Tartarin, les avatars d'un disciple de Saint Hubert

Abstract

Ahhough Daudet claimed to paint " from life ", his personal experience of hunting doesn ' t account for the importance ofthe theme in his work or to juslify the creation of Tartarin, a debased double of Saint Hubert, emblem of the Southerner hunter, histrionic and inveterate liar; who is altogether a caricature of the Sunday hunter and a literary hero taking place among the " victimes du livre", intoxicated by the reading of cynegetic exploits. Tartarin of Tarascon is a satirical novel directed against two styles of hunting: one sends back to realism and the other to parody and pastiche. In other works of Daudet; hunting is seen as the opportunity to penetrate a mysterious sphere and favours meditation on death and evil, though il would be an overstatement to say that the writer uses hunting as a representation ofa mystic or symbolic quest. Hunting is essentially the pretext to telling fabulous stories, full of lies and fancies, on which the novelist cames no moral judgements because, in the final analysis, the hunter stands for the artist. Daudet denies reality to hunting and substitutes to it the evidence of the fable and its rewritings. Hunting wasn't-it already an illusion for the Tarasconnais who pretended to believe that caps were small game? Tartarin of Tarascon is an eccentric short story, neither fantastic, nor symbolic, which uses the metaphor of hunting lo tell that the mirage is indispensable in a world where action is not companion lo dream...