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.

Because of this enormous vision of life Tartarin was driven into
adventure. Because he magnified his words he was compelled by popular
opinion to sail to Algiers to shoot lions, though he was at heart afraid
of dogs; to scale the Alps, though he shuddered when he thought of
catching cold. He had to justify himself in the eyes of his
fellow-citizens, or forgo for ever the halo of heroism. He did not have
to abandon it, for Daudet loved his Tartarin; in Algeria he was mocked,
swindled, beaten, but somehow he secured his lion's skin; and, in the
Alps, he actually scaled both the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc ... the first
without knowing that it was dangerous, the second against his will.
Tartarin won because he was vital, his vitality served him as a shield.
All his qualities were of those that make a man absurd but invincible;
his exaggeration, his histrionics, his mock heroics, his credulity, his
mild sensuality, his sentimentality, and his bumptious cowardice--all
this blended into an enormous bubbling charm which neither man nor
circumstance could in the end withstand.

Daudet brings out his traits on every page. Everywhere he makes Tartarin
strut and swell as a turkey-cock. Exaggeration, in other words lying,
lay in every word and deed of Tartarin. He could not say: 'We were a
couple of thousand at the amphitheatre yesterday,' but naturally said:
'We were fifty thousand.' And he was not exactly lying; Daudet, who
loved him well, pleaded that this was not lying but mirage, mirage
induced by the hot sun. He was not quite wrong: when Tartarin said that
he had killed forty lions he believed it; and his fellow-climber
believed the absurd story he had concocted: that Switzerland was a
fraud, that there were eiderdowns at the bottom of every crevasse, and
that he had himself climbed the Andes on his hands and knees. Likewise,
Tartarin and the people of Tarascon were deceived by their own
histrionics. The baobab (_arbos gigantea_) which Tartarin trained in a
flower-pot stood, in their imagination, a hundred feet high.

Histrionics and mock heroics pervade the three books. It is not the fact
that matters, it is the fact seen through the coloured Southern mind,
and tha