inside, ye gods and little fishes! what a change! From turret to
foundation-stone -- I mean, from cellar to garret, -- the whole
building wore a heroic front; even so the garden!

O that garden of Tartarin's! there's not its match in Europe! Not a
native tree was there -- not one flower of France; nothing hut
exotic plants, gum-trees, gourds, cotton-woods, cocoa and cacao,
mangoes, bananas, palms, a baobab, nopals, cacti, Barbary figs --
well, you would believe yourself in the very midst of Central Africa,
ten thousand leagues away. It is but fair to say that these were
none of full growth; indeed, the cocoa-palms were no bigger than
beet root and the baobab (arbos gigantea -- "giant tree," you
know) was easily enough circumscribed by a window-pot; but,
notwithstanding this, it was rather a sensation for Tarascon, and the
townsfolk who were admitted on Sundays to the honour of
contemplating Tartarin's baobab, went home chokeful of
admiration.

Try to conceive my own emotion, which I was bound to feel on
that day of days when I crossed through this marvellous garden,
and that was capped when I was ushered into the hero's sanctum.

His study, one of the lions -- I should say, lions' dens -- of the town,
was at the end of the garden, its glass door opening right on to the
baobab.

You are to picture a capacious apartment adorned with firearms
and steel blades from top to bottom: all the weapons of all the
countries in the wide world -- carbines, rifles, blunderbusses,
Corsican, Catalan, and dagger knives, Malay kreeses, revolvers