V.
It was into the busy little town of Beaucaire, which lies around its ancient castle of Bellicardo, on the west bank of the broad Rhone, glaring across at Tarascon, that I wheeled one bright day in June. Beaucaire, for all its canal, wharves, and signs of prosperous industry, is as tidy a town as I have seen, and the fine old castle, ruined by Richelieu, where in the golden age of Languedoc's poesy the troubadors sang their ballads at the Court of Love, is beautifully situated on a little hill by the river-side, quite near to the magnificent suspension bridge which figures so humorously in Port Tarascon. The rivalry between the two towns, their mutual jealousies, furnished Daudet with many an opportunity to poke fun at them. "Separated by the whole breadth of the Rhone, the two cities regard each other across the river as irreconcilable enemies. The bridge that has been thrown between them has not brought them any nearer. This bridge is never crossed—in the first place, because it's very dangerous. The people of Beaucaire no more go to Tarascon than those of Tarascon go to Beaucaire." As the gentleman I met at Nîmes would have said, "Zut! It is not true." But that is neither here nor there.
Tartarin, up to his forty-ninth year, had never spent a night away from his own home. "The very limit of his travels was Beaucaire, and yet Beaucaire is not far from Tarascon, as there is only the bridge to cross. Unhappily that beastly bridge had been so often swept away by the storms; it is so long, so rickety, and the Rhone so broad there that—zounds, you understand!... Tartarin preferred to have a firm grip of the ground." But this must have referred to the old bridge that made way for the present magnificent structure, which crosses the river in four spans and is 1,456 feet in length. However, it was this suspension bridge, and no other, across which the hero's cronie Bompard came with such bravery to witness for his friend, when Tartarin, fallen from his high estate, was on trial at the court of Tarascon for having been party to a gigantic swindle in the great colonising fraud of Port Tarascon, a charge from which, as we know, he was rightly acquitted. Bompard at the time of the trial was in hiding at Beaucaire, where he had become conservator of the Castle and warden of the Fair Grounds—Beaucaire's annual fair is famed all over France—"but when I saw that Tartarin was really dragged into the dock between the myrmidons of the law, then I could hold out no longer; I let myself go—I crossed the bridge! I crossed it this morning in a terrible tempest. I was obliged to go down on all fours the same way as when I went up Mont Blanc.... When I tell you that the bridge was swinging like a pendulum, you'll believe I had to be brave. I was, in fact, heroic."