QUIXOTE-TARTARIN. SANCHO-TARTARIN.
(Highly excited.) (Quite calmly.)
Cover yourself with glory, Tartarin, cover yourself
Tartarin. with flannel.
(Still more excitedly.) (Still more calmly.)
O for the terrible double- O for the thick knitted
barrelled rifle! O for waistcoats! and warm
bowie-knives, lassoes, knee-caps! O for the
and moccasins! welcome padded caps
with ear-flaps!
(Above all self-control.) (Ringing up the maid.)
A battle-axe! fetch me a Now, then, Jeannette, do
battle-axe! bring up that chocolate!
Whereupon Jeannette would appear with an unusually good cup of
chocolate, just right in warmth, sweetly smelling, and with the play
of light on watered silk upon its unctuous surface, and with succulent
grilled steak flavoured with anise-seed, which would set Sancho-Tartarin
off on the broad grin, and into a laugh that drowned the shouts of
Quixote-Tartarin.
Thus it came about that Tartarin of Tarascon never had left Tarascon.
VII. Tartarin--The Europeans at Shanghai--Commerce--The Tartars--Can
Tartarin of Tarascon be an Impostor?--The Mirage.
UNDER one conjunction of circumstances, Tartarin did, however, once
almost start out upon a great voyage.
The three brothers Garcio-Camus, relatives of Tarascon, established
in business at Shanghai, offered him the managership of one of their
branches there. This undoubtedly presented the kind of life he hankered
after. Plenty of active business, a whole army of under-strappers to
order about, and connections with Russia, Persia, Turkey in Asia--in
short, to be a merchant prince!
In Tartarin’s mouth, the title of Merchant Prince thundered out as
something stunning!
The house of Garcio-Camus had the further advantage of sometimes being
favoured with a call from the Tartars. Then the doors would be slammed
shut, all the clerks flew to arms, up ran the consular flag, and zizz!
phit! bang! out of the windows upon the Tartars.
I need not tell you with what enthusiasm Quixote-Tartarin clutched this
proposition; sad to say, Sancho-Tartarin did not see it in the same
light, and, as he was the stronger party, it never came to anything. But
in the town there was much talk about it. Would he go or would he not?
“I’ll lay he will!”--and “I’ll wager he won’t!” It was the event of the
week. In the upshot, Tartarin did not depart, but the matter redounded
to his credit none the less. Going or not going to Shanghai was all one
to Tarascon. Tartarin’s journey was so much talked about that people got
to believe he had done it and returned, and at the club in the evening
members would actually ask for information on life at Shanghai, the
manners and customs and climate, about opium, and commerce.
Deeply read up, Tartarin would graciously furnish the particulars
desired, and, in the end, the good fellow was not quite sure himself
about not having gone to Shanghai, so that, after relating for the
hundredth time how the Tartars came down on the trading post, it would
most naturally happen him to add:
“Then I made my men take up arms and hoist the consular flag, and zizz!
phit! bang! out of the windows upon the Tartars.”
On hearing this, the whole club would quiver.
“But according to that, this Tartarin of yours is an awful liar.”
“No, no, a thousand times over, no! Tartarin was no liar.”
“But the man ought to know that he has never been to Shanghai”--
“Why, of course, he knows that; but still”--
“But still,” you see--mark that! It is high time for the law to be laid
down once for all on the reputation as drawers of the long bow which
Northerners fling at Southerners. There are no Baron Munchausens in the
south of France, neither at Nimes nor Marseilles, Toulouse nor Tarascon.
The Southerner does not deceive but is self-deceived. He does not always
tell the cold-drawn truth, but he believes he does. His falsehood is not
any such thing, but a kind of mental mirage.
Yes, purely mirage! The better to follow me, you should actually follow
me into the South, and you will see I am right. You have only to look at
that Lucifer’s own country, where the sun transmogrifies everything,
and magnifies it beyond life-size. The little hills of Provence are no
bigger than the Butte Montmartre, but they will loom up like the Rocky
Mountains; the Square House at Nimes--a mere model to put on your
sideboard--will seem grander than St. Peter’s. You will see--in brief,
the only exaggerator in the South is Old Sol, for he does enlarge
everything he touches. What was Sparta in its days of splendour? a
pitiful hamlet. What was Athens? at the most, a second-class town; and
yet in history both appear to us as enormous cities. This is a sample of
what the sun can do.
Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling upon
Tarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army Clothing Factory,
like Bravida, the “brave commandant;” of a sprout an Indian fig-tree;
and of a man who had missed going to Shanghai one who had been there?
VIII. Mitaine’s Menagerie--A Lion from the Atlas at Tarascon--A Solemn
and Fearsome Confrontation.
EXHIBITING Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life, before
Fame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn laurel wreath,
and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest state, his delights
and sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us hurriedly skip to the
grandest pages of his story, and to the singular event which was to give
the first flight to his incomparable career.
