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Updated: June 25, 2025
Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young girl was framed by a low doorway; but for the rest, as I have said, Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta.
Then he set off. On the Avignon road there was not so much as a cat. Doors were shut and curtains drawn across windows. Here and there a street light blinked in the mist rising from the Rhone. Superb and calm Tartarin de Tarascon strode through the night, his heels striking the road with measured tread and the metal tip of his cane raising sparks from the paving-stones.
How the people of Tarascon would have kicked themselves for having constrained the great Tartarin to leave home, if they had but seen him stretched in the bunk in the dull, wan gleam through the dead-light, amid the sickly odour of cooking and wet wood the heart-heaving perfume of mail-boats; if they had but heard him gurgle at every turn of the screw, wail for tea every five minutes, and swear at the steward in a childish treble!
Valentine knew, that fatal evening, that Gaston would have to walk to Tarascon, to cross the bridge over the Rhone which connected Tarascon with Beaucaire, and did not expect to see him until eleven o'clock, the hour which they had fixed upon the previous evening.
The first stone bridge up the Rhone was at Avignon, but there was a bridge of boats connecting Beaucaire with Tarascon. En route he was inveigled into a controversy of unwonted bitterness with an innkeeper at le Muy. The scene is conjured up for us with an almost disconcerting actuality; no single detail of the author's discomfiture is omitted.
Meanwhile the Rhone, refusing to be an accomplice in such a crime, bore away the corpse, which the assassins believed had been swallowed up for ever. Next day it was found on the sandy shore at Tarascon, but the news of the murder had preceded it, and it was recognised by the wounds, and pushed back again into the waters, which bore it towards the sea.
In moments of expansion, his intimate friends would dig him in the ribs, remembering those four feverish days, with a facetious, "Ah! vieux polisson de Sisteron, va! Nous autres, nous n'avons pas fait des farces a Paris dans notre jeunesse!" to M. Sisteron's unbounded delight. It was in the genuine spirit of Tartarin de Tarascon, with all the mutual make-believe on both sides. His wife, Mme.
ANSWER me, you will say, how the mischief is it that Tartarin of Tarascon never left Tarascon with all this mania for adventure, need of powerful sensations, and folly about travel, rides, and journeys from the Pole to the Equator? For that is a fact: up to the age of five-and-forty, the dreadless Tarasconian had never once slept outside his own room.
To begin with, he ordered of Bompard two large boxes bound with brass, and an inscription to be on them: I TARTARIN, OF TARASCON I I Firearms, &c. The binding in brass and the lettering took much time. He also ordered at Tastavin's a showy album, in which to keep a diary and his impressions of travel; for a man cannot help having an idea or two strike him even when he is busy lion-hunting.
Duplessis entered abruptly, and with a countenance much disturbed from its wonted saturnine composure. "Marquis, what is this I have just heard from the Duchesse de Tarascon? Can it be? You ask military service in this ill-omened war? you?"
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