Tartarin of Tarascon | Page 7

sad to say, Sancho-Tartarin did not see it in the same light,
and, as he was the stronger party, it never came to anything. But in the
town there was much talk about it. Would he go or would he not? "I'll
lay he will!" -- and "I'll wager he won't!" It was the event of the week.
In the upshot, Tartarin did not depart, but the matter redounded to his
credit none the less. Going or not going to Shanghai was all one to

Tarascon. Tartarin's journey was so much talked about that people got
to believe he had done it and returned, and at the club in the evening
members would actually ask for information on life at Shanghai, the
manners and customs and climate, about opium, and commerce.
Deeply read up, Tartarin would graciously furnish the particulars
desired, and, in the end, the good fellow was not quite sure himself
about not having gone to Shanghai, so that, after relating for the
hundredth time how the Tartars came down on the trading post, it
would most naturally happen him to add:
"Then I made my men take up arms and hoist the consular flag, and
zizz! phit! bang! out of the windows upon the Tartars."
On hearing this, the whole club would quiver.
"But according to that, this Tartarin of yours is an awful liar."
"No, no, a thousand times over, no! Tartarin was no liar."
"But the man ought to know that he has never been to Shanghai" --
"Why, of course, he knows that; but still" --
"But still," you see -- mark that! It is high time for the law to be laid
down once for all on the reputation as drawers of the long bow which
Northerners fling at Southerners. There are no Baron Munchausens in
the south of France, neither at Nimes nor Marseilles, Toulouse nor
Tarascon. The Southerner does not deceive but is self-deceived. He
does not always tell the cold-drawn truth, but he believes he does. His
falsehood is not any such thing, but a kind of mental mirage.
Yes, purely mirage! The better to follow me, you should actually
follow me into the South, and you will see I am right. You have only to
look at that Lucifer's own country, where the sun transmogrifies
everything, and magnifies it beyond life-size. The little hills of
Provence are no bigger than the Butte Montmartre, but they will loom
up like the Rocky Mountains; the Square House at Nimes -- a mere

model to put on your sideboard -- will seem grander than St. Peter's.
You will see -- in brief, the only exaggerator in the South is Old Sol,
for he does enlarge everything he touches. What was Sparta in its days
of splendour? a pitiful hamlet. What was Athens? at the most, a
second-class town; and yet in history both appear to us as enormous
cities. This is a sample of what the sun can do.
Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling upon
Tarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army Clothing
Factory, like Bravida, the "brave commandant;" of a sprout an Indian
fig-tree; and of a man who had missed going to Shanghai one who had
been there?

VIII. Mitaine's Menagerie -- A Lion from the Atlas at Tarascon -- A
Solemn and Fearsome Confrontation.
EXHIBITING Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life,
before Fame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn
laurel wreath, and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest state,
his delights and sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us hurriedly skip
to the grandest pages of his story, and to the singular event which was
to give the first flight to his incomparable career.
It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker's, where Tartarin
was engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the
needle-gun, then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew open, and
in rushed a bewildered cap-popper, howling "A lion, a lion!" General
was the alarm, stupor, uproar and tumult. Tartarin prepared to resist
cavalry with the bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to shut the door. The
sportsman was surrounded and pressed and questioned, and here
follows what he told them: Mitaine's Menagerie, returning from
Beaucaire Fair, had consented to stay over a few days at Tarascon, and
was just unpacking, to set up the show on the Castle-green, with a lot of
boas, seals, crocodiles, and a magnificent lion from the Atlas
Mountains.

An African lion in Tarascon?
Never in the memory of living man had the like been seen. Hence our
dauntless cap-poppers looked at one another how proudly! What a
beaming on their sunburned visages! and in every nook of Costecalde's
shop what hearty