Chapter 2
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.”
THE DUET.
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.
IX. Singular effects of Mental Mirage.
CONFINING his remarks to the sentence last recorded, Tartarin had unfortunately still said overmuch.
On the morrow, there was nothing talked about through town but the near-at-hand departure of Tartarin for Algeria and lion-hunting. You are all witness, dear readers, that the honest fellow had not breathed a word on that head; but, you know, the mirage had its usual effect. In brief, all Tarascon spoke of nothing but the departure.
On the Old Walk, at the club, in Costecalde’s, friends accosted one another with a startled aspect:
“And furthermore, you know the news, at least?”
“And furthermore, rather? Tartarin’s setting out, at least?”
For at Tarascon all phrases begin with “and furthermore,” and conclude with “at least,” with a strong local accent. Hence, on this occasion more than upon others, these peculiarities rang out till the windows shivered.
The most surprised of men in the town on hearing that Tartarin was going away to Africa, was Tartarin himself. But only see what vanity is! Instead of plumply answering that he was not going at all, and had not even had the intention, poor Tartarin, on the first of them mentioning the journey to him, observed with a neat little evasive air, “Aha! maybe I shall--but I do not say as much.” The second time; a trifle more familiarised with the idea, he replied, “Very likely;” and the third time, “It’s certain.”
Finally, in the evening, at Costecalde’s and the club, carried away by the egg-nogg, cheers, and illumination; intoxicated by the impression that bare announcement of his departure had made on the town, the hapless fellow formally declared that he was sick of banging away at caps, and that he would shortly be on the trail of the great lions of the Atlas. A deafening hurrah greeted this assertion. Whereupon more egg-nogg, bravoes, handshaking, slappings of the shoulder, and a torchlight serenade up to midnight before Baobab Villa.
It was Sancho-Tartarin who was anything but delighted. This idea of travel in Africa and lion-hunting made him shudder beforehand; and when the house was re-entered, and whilst the complimentary concert was sounding under the windows, he had a dreadful “row” with Quixote-Tartarin, calling him a cracked head, a visionary, imprudent, and thrice an idiot, and detailing by the card all the catastrophes awaiting him on such an expedition--shipwreck, rheumatism, yellow fever, dysentery, the black plague, elephantiasis, and the rest of them.
In vain did Quixote-Tartarin vow that he had not committed any imprudence--that he would wrap himself up well, and take even superfluous necessaries with him. Sancho-Tartarin would listen to nothing. The poor craven saw himself already torn to tatters by the lions, or engulfed in the desert sands like his late royal highness Cambyses, and the other Tartarin only managed to appease him a little by explaining that the start was not immediate, as nothing pressed.
It is clear enough, indeed, that none embark on such an enterprise without some preparations. A man is bound to know whither he goes, hang it all! and not fly off like a bird. Before anything else, the Tarasconian wanted to peruse the accounts of great African tourists, the narrations of Mungo Park, Du Chaillu, Dr. Livingstone, Stanley, and so on.
In them, he learnt that these daring explorers, before donning their sandals for distant excursions, hardened themselves well beforehand to support hunger and thirst, forced marches, and all kinds of privation. Tartarin meant to act like they did, and from that day forward he lived upon water broth alone. The water broth of Tarascon is a few slices of bread drowned in hot water, with a clove of garlic, a pinch of thyme, and a sprig of laurel. Strict diet, at which you may believe poor Sancho made a wry face.
To the regimen of water broth Tartarin of Tarascon joined other wise practices. To break himself into the habit of long marches, he constrained himself to go round the town seven or eight times consecutively every morning, either at the fast walk or run, his elbows well set against his body, and a couple of white pebbles in the mouth, according to the antique usage.
To get inured to fog, dew, and night coolness, he would go down into his garden every dusk, and stop out there till ten or eleven, alone with his gun, on the lookout, behind the baobab.
Finally, so long as Mitaine’s wild beast show tarried in Tarascon, the cap-poppers who were belated at Costecalde’s might spy in the shadow of the booth, as they crossed the Castle-green, a mysterious figure stalking up and down. It was Tartarin of Tarascon, habituating himself to hear without emotion the roarings of the lion in the sombre night.
X. Before the Start.
PENDING Tartarin’s delay of the event by all sorts of heroic means, all Tarascon kept an eye upon him, and nothing else was busied about. Cap-popping was winged, and ballad-singing dead. The piano in Bezuquet’s shop mouldered away under a green fungus, and the Spanish flies dried upon it, belly up. Tartarin’s expedition had a put a stopper on everything.
Ah, you ought to have seen his success in the parlours. He was snatched away by one from another, fought for, loaned and borrowed, ay, stolen. There was no greater honour for the ladies than to go to Mitaine’s Menagerie on Tartarin’s arms, and have it explained before the lion’s den how such large game are hunted, where they should be aimed at, at how many paces off; if the accidents were numerous, and the like of that.
Tartarin furnished all the elucidation desired. He had read “The Life of Jules Gerard, the Lion-Slayer,” and had lion-hunting at his finger ends, as if he had been through it himself. Hence he orated upon these matters with great eloquence.
