Even the
familiar "tea and tennis," the stereotyped mild dissipation of
little English towns, was quite unknown. There was no entertaining
of any sort, beyond the formal visits the ladies were perpetually
paying each other. The Ducros alone, occasionally, asking their
legal friends to dinner, invitations accepted with the utmost
enthusiasm, for the culinary genius who presided over the Ducros'
kitchen (M. Dueros' own sister) deservedly enjoyed an enormous
local reputation.
Most people must be familiar with Alphonse Daudet's immortal work,
Tartarin de Tarascon, in which the typical "Meridional" of
Southern France is portrayed with such unerring exactitude that
Daudet himself, after writing the book, was never able to set foot
in Tarascon again.
We had a cercle in Nyons, in the Place Napoleon (re-christened
Place de la Republique after September 4, 1870), housed in three
rather stately, sparsely furnished, eighteenth-century rooms.
Here, with the exception of Tartarin himself, the counterparts of
all Daudet's characters were to be found. "Le Capitaine Bravida"
was represented by Colonel Olivier, a fiercely moustached and
imperialled Crimean veteran, who perpetually breathed fire and
swords on any potential enemy of France.
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