Tartarin de Tarascon Reading Order

Tartarin de Tarascon (1872) by Alphonse Daudet is the most beloved comic novel in the French Naturalist tradition, a portrait of the Provençal boaster Tartarin — a man who believes every tall tale he tells about himself, who imagines himself as a great hunter and adventurer while living a comfortable bourgeois life in the sun-drenched town of Tarascon, and who finally goes to Africa to fulfill the fantasies he has so thoroughly narrated. Daudet's genius is that Tartarin is never simply ridiculous: he genuinely believes his own stories, his warmth and generosity are real, his desire for adventure is sincere even if his execution is comic, and Daudet's affection for him is palpable throughout. The novel belongs to the tradition of Cervantes's Don Quixote — the gap between imagination and reality, between the chivalric ideal and the actual provincial Spain — but Daudet applies this structure to the specifically Provençal character that he would analyze more seriously in Numa Roumestan: the southerner whose natural exuberance makes him live in a continuous narrative of his own heroism. The sequel, Tartarin sur les Alpes (1885), in which Tartarin conquers the Matterhorn (or believes he does), is equally brilliant. The Tartarin novels were Daudet's most popular works in his lifetime and remain the books most associated with his name, though his more serious social novels (Le Nabab, Numa Roumestan) have received more critical attention since his death.