But where he shone the brightest was at dinner at Chief Judge Ladeveze’s, or brave Commandant Bravida’s (the former captain in the Army Clothing Factory, you will keep in mind), when coffee came in, and all the chairs were brought up closer together, whilst they chatted of his future hunts.
Thereupon, his elbow on the cloth, his nose over his Mocha, our hero would discourse in a feeling tone of all the dangers awaiting him thereaway. He spoke of the long moonless night lyings-in-wait, the pestilential fens, the rivers envenomed by leaves of poison-plants, the deep snow-drifts, the scorching suns, the scorpions, and rains of grasshoppers; he also descanted on the peculiarities of the great lions of the Atlas, their way of fighting, their phenomenal vigour; and their ferocity in the mating season.
Heating with his own recital, he would rise from table, bounding to the middle of the dining-room, imitating the roar of a lion and the going off of a rifle crack! bang! the zizz of the explosive bullet--gesticulating and roaring about till he had overset the chairs.
Everybody turned pale around the board: the gentlemen looking at one another and wagging their heads, the ladies shutting their eyes with pretty screams of fright, the elderly men combatively brandishing their canes; and, in the side apartments, the little boys, who had been put to bed betimes, were greatly startled by the sudden outcries and imitated gun-fire, and screamed for lights. Meanwhile, Tartarin did not start.
XI. “Let’s have it out with swords gentleman, not pins!”
A DELICATE question: whether Tartarin really had any intention of going, and one which the historian of Tartarin would be highly embarrassed to answer. In plain words, Mitaine’s Menagerie had left Tarascon over three months, and still the lion-slayer had not started. After all, blinded by a new mirage, our candid hero may have imagined in perfectly good faith that he had gone to Algeria. On the strength of having related his future hunts, he may have believed he had performed them as sincerely as he fancied he had hoisted the consular flag and fired on the Tartars, zizz, phit, bang! at Shanghai.
Unfortunately, granting Tartarin was this time again dupe of an illusion, his fellow-townsfolk were not. When, after the quarter’s expectation, they perceived that the hunter had not packed even a collar-box, they commenced murmuring.
“This is going to turn out like the Shanghai expedition,” remarked Costecalde, smiling.
The gunsmith’s comment was welcomed all over town, for nobody believed any longer in their late idol. The simpletons and poltroons--all the fellows of Bezuquet’s stamp, whom a flea would put to flight, and who could not fire a shot without closing their eyes--were conspicuously pitiless. In the club-rooms or on the esplanade, they accosted poor Tartarin with bantering mien:
“And furthermore, when is that trip coming off?”
In Costecalde’s shop, his opinions gained no credence, for the cap-poppers renounced their chief!
Next, epigrams dropped into the affair. Chief Judge Ladevese, who willingly paid court in his leisure hours to the native Muse, composed in local dialect a song which won much success. It told of a sportsman called “Master Gervais,” whose dreaded rifle was bound to exterminate all the lions in Africa to the very last. Unluckily, this terrible gun was of a strange kind: “though loaded daily, it never went off.”
“It never went off”--you will catch the drift.
In less than no time, this ditty became popular; and when Tartarin came by, the longshoremen and the little shoeblacks before his door sang in chorus--
“Muster Jarvey’s roifle Allus gittin’ chaarged; Muster Jarvey’s roifle ‘il hev to git enlaarged; Muster Jarvey’s roifle’s Loaded oft--don’t scoff; Muster Jarvey’s roifle Nivver do go off!”
But it was shouted out from a safe distance, on account of the double muscles.
Oh, the fragility of Tarascon’s fads!
The great object himself feigned to see and hear nothing; but, under the surface, this sullen and venomous petty warfare much afflicted him. He felt aware that Tarascon was slipping out of his grip, and that popular favour was going to others; and this made him suffer horribly.
Ah, the huge bowl of popularity! it’s all very well to have a seat in front of it, but what a scalding you catch when it is overturned!
Notwithstanding his pain, Tartarin smiled and peacefully jogged on in the same life as if nothing untoward had happened. Still, the mask of jovial heedlessness glued by pride on his face would sometimes be suddenly detached. Then, in lieu of laughter, one saw grief and indignation. Thus it was that one morning, when the little blackguards yelped “Muster Jarvey’s Roifle” beneath his window, the wretches’ voices rose even into the poor great man’s room, where he was shaving before the glass. (Tartarin wore a full beard, but as it grew very thick, he was obliged to keep it trimmed orderly.)
All at once the window was violently opened, and Tartarin appeared in shirt-sleeves and nightcap, smothered in lather, flourishing his razor and shaving-brush, and roaring with a formidable voice:
“Let’s have it out with swords, gentlemen, not pins!”
Fine words, worthy of history’s record, with only the blemish that they were addressed to little scamps not higher than their boot-boxes, and who were quite incapable of holding a smallsword.
XII. A memorable Dialogue in the little Baobab Villa.