Thirteen years after the success of the first novel featuring the adventures of the petty-bourgeois Tartarin from the southern French town of Tarascon, Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) resurrected his hero in 1885. This time, however, Tartarin is not drawn to exotic distant lands, but rather to the neighboring Switzerland, where he encounters a completely new phenomenon in his usual grotesque manner: the emerging popularity of high-altitude tourism.