CHAPTER XXI

LES BAUX

In all Provence, perhaps in all Europe, there is no more astonishing relic of mediÆval life than that "crater of a feudal volcano" Les Baux,[21] a veritable eagle's nest of a city in one of the wildest and highest points of the Alpilles. It is a morning's drive from St. Remy across the little range to its steep southern side.

We plunge straight into their heart and begin to mount by gradual windings through little valleys, arid and lonely. Dwarf oak, lavender and rosemary make their only covering. But for their grey vesture one might imagine oneself in some valley of the moon, wandering dream-bound in a dead world. The limestone vales have something of the character of the lunar landscape: a look of death succeeding violent and frenzied life, which gives to the airless, riverless valleys of our satellite their unbearable desolation. It might have been fancy, but it seemed that in the Alpilles there was not a living thing; neither beast nor bird nor insect.

As we ascended, the landscape grew stranger and more tragic. The walls of rock closed in upon us, then fell back, breaking up into chasms, crags, pinnacles. The lavender and aromatic plants no longer climbed the sides of the defiles; they carpeted the ground and sent a sharp fragrance into the air. The passes would widen again more liberally into battlemented gorges from which great solitary boulders and peninsulas rose out of the sea of lavender. Here and there this fragrant sea seemed to have splashed up against the rock-face, for little grey bushes would cling for dear life to some cleft or cranny far up the heights; sometimes on the very summit. As one follows the road it seems as if the heavily overhanging crags must come crashing down on one's head. What prevents it, I fail to this day to understand.

The whole place gives the impression of having been fashioned in some gloomy dream.

Every turn brings new and monstrous forms into view; the fantastic handiwork of earth's inner fires, patient modellings of the sun and wind. One thinks of the busy coming and going along these "footprints of the earthquake" in troubadour days, when knights and nobles flocked to the famous little court of the Alpilles, and the fame of the beautiful Passe Rose (Cecilia des Baux) brought troops of admirers from the ends of the earth—kings, princes, jongleurs, troubadours. Many a figure well known to history—the exiled Dante among them—has passed along these gorges. The Princes of Les Baux owned seventy-nine bourgs and had a finger in half the intrigues of Europe; a barbaric race, probably descendants of the ancient Ligurians, with wild mountain blood in their veins.

Further on, the valleys widen, and we see large oblong holes hollowed out of the creamy limestone, sometimes at regular intervals, producing an effect of arcades in the rock. Still further on we come upon majestic Assyrian-like portals, narrowing to the top in true archaic fashion and giving ingress to dark vestibules exciting to the fancy. They might well have been the entry to some subterranean Aladdin's palace whose gardens and miraculous orchards grow emeralds and diamonds as cherries grow in Kent. It was quite surprising to find that these grandiose excavations were the work of mere modern quarrymen still engaged in the prehistoric industry. Fine groups of horses and big carts and labourers before the Assyrian entrances had an effect curiously ancient and majestic. There was a time when the men of the Stone Age cut just such galleries and holes far up in the rocks at Les Baux and dwelt there like a flock of jackdaws, high above the hazard of attack.

It is asserted by the learned that the city, in fact, dates from the Stone Age, being inhabited by generation after generation of wild peoples, till gradually the dwellings were adapted to less uncivilised needs and added to by further sculpturing and excavation and by masonry whose material was hewn from the surrounding limestone.

In the city is a small museum containing many Stone Age implements.

It is indeed a place of strange memories.

In one of the tombs of the principal church was discovered the perfectly preserved body of a young woman with a mass of golden hair. The body crumbled to dust almost immediately, but the innkeeper took possession of the beautiful tresses, and called his inn in its honour, À la Chevelure d'Or.

Poor golden hair, it has set many a poet singing and vielle twanging in its day!

We have been wending our way steadily upward across a region that grows wider and more sweeping in its contours. The road rounds a corner. Suddenly we feel the wind in our faces and a blaze of light.

There is an exclamation, and then silence.

The carriage has stopped on the highest point of the pass just where the road has been cut through the low rock, and the driver points with his whip across a vast grey cauldron of a valley to a sort of shelving plateau high up on the shoulder of the opposite cliffs.

"VoilÀ Les Baux!"

