Because of this enormous vision of life Tartarin was driven into adventure. Because he magnified his words he was compelled by popular opinion to sail to Algiers to shoot lions, though he was at heart afraid of dogs; to scale the Alps, though he shuddered when he thought of catching cold. He had to justify himself in the eyes of his fellow-citizens, or forgo for ever the halo of heroism. He did not have to abandon it, for Daudet loved his Tartarin; in Algeria he was mocked, swindled, beaten, but somehow he secured his lion's skin; and, in the Alps, he actually scaled both the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc ... the first without knowing that it was dangerous, the second against his will. Tartarin won because he was vital, his vitality served him as a shield. All his qualities were of those that make a man absurd but invincible; his exaggeration, his histrionics, his mock heroics, his credulity, his mild sensuality, his sentimentality, and his bumptious cowardice--all this blended into an enormous bubbling charm which neither man nor circumstance could in the end withstand. Daudet brings out his traits on every page. Everywhere he makes Tartarin strut and swell as a turkey-cock. Exaggeration, in other words lying, lay in every word and deed of Tartarin. He could not say: 'We were a couple of thousand at the amphitheatre yesterday,' but naturally said: 'We were fifty thousand.' And he was not exactly lying; Daudet, who loved him well, pleaded that this was not lying but mirage, mirage induced by the hot sun. He was not quite wrong: when Tartarin said that he had killed forty lions he believed it; and his fellow-climber believed the absurd story he had concocted: that Switzerland was a fraud, that there were eiderdowns at the bottom of every crevasse, and that he had himself climbed the Andes on his hands and knees. Likewise, Tartarin and the people of Tarascon were deceived by their own histrionics. The baobab (_arbos gigantea_) which Tartarin trained in a flower-pot stood, in their imagination, a hundred feet high.