II. Somehow, except on the score of purely analytical criticism and appreciation, one can find little that it is wise to write about in Alphonse Daudet and his work. What is there in the narrative of his own struggles and successes, in the true stories of the men and women who, in his novels, live and love and laugh and weep and make the hearts of those who read of their mimic joys and woes throb in sympathy, or in the histories of how these books came to be written, that he himself has not told with a remarkable fulness and with exquisite pathos and humour? Those little reminiscent sketches which he was forever dashing off in the later years of his life tell the whole story of his aspirations, his inspirations and his achievements. He lived so keenly. To him a pang of pleasure or of pain suggested so much. A landscape, a wind from the Mediterranean laden with the odour of the salt and the seaweed, a sunset in Algeria, the western sky gleaming purple and amethyst, and into his Southern head there rushed a thousand vivid impressions, ideas, dreams. There was in him a faculty of spontaneous creation, absolutely marvellous in its scope- -a creation out of proportion to his actual THE TOWN HALL. achievement, great as that was. It was in this, first of all, that he so much resembled Dickens. People profess to find the two writers alike, because each underwent a youth of struggle and privation, and was continually drawing upon the impressions of his early years during a life of literary labour; because each, having suffered, had a wondrous love for and appreciation of children; because Where the Lion of Tarascon found a brief refuge in the dark days of his downfall. "We saw him go farther and farther away beneath the arches; a little heavily, and yet with a good step. The bridge swayed awfully. Twice or thrice he stopped, because his hat was blowing off. We called to him in the distance, but without advancing: "Adieu, Tartarin." He never turned; he said nothing, too much moved; but with the hat-box he waved us a signal behind him: "Adieu Adieu ."-Port Tarascon. "Once, looking toward the Castle of Beaucaire, at the top, quite at the top, I thought I could distinguish some one levelling a spy-glass at Tarascon. He had a look like Bompard. He disappeared into the tower, and then came back with another man, very stout, who seemed to be Tartarin. This one took the spy-glass, looked through it, and then dropped it, to make a sign with his arms, as if of recognition; he was so far off, so small, so vague."-Port Tarascon. each found an inspiration in the joys and sorrows of the humble. But these are merely coincidences. What writer has there been of great and noble talent who has not drawn upon the memories of his early days? Who was Louis Lambert but Balzac himself? What was it, if not that certain knowledge which comes only from within, that enabled Thackeray to paint the follies and the reckless excesses of young Arthur Pendennis with such sympathy and fidelity? You are amazed at the marvellous consistency which marks all the exaggeration and buffooneries of Tartarin. But remember that Daudet himself is Tartarin, only a Tartarin whose fiery imagination has come in contact with the cold, sober sense of the North, who has learned to look back ironically, and even a little piteously, on the absurdities and the galéjados of his own youth. with its languor and its disillusionment. To be sure, my companion and I looked a fine pair of fools as we disembarked in red belts and glaring sharpshooters' caps in the good city of Algiers, where there were hardly any Turks except our two selves. With what a meditative, satisfied air did Tartarin remove his enormous hunting boots at the doors of the mosque and enter the sanctuary of Mahomet, with grave face and tightly closed lips, in coloured socks! Ah! that fellow believed in the Orient, the Indian dancing girls, "Instead of going to the club by the public promenade, he went through the town; that is, by the longest and darkest way, through a nest of villainous little streets, at the end of which the Rhône is seen to glitter ominously." Tartarin de Tarascon. In the history of the writing of Tartarin, Daudet tells of how one day, in November, 1861, he himself and a comrade, armed to the teeth and with Algerian sharp-shooters' caps on their heads, set out to hunt the lion in Algeria. Not for nothing was he born in the country of the helmet hunters; and as soon as he set his foot on the deck of the Zouave (it was the same boat that in after years carried the mighty Tartarin to and from Algiers), upon which their enormous arm-chest was embarked, more Tartarin than Tartarin, he fancied that he was going to exterminate all the wild beasts in the Atlas Mountains. Then came all the enchantment of a first journey. The sea "blue as a liquid dye," the bazaars of Algiers, the orange groves, the orchards