ANSWER me, you will say, how the mischief is it that Tartarin of
Tarascon never left Tarascon with all this mania for adventure, need of
powerful sensations, and folly about travel, rides, and journeys from
the Pole to the Equator?
For that is a fact: up to the age of five-and-forty, the dreadless
Tarasconian had never once slept outside his own room. He had not even
taken that obligatory trip to Marseilles which every sound Provencal
makes upon coming of age. The most of his knowledge included Beaucaire,
and yet that’s not far from Tarascon, there being merely the bridge to
go over. Unfortunately, this rascally bridge has so often been blown
away by the gales, it is so long and frail, and the Rhone has such
a width at this spot that--well, faith! you understand! Tartarin of
Tarascon preferred terra firma.
We are afraid we must make a clean breast of it: in our hero there were
two very distinct characters. Some Father of the Church has said: “I
feel there are two men in me.” He would have spoken truly in saying this
about Tartarin, who carried in his frame the soul of Don Quixote, the
same chivalric impulses, heroic ideal, and crankiness for the grandiose
and romantic; but, worse is the luck! he had not the body of the
celebrated hidalgo, that thin and meagre apology for a body, on which
material life failed to take a hold; one that could get through twenty
nights without its breast-plate being unbuckled off, and forty-eight
hours on a handful of rice. On the contrary, Tartarin’s body was a stout
honest bully of a body, very fat, very weighty, most sensual and fond
of coddling, highly touchy, full of low-class appetite and homely
requirements--the short, paunchy body on stumps of the immortal Sancho
Panza.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the one same man! you will readily
comprehend what a cat-and-dog couple they made! what strife! what
clapper-clawing! Oh, the fine dialogue for Lucian or Saint-Evremond to
write, between the two Tartarins--Quixote-Tartarin and Sancho-Tartarin!
Quixote-Tartarin firing up on the stories of Gustave Aimard, and
shouting: “Up and at ‘em!” and Sancho-Tartarin thinking only of the
rheumatics ahead, and murmuring: “I mean to stay at home.”