A well-to-do bourgeois, Tartarin lives in Tarascon, a small southern town, among friends who, like him, love hunting "à la casquette", gossip, aperitifs and thought-provoking journeys. Imaginative like all his compatriots, Tartarin ended up believing he had once been to Shanghai, so fervently did he recount his illusory adventures. It was even rumored that Tartarin was about to leave for Africa to hunt wild beasts, and this was so insistent that the brave man, urged on by his friends, was forced "for the sake of honor" to embark. He arrives in Casablanca, surprised to discover a modern city and not a single lion. But a charming Moorish woman, Baïa, seduces him, and Tartarin indulges in the "delights of Capua". This euphoria is short-lived: Baïa disappears, a false prince, mostly a swindler, finds a replacement and sets off on a hunting expedition in southern Morocco, which will only earn Tartarin the loss of his savings and a blind old lion dragged along by two beggars.

A legionnaire, Georges, promised his friend, who died of a snake-bite, to marry Catherine, the girl with whom he had a child. Back in France, the young soldier goes in search of Catherine. The girl he finds is a dumb puritan; in spite of his disappointment, he keeps his promise and asks for her hand. At the last moment, in the town-hall, he discovers the girl he is to marry is not the true Catherine. So he leaves his fiancee and heads for Paris where the true girl works as a cabaret dancer. But the deserted fiancee is not prepared to accept it.