All this Tartarin fulfils. He is the creature of Alphonse Daudet, a second-rate writer who has earned for him a title maybe to immortality. There is no doubt that Daudet was a second-rate writer, and that Mr George Moore was right when he summed him up as _de la bouillabaisse_; his novels are sentimental, his reminiscences turgid, his verses suitable for crackers, but Daudet had an asset--his vivid feeling for the South. It was not knowledge or observation made Tartarin; it was instinct. Neither in _Tartarin de Tarascon_ nor in _Tartarin sur les Alpes_ was Daudet for a moment inconsistent or obscure; for him, Tartarin and his followers stood all the time in violent light. He knew not only what they had to say in given circumstances, but also what they would say in any circumstances that might arise.
It is not wonderful then, that Tartarin appears as a large character. You will figure him throughout as a French bourgeois, aged about forty in the first novel, fifty in the second, and sixty in the third. Daudet's dates being unreliable, you must assume his adventures as happening between 1861 and 1881, and bridge the gaps that exist between them with a vision of Tartarin's stormily peaceful life in the sleepy town of Tarascon. For Tartarin was too adventurous to live without dangers and storms. When he was not shooting lions in Algeria, or climbing the Alps, or colonising in Polynesia, Tartarin was still a hero: he lived in his little white house with the green shutters, surrounded with knives, revolvers, rifles, double-handed swords, crishes, and yataghans; he read, not the local paper, but Fenimore Cooper and Captain Cook; he learned how to fight and how to hunt, how to follow a trail, or he hypnotised himself with the recitals of Alpine climbs, of battles in China with the bellicose Tartar. Save under compulsion, he never did anything, partly because there was nothing to do at Tarascon, partly because his soul was turned rather towards bourgeois comfort than towards glory and blood. This, however, the fiery Southerner could not accept: if he could not do he could pretend, and thus did Daudet establish the enormous absurdity of his character.
There was nothing to shoot at Tarascon, so Tartarin and his followers went solemnly into the fields and fired at their caps; there was nothing to climb, except the neighbouring Alpilles ... whose height was three hundred feet, but Tartarin bought an alpen-stock and printed upon his visiting-cards initials which meant 'President of the Alpine Club'; there was no danger in the town, but Tartarin never went out at night without a dagger and several guns. He was a bourgeois, but he was a romantic: he had to find in fiction the excitement that life refused him, to create it where it did not exist. In the rough, Tartarin was the jovial Frenchman of the South, short, fat, excitable, unable to see things as they are, unable to restrain his voice, his gestures, his imagination; he was greedy and self-deceived, he saw trifles as enormous, he placed the world under a magnifying glass.