Tartarin believes because he is together romantic, sentimental, and mildly sensual: that which he likes he wants to think true. He wants to believe that sweet Baia is his true love; when again he succumbs to Sonia, the Russian exile, he wants to believe that he too is an extremist, a potential martyr in the cause of Nihilism; and again he wants to believe that Likiriki, the nigger girl, is the little creature of charm for whom his heart has been calling. His sentimentality is always ready--for women, for ideas, for beasts. He can be moved when he hears for the hundredth time the ridiculous ballads that are popular in the local drawing-rooms, weep when Bezuquet, the chemist, sings 'Oh thou, beloved white star of my soul!' For him the lion is 'a noble beast,' who must be shot, not caged; the horse 'the most glorious conquest of man.' He is always above the world, never of it unless his own safety be endangered, when he scuttles to shelter; as Daudet says, half Tartarin is Quixote, half is Sancho ... but Sancho wins. It is because Tartarin is a comic coward that he will not allow the heroic crusaders of Pamperigouste to fire on the Government troops; the 'abbot' of Port Tarascon to train the carronade on the English frigate; alone, he is a greater coward than in public; he shivers under his weapons when he walks to the club in the evening; he severs the rope on Mont Blanc, sending his companion to probable death. But the burlesque does not end tragically: nobody actually dies, all return to Tarascon in time to hear their funeral orations. It might be thought that Tartarin is repulsive: he is not; he is too young, too innocent. His great, foolish heart is too open to the woes of any damsel; his simplicity, his credulity, his muddled faith, the optimism which no misfortune can shatter--all these traits endear him to us, make him real. For Tartarin is real: he is the Frenchman of the South; in the words of a character, 'The Tarasconnais type is the Frenchman magnified, exaggerated, as seen in a convex mirror.' Tartarin and his fellows typify the South, though some typify one side of the Southern Frenchman rather than another; thus Bravida is military pride, Excourbanies is the liar, and mild Pascalon is the imitator of imitators: when Tarascon, arrested by the British captain and brought home on board the frigate, takes up the attitude of Napoleon on the _Bellerophon_, Pascalon begins a memorial and tries to impersonate Las Cases. As for Tartarin, bell-wether of the flock, he has all the characteristics, he even sings all the songs. He is the South.