e 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.

Tartarin lives to a greater or lesser degree within every Frenchman of
the plains, born South of the line which unites Lyons and Bordeaux. It
is Tartarin who stands for hours at street corners in Arles or
Montpellier, chattering with Tartarin and, like Tartarin, endlessly
brags of the small birds he has killed, of the hearts he has won and of
his extraordinary luck at cards. It is Tartarin again who still wears
night-caps and flannel belts, and drinks every morning great bowls of
chocolate. And it is Tartarin who, light-heartedly, joins the colonial
infantry regiment and goes singing into battle because he likes the
adventure and would rather die in the field than be bored in barracks.
Daudet has maligned the Sou