of tangled helianthus, fig-trees and gourd-trees, the white housetops, the mosques, the camels-in short, the East, the muezzins, the lions, the panthers, the dromedaries -everything that his books had chosen to tell him; and his Southern imagination magnified them all. I, as faithful as the camel in my tale, followed him through his heroic dreams; but at times I was a little doubtful. I remember that one evening, at Oued-Fodda, as we started out to lie in wait for a lion, and passed through an encampment of Chasseurs d'Afrique with our whole outfit of leggings, rifles, revolvers and huntingknives, I felt keenly the absurdity of the situation as I remarked the silent stupefaction of the honest troopers eating their soup in front of the lines of tents. Suppose there shouldn't be any lion! And yet, that sensation to the contrary notwithstanding, an hour later, after nightfall, when I was on my knees in a clump of laurel, searching the darkness with my glasses, while cranes flew, screaming, far overhead, and jackals crept through the grass around me, I felt my rifle tremble on the hilt of the hunting-knife, which was stuck in the ground. I have attributed to Tartarin that shudder of fear and the burlesque reflections which accompanied it; but that is a great injustice. I give you my word that, if the lion had appeared, honest Tartarin would have received him, rifle at rest and knife in the air; and if his bullet had missed its mark, if his knife had betrayed him in a hand-to-hand struggle, he would have ended the conflict body to body, would have suffocated the monster in his more than muscular arms, torn him with his nails and teeth without turning a hair; for he was a rough fighter, was that helmet-hunter; and, furthermore, a man of spirit, who was the first to laugh at my galéjade. In the last paragraph quoted above there is the amende honorable long due to Tartarin himself and to all those who have in mind followed his journeys and shared his perils. It was eight years after this trip of Daudet's that the first Tartarin book was written. The story of its trials as a serial-its flat failure when running in one newspaper, the threatened lawsuit by the Tarasconian family. of Barbarins (it was as Barbarin that the Lion Slayer was first introduced to the reading public)-has often been told. It was generally misunderstood at first -in fact, it was not understood at all-and it was some time before it emerged from a state of comparative obscurity; but emerge it did, and Tartarin came to take its place among the great figures of fiction, so that one may say of a person, "He is a Tartarin," just as one says, "He is a Pecksniff" or "He is a Tartufe." III. Tarascon is known as "The Grand Hotel of the Emperors." Of course it was the Grand Hotel of the Emperors. Had there been in the vocabulary or in the sun-inflamed imagination of the Tarasconese a title more sonorous, more magnificent, more magniloquent, more imperial. than "Emperor," it probably would have been something else; but Hotel of the Emperors it was and isa tiny French inn of the type so common in the little towns of Provence, where one likes to fancy that the city's Great Man was wont to come and dine in state, attended by Bompard and Bravida and Bézuquet and Pascalon and even the insidious and jaundiced Costecalde and all the rest of the merry company of cap-poppers and Alpinists and colonists. Tarascon is a little, white town of nine thousand inhabitants, situated on the right bank of the Rhône, some fifteen or eighteen leagues to the north of the Mediterranean. Not far away is Avignon. where once upon a time a Pope used to sit in state; and a few miles to the west there is Nimes, with its splendid Roman amphitheatre. All over these hills-the little Alps of Provence -Alphonse Daudet and his brother tramped as boys, loitering about the pleasant banks of the Rhône, listening to the music of the country's fairs and watching the steps of the farandole. Across the river from Tarascon is Beaucaire; and the two towns are linked by that long, narrow suspension bridge which Sancho Panza Tartarin-the Tartarin of the warm blankets, the knitted waistcoats, the knee caps and the succulent chocolate--regarded with so much hesitation and dread. "The poor man always hoped that, in passing some angle of these cutthroat alleys, they would spring from the shadow, and fall upon his back. Had they done so, they would have been well received. I'll answer for it." Tartarin de Tarascon. Tarasconian hospitality has to offer to the visitor within the city's gates two or three little inns built with stone and stucco, relics, perhaps, not of remote centuries, but certainly of days long before the town became immortal through the exploits of her Lion Slayer. The one at which the present pilgrim first slept in Round the city of Tartarin there runs a wide street, shaded by trees and lined |