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 with spring-bayonets, Carib and flint arrows, knuckle-dusters, life-preservers, Hottentot clubs, Mexican lassoes —­ now, can you expect me to name the rest?  Upon the whole fell a fierce sunlight, which made the blades and the brass butt-plate of the muskets gleam as if all the more to set your flesh creeping.  Still, the beholder was soothed a little by the tame air of order and tidiness reigning over the arsenal.  Everything was in place, brushed, dusted, labelled, as in a museum; from point to point the eye descried some obliging little card reading: 

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I             Poisoned Arrows!           I
I               Do Not Touch!            I
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Or,

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I                Loaded!                 I
I             Take care, please!         I
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If it had not been for these cautions I never should have dared venture in.

In the middle of the room was an occasional table, on which stood a decanter of rum, a siphon of soda-water, a Turkish tobacco-pouch, “Captain Cook’s Voyages,” the Indian tales of Fenimore Cooper and Gustave Aimard, stories of hunting the bear, eagle, elephant, and so on.  Lastly, beside the table sat a man of between forty and forty-five, short, stout, thick-set, ruddy, with flaming eyes and a strong stubbly beard; he wore flannel tights, and was in his shirt sleeves; one hand held a book, and the other brandished a very large pipe with an iron bowl-cap.  Whilst reading heaven only knows what startling adventure of scalp-hunters, he pouted out his lower lip in a terrifying way, which gave the honest phiz of the man living placidly on his means the same impression of kindly ferocity which abounded throughout the house.

This man was Tartarin himself —­ the Tartarin of Tarascon, the great, dreadnought, incomparable Tartarin of Tarascon.

II. 
A general glance bestowed upon the good town of
Tarascon, and a particular one on “the cap-poppers.”

At the time I am telling of, Tartarin of Tarascon had not become the present-day Tartarin, the great one so popular in the whole South of France:  but yet he was even then the cock of the walk at Tarascon.

Let us show whence arose this sovereignty.

In the first place you must know that everybody is shooting mad in these parts, from the greatest to the least.  The chase is the local craze, and so it has ever been since the mythological times when the Tarasque, as the county dragon was called, flourished himself and his tail in the town marshes, and entertained shooting parties got up against him.  So you see the passion has lasted a goodish bit.