It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker’s, where Tartarin was
engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the needle-gun,
then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew open, and in rushed a
bewildered cap-popper, howling “A lion, a lion!” General was the alarm,
stupor, uproar and tumult. Tartarin prepared to resist cavalry with
the bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to shut the door. The sportsman was
surrounded and pressed and questioned, and here follows what he told
them: Mitaine’s Menagerie, returning from Beaucaire Fair, had consented
to stay over a few days at Tarascon, and was just unpacking, to set up
the show on the Castle-green, with a lot of boas, seals, crocodiles, and
a magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains.
An African lion in Tarascon?
Never in the memory of living man had the like been seen. Hence our
dauntless cap-poppers looked at one another how proudly! What a beaming
on their sunburned visages! and in every nook of Costecalde’s shop what
hearty congratulatory grips of the hand were silently exchanged! The
sensation was so great and unforeseen that nobody could find a word to
say--not even Tartarin.
Blanched and agitated, with the needle-gun still in his fist, he
brooded, erect before the counter. A lion from the Atlas Range at pistol
range from him, a couple of strides off? a lion, mind you--the beast
heroic and ferocious above all others, the King of the Brute Creation,
the crowning game of his fancies, something like the leading actor in
the ideal company which played such splendid tragedies in his mind’s
eye. A lion, heaven be thanked! and from the Atlas, to boot! It was more
than the great Tartarin could bear.
Suddenly a flush of blood flew into his face. His eyes flashed. With one
convulsive movement he shouldered the needle-gun, and turning towards
the brave Commandant Bravida (formerly captain in the Army Clothing
Department, please to remember), he thundered to him--
“Let’s go have a look at him, commandant.”
“Here, here, I say! that’s my gun--my needle-gun you are carrying off,”
timidly ventured the wary Costecalde; but Tartarin had already got round
the corner, with all the cap-poppers proudly lock-stepping behind him.
When they arrived at the menagerie, they found a goodly number of people
there. Tarascon, heroic but too long deprived of sensational shows, had
rushed upon Mitaine’s portable theatre, and had taken it by storm. Hence
the voluminous Madame Mitaine was highly contented. In an Arab costume,
her arms bare to the elbow, iron anklets on, a whip in one hand and a
plucked though live pullet in the other, the noted lady was doing the
honours of the booth to the Tarasconians; and, as she also had “double
muscles,” her success was almost as great as her animals.
The entrance of Tartarin with the gun on his shoulder was a damper.
All our good Tarasconians, who had been quite tranquilly strolling
before the cages, unarmed and with no distrust, without even any idea
of danger, felt momentary apprehension, naturally enough, on beholding
their mighty Tartarin rush into the enclosure with his formidable engine
of war. There must be something to fear when a hero like he was, came
weaponed; so, in a twinkling, all the space along the cage fronts was
cleared. The youngsters burst out squalling for fear, and the women
looked round for the nearest way out. The chemist Bezuquet made off
altogether, alleging that he was going home for his gun.
Gradually, however, Tartarin’s bearing restored courage. With head
erect, the intrepid Tarasconian slowly and calmly made the circuit
of the booth, passing the seal’s tank without stopping, glancing
disdainfully on the long box filled with sawdust in which the boa would
digest its raw fowl, and going to take his stand before the lion’s cage.
A terrible and solemn confrontation, this! The lion of Tarascon and the
lion of Africa face to face!
On the one part, Tartarin erect, with his hamstrings in tension, and
his arms folded on his gun barrel; on the other, the lion, a gigantic
specimen, humped up in the straw, with blinking orbs and brutish mien,
resting his huge muzzle and tawny full-bottomed wig on his forepaws.
Both calm in their gaze.
Singular thing! whether the needle-gun had given him “the needle,” if
the popular idiom is admissible, or that he scented an enemy of
his race, the lion, who had hitherto regarded the Tarasconians with
sovereign scorn, and yawned in their faces, was all at once affected by
ire. At first he sniffed; then he growled hollowly, stretching out his
claws; rising, he tossed his head, shook his mane, opened a capacious
maw, and belched a deafening roar at Tartarin.
A yell of fright responded, as Tarascon precipitated itself madly
towards the exit, women and children, lightermen, cap-poppers, even the
brave Commandant Bravida himself. But, alone, Tartarin of Tarascon
had not budged. There he stood, firm and resolute, before the cage,
lightnings in his eyes, and on his lip that gruesome grin with which
all the town was familiar. In a moment’s time, when all the cap-poppers,
some little fortified by his bearing and the strength of the bars,
re-approached their leader, they heard him mutter, as he stared Leo out
of countenance:
“Now, this is something like a hunt!”
All the rest of that day, never a word farther could they draw from
Tartarin of Tarascon.