tarin took off his enormous hunting boots at the portal of the
mosques and advanced into the sanctuary, grave, solemn, and . . .
in colored socks! Ah, he believed in the Orient, with its muez-
zins and dancing-girls, its lions, panthers, and dromedaries, in
all the marvelous stories that his books had given him, stories
that his southern imagination had magnified a hundredfold. I,
faithful as the camel in my story, followed him in his heroic
dream; but now and then I doubted a little." His doubts, how-
ever, did not prevent him, an hour later, from lying in wait for
lions that never came, just as Tartarin does in the book.

Tartarin de Tarascon first appeared in le Petit Moniteur, a
Paris newspaper. "Its failure was complete. Le Petit Moniteur
was a popular sheet, and the masses do not understand printed
irony, which bewilders them, and makes them think you are
taking them for a pack of fools. Words cannot describe the
disappointment of the subscribers of that penny paper upon read-
ing the first chapters of Tartarin's life. . . After some ten install-
ments had come out, I had pity on the editor, and took Tartarin
to the Figaro, whose readers understood it better. . . Finally
the book was published, and took fairly well . . .," a rather mod-
est assertion in view of the fact that more copies of Tartarin
have been sold than of any of Daudet's other novels.

"Judged freely, after many years, Tartarin, with its swift and
varied movement, seems to me to have qualities of youth and of
life. . . The style is neither very elegant nor very concise. It