It might be thought that Tartarin is repulsive: he is not; he is too young, too innocent. His great, foolish heart is too open to the woes of any damsel; his simplicity, his credulity, his muddled faith, the optimism which no misfortune can shatter--all these traits endear him to us, make him real. For Tartarin is real: he is the Frenchman of the South; in the words of a character, 'The Tarasconnais type is the Frenchman magnified, exaggerated, as seen in a convex mirror.' Tartarin and his fellows typify the South, though some typify one side of the Southern Frenchman rather than another; thus Bravida is military pride, Excourbaniès is the liar, and mild Pascalon is the imitator of imitators: when Tarascon, arrested by the British captain and brought home on board the frigate, takes up the attitude of Napoleon on the _Bellerophon_, Pascalon begins a memorial and tries to impersonate Las Cases. As for Tartarin, bell-wether of the flock, he has all the characteristics, he even sings all the songs. He is the South.
The three Tartarin books constitute together the most violent satire that has ever been written against the South. Gascony, Provence, and Languedoc are often made the butts of Northern French writers, while Lombards introduce in books ridiculous Neapolitans, and Catalonians paint burlesque Andalusians, but no writer has equalled Alphonse Daudet in consistent ferocity. So evident is this, that Tarascon to this day resents the publications, and that, some years ago, a commercial traveller who humorously described himself on the hotel register as 'Alphonse Daudet' was mobbed in the street, and rescued by the police from the rabble who threatened to throw him into the Rhone. Tarascon, a little junction on the way to Marseilles, has been made absurd for ever. Yet, though Daudet exaggerated, he built on the truth: there is a close connection between his preposterous figures, grown men with the tendencies of children enormously distorted, and the Frenchmen of the South. Indeed, the Southern Frenchman is the Frenchman as we picture him in England; there is between him and his compatriot from Picardy or Flanders a difference as great as exists between the Scotsman and the man of Kent. The Northern Frenchman is sober, silent, hard, reasonable, and logical; his imagination is negligible, his artistic taste as corrupt as that of an average inhabitant of the Midlands. But the Southern Frenchman is a different creature; his excitable temperament, his irresponsibility and impetuousness run through the majority of French artists and politicians. As the French saying goes, 'the South moves'; thus it is not wonderful that Le Havre and Lille should not rival Marseilles and Bordeaux.