VI.
The two Tartarins.


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