Tartarin of Tarascon | Page 3

for.
The man who lodges most shot in his cap is hailed as king of the hunt,
and stalks back triumphantly at dusk into Tarascon, with his riddled cap
on the end of his gun-barrel, amid any quantity of dog- barks and
horn-blasts.
It is needless to say that cap-selling is a fine business in the town.
There are even some hatters who sell hunting-caps ready shot, torn, and
perforated for the bad shots; but the only buyer known is the chemist
Bezuquet. This is dishonourable!
As a marksman at caps, Tartarin of Tarascon never had his match.
Every Sunday morning out he would march in a new cap, and back he
would strut every Sunday evening with a mere thing of shreds. The loft
of Baobab Villa was full of these glorious trophies. Hence all Tarascon

acknowledged him as master; and as Tartarin thoroughly understood
hunting, and had read all the handbooks of all possible kinds of venery,
from cap-popping to Burmese tiger- shooting, the sportsmen
constituted him their great cynegetical judge, and took him for referee
and arbitrator in all their differences.
Between three and four daily, at Costecalde the gunsmith's, a stout
stern pipe-smoker might be seen in a green leather-covered arm- chair
in the centre of the shop crammed with cap-poppers, they all on foot
and wrangling. This was Tartarin of Tarascon delivering judgement --
Nimrod plus Solomon.

III. "Naw, naw, naw!" The general glance protracted upon the good
town.
AFTER the craze for sporting, the lusty Tarascon race cherishes one
love: ballad-singing. There's no believing what a quantity of ballads is
used up in that little region. All the sentimental stuff turning into sere
and yellow leaves in the oldest portfolios, are to be found in full
pristine lustre in Tarascon. Ay, the entire collection. Every family has
its own pet, as is known to the town.
For instance, it is an established fact that this is the chemist Bezuquet's
family's:
"Thou art the fair star that I adore!"
The gunmaker Costecalde's family's:
"Would'st thou come to the land Where the log-cabins rise?"
The official registrar's family's:
"If I wore a coat of invisible green, Do you think for a moment I could
be seen?"
And so on for the whole of Tarascon. Two or three times a week there

were parties where they were sung. The singularity was their being
always the same, and that the honest Tarasconers had never had an
inclination to change them during the long, long time they had been
harping on them. They were handed down from father to son in the
families, without anybody improving on them or bowdlerising them:
they were sacred. Never did it occur to Costecalde's mind to sing the
Bezuquets', or the Bezuquets to try Costecalde's. And yet you may
believe that they ought to know by heart what they had been singing for
two-score years! But, nay! everybody stuck to his own ,and they were
all contented.
In ballad-singing, as in cap-popping, Tartarin was still the foremost.
His superiority over his fellow-townsmen consisted in his not having
any one song of his own, but in knowing the lot, the whole, mind you!
But -- there's a but -- it was the devil's own work to get him to sing
them.
Surfeited early in life with his drawing-room successes, our hero
preferred by far burying himself in his hunting story-books, or
spending the evening at the club, to making a personal exhibition
before a Nimes piano between a pair of home-made candles. These
musical parades seemed beneath him. Nevertheless, at whiles, when
there was a harmonic party at Bezuquet's, he would drop into the
chemist's shop, as if by chance, and, after a deal of pressure, consent to
do the grand duo in Robert le Diable with old Madame Bezuquet.
Whoso never heard that never heard anything! For my part, even if I
lived a hundred years, I should always see the mighty Tartarin
solemnly stepping up to the piano, setting his arms akimbo, working up
his tragic mien, and, beneath the green reflection from the show-bottles
in the window, trying to give his pleasant visage the fierce and satanic
expression of Robert the Devil. Hardly would he fall into position
before the whole audience would be shuddering with the foreboding
that something uncommon was at hand. After a hush, old Madame
Bezuquet would commence to her own accompaniment:
"Robert, my love is thine! To thee I my faith did plight, Thou seest my
affright, -- Mercy for thine own sake, And mercy for mine!"

In an undertone she would add: "Now, then, Tartarin!" Whereupon
Tartarin of Tarascon, with crooked arms, clenched fists, and quivering
nostrils, would roar three times in a formidable voice, rolling like a
thunderclap in the bowels of the instrument:
"No! no!