Short answers, pulled from the story.
Beaucaire is a commune in the Gard department of the Occitanie region in southern France. It sits on the western bank of the River Rhone, approximately 15 kilometres south-west of Avignon and 10 kilometres north of Arles, directly across the river from Tarascon.
The Fair of la Madeleine was a major commercial fair declared by Charles VII of France in 1453 to enable trade between Mediterranean Basin countries and the rest of France. By the mid-17th century it was the largest commercial fair in the Mediterranean region, said to surpass in a single week the total annual trade volume of Marseilles. It declined after the railway arrived in the mid-19th century.
Le Drac is a Beaucaire legend recorded by Gervase of Tilbury in 1214. It tells of a river monster that abducted a laundress and kept her for seven years as a wet nurse for its child. When the woman later recognised the drac in human form at the town fair, it blinded her. The town commemorates the legend with a street procession held each year from the 20th to the 22nd of June.
The Croix Couverte de Beaucaire is a 14th-century stone oratory standing at the intersection of the Route to Fourques and the Chemin de Beauvoir. It has three faces rising from a triangular base, each with a Gothic arched opening. It was classified as a historical monument on the 10th of October 1906 and is believed to have been built by John, Duke of Berry, Governor of Languedoc.
Noël Vandernotte was born in Beaucaire in 1923 and became the youngest athlete in the history of the modern Olympic Games to win a medal. He earned that medal as a rowing coxswain at the 1936 Olympics, a record described as holding ad vitam aeternam.
Beaucaire was called Ugernum by the Romans and was founded in the 7th century BC. Its importance stemmed from its position on the Via Domitia, the first Roman road built in Gaul, constructed in 121 BC to link Italy to Spain. Beaucaire stood at the fork where the road divided toward Arles, Nimes, Remoulins, and Saint-Gilles, and after the Vandals captured Rome in 455, Gallo-Roman nobles gathered there to elect the emperor Avitus.