that which he likes he wants to think true. He wants to
believe that sweet Baia is his true love; when again he succumbs to
Sonia, the Russian exile, he wants to believe that he too is an
extremist, a potential martyr in the cause of Nihilism; and again he
wants to believe that Likiriki, the nigger girl, is the little creature
of charm for whom his heart has been calling. His sentimentality is
always ready--for women, for ideas, for beasts. He can be moved when he
hears for the hundredth time the ridiculous ballads that are popular in
the local drawing-rooms, weep when Bezuquet, the chemist, sings 'Oh
thou, beloved white star of my soul!' For him the lion is 'a noble
beast,' who must be shot, not caged; the horse 'the most glorious
conquest of man.' He is always above the world, never of it unless his
own safety be endangered, when he scuttles to shelter; as Daudet says,
half Tartarin is Quixote, half is Sancho ... but Sancho wins. It is
because Tartarin is a comic coward that he will not allow the heroic
crusaders of Pamperigouste to fire on the Government troops; the 'abbot'
of Port Tarascon to train the carronade on the English frigate; alone,
he is a greater coward than in public; he shivers under his weapons when
he walks to the club in the evening; he severs the rope on Mont Blanc,
sending his companion to probable death. But the burlesque does not end
tragically: nobody actually dies, all return to Tarascon in time to hear
their funeral orations.

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,
Excourbanies 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, h