Yes, purely mirage!  The better to follow me, you should actually follow me into the South, and you will see I am right.  You have only to look at that Lucifer’s own country, where the sun transmogrifies everything, and magnifies it beyond life-size.  The little hills of Provence are no bigger than the Butte Montmartre, but they will loom up like the Rocky Mountains; the Square House at Nimes —­ a mere model to put on your sideboard —­ will seem grander than St. Peter’s.  You will see —­ in brief, the only exaggerator in the South is Old Sol, for he does enlarge everything he touches.  What was Sparta in its days of splendour? a pitiful hamlet.  What was Athens? at the most, a second-class town; and yet in history both appear to us as enormous cities.  This is a sample of what the sun can do.

Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling upon Tarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army Clothing Factory, like Bravida, the “brave commandant;” of a sprout an Indian fig-tree; and of a man who had missed going to Shanghai one who had been there?

VIII. 
Mitaine’s Menagerie —­ A Lion from the Atlas at
Tarascon —­ A Solemn and Fearsome Confrontation.

Exhibiting Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life, before Fame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn laurel wreath, and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest state, his delights and sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us hurriedly skip to the grandest pages of his story, and to the singular event which was to give the first flight to his incomparable career.

It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker’s, where Tartarin was engaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the needle-gun, then in its first novelty.  The door suddenly flew open, and in rushed a bewildered cap-popper, howling “A lion, a lion!” General was the alarm, stupor, uproar and tumult.  Tartarin prepared to resist cavalry with the bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to shut the door.  The sportsman was surrounded and pressed and questioned, and here follows what he told them:  Mitaine’s Menagerie, returning from Beaucaire Fair, had consented to stay over a few days at Tarascon, and was just unpacking, to set up the show on the Castle-green, with a lot of boas, seals, crocodiles, and a magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains.

An African lion in Tarascon?

Never in the memory of living man had the like been seen.  Hence our dauntless cap-poppers looked at one another how proudly!  What a beaming on their sunburned visages! and in every nook of Costecalde’s shop what hearty congratulatory grips of the hand were silently exchanged!  The sensation was so great and unforeseen that nobody could find a word to say —­ not even Tartarin.

Blanched and agitated, with the needle-gun still in his fist, he brooded, erect before the counter.  A lion from the Atlas Range at pistol range from him, a couple of strides off? a lion, mind you —­ the beast heroic and ferocious above all others, the King of the Brute Creation, the crowning game of his fancies, something like the leading actor in the ideal company which played such splendid tragedies in his mind’s eye.  A lion, heaven be thanked! and from the Atlas, to boot!  It was more than the great Tartarin could bear.