Tartarín de Tarascón (1800)

One of the great light-hearted French classics. The book tells the story of Tartarin, a Falstaff-like figure, full of hot-air and bluster, who is persuaded by the fellow residents of the provincial French town in which he lives to go on a lion-hunting expedition to Algeria. He blunders along from one disaster to the next, involving a foreign con-man, a lady of easy virtue, and a blind lion, but in the end he comes out of it all smelling of roses. It is best read in the original French.