And so on for the whole of Tarascon. Two or three times a week
there were parties where they were sung. The singularity was their
being always the same, and that the honest Tarasconers had never
had an inclination to change them during the long, long time they
had been harping on them. They were handed down from father to
son in the families, without anybody improving on them or
bowdlerising them: they were sacred. Never did it occur to
Costecalde's mind to sing the Bezuquets', or the Bezuquets to try
Costecalde's. And yet you may believe that they ought to know by
heart what they had been singing for two-score years! But, nay!
everybody stuck to his own ,and they were all contented.

In ballad-singing, as in cap-popping, Tartarin was still the foremost.
His superiority over his fellow-townsmen consisted in his not
having any one song of his own, but in knowing the lot, the whole,
mind you! But -- there's a but -- it was the devil's own work to get
him to sing them.

Surfeited early in life with his drawing-room successes, our hero
preferred by far burying himself in his hunting story-books, or
spending the evening at the club, to making a personal exhibition
before a Nimes piano between a pair of home-made candles. These
musical parades seemed beneath him. Nevertheless, at whiles, when
there was a harmonic party at Bezuquet's, he would drop into the
chemist's shop, as if by chance, and, after a deal of pressure,
consent to do the grand duo in Robert le Diable with old Madame
Bezuquet. Whoso never heard that never heard anything! For my
part, even if I lived a hundred years, I should always see the mighty
Tartarin solemnly stepping up to the piano, setting his arms akimbo,
working up his tragic mien, and, beneath the green reflection from