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."
The view from the bridge as one crosses to Tarascon is as pleasant a picture as may be seen in any part of old France. The noble stream, broken by sedgy inlands, sweeps on between its low banks, and rising sheer from the water's edge on a firm rock-base, almost opposite the picturesque mass of Bellicardo, are the massive walls of the ancient castle of Tarascon, founded by Count Louis II. in the fourteenth century and finished by King Réné of Anjou in the fifteenth, and at one time tenanted by Pope Urbain II., but now, like many another palace of kings, fallen to the condition of a common prison. Within these grim walls Tartarin passed some of his inglorious days, but days not lacking romance, for was not Bompard from the opposite height signalling o' nights to him by means of mysterious lights?