The stupendous scene is spread out before us, wild and silent. The wind from the Crau to the south continues to blow through the cut in the rock; the sun glares down full upon the mysterious rock-city and lays bare the desolation of the valley.

Behind us a few sounds rise from the quarries, but there is otherwise that perfect silence of high places which seems to brood and wait, eternally patient.

This is the spot which is said to have furnished Dante with the scenery of his infernal regions, and the mind at once accepts the tradition, so gloomily grand, so instinct with motionless despair is the scene.

Beyond measure extraordinary the aspect of that cluster of roofs and walls scarcely to be distinguished from the crags and escarpments out of which they grow—"window and vault and hall" fashioned in the living rock. Truly, as Madame our hostess had said, "une ville remarquable"!

The eye slowly learns to recognise the masonry among the natural architecture, to separate the fantastic limestone surfaces from broken dwellings and fallen towers.

The city, once containing about eight thousand inhabitants, is now reduced to about a dozen or so, and these all live at the entrance to the town on the ascending road from the valley by which the traveller from the mountains must approach this grim little court of mediÆval princes. The road is comparatively new, for it cuts through some of the great houses, and high up above us as we pass, we see the columns and frieze of a fine stone mantelpiece overhanging the road, evidently belonging to some seigneurial dwelling. Perhaps it was here that the lady of the golden hair passed her tumultuous life—it could scarcely have been peaceful at that time, in that place—with that hair!

A few silent inhabitants watch us as we go by. A cat peers suspiciously over a wall of which the roof has fallen in; a mongrel hunts for garbage in a rubbish heap in a windowless mansion.

Before the Chevelure d'Or[22] there is a little group of men. Here the trap is put up and we set forth on foot up the steep main street of this "mediÆval Pompeii."

The whole place is built on the shelving shoulder of the cliff; a sloping ledge whence one might expect the town to slip down at any moment into the cauldron-valley; just as from time to time great fragments of rock have evidently rolled down to eternal oblivion.

The impression of universal greyness strengthens as we move upwards through the silent streets: grey walls, grey tiles, grey paving stones and grey escarpments above, on whose highest summit stands the rock-excavated castle, now apparently inaccessible except to adventurous birds—or, perhaps, the ghosts of the Princes of Les Baux who for their crimes are unable to rest in their graves.

We clamber up and down the ruinous higher part of the town, among those pathetic rectangles of masonry open to the sky where human life throbbed so eagerly a little while ago; we mount some perilous-looking steps on the cliff-side, in hopes of reaching the castle, but find ourselves emerging in mid-air upon the edge of the plateau overlooking from an appalling height the windy spaces of the Crau.

The mountains run sheer to the plain. It is exciting to stand on that great altitude which commands the stony desert towards Arles and the mouths of the Rhone. It has something of the character of the scene from the Appian Way looking towards Ostia and the mouths of the Tiber. The approach to Les Baux from Arles is in some respects more impressive than the route from St. Remy, for then the whole immense height of the cliffs is visible from the level of the plain. On one of the little heights that rise here and there on this plain stands the windmill of Daudet, which gives the title to his famous Lettres de Mon Moulin.

If we stand on the highest point of the city, the eye can run along the line of the Alpilles. Another little wave of hills sweeps forward on to the plain precisely as the smaller ocean waves go curling in on the shore, followed by the foaming line of breakers. The Alpilles seem, indeed, to be breaking on the shore of the Crau like the billows of a great sea.

A pathway perilously near the edge of the cliff fails to help us to approach that strange castle from which we are still separated by many feet of sheer rock.

As we stand looking across the chasm at the stronghold, its position seems to invest it with additional mystery and a solitude almost horrible.

An evil shadow hangs about it, and yet there is but little of the building touched by visible shades at this magnificent moment of a ProvenÇal day. A shadow that no sunshine can dispel surely haunts the fortress of Les Baux. For a second, in the hot glare, fancy plays one a trick, and there seems to be floating from the summit the blood-red banner which the princes used to unfurl on days of combat, when the air rang with the strange battle-cry of the house: "Au hazard Balthazar!"

They claimed descent from Balthazar, one of the Magi who visited the new-born Christ in the manger, and a six-rayed star was the device of the family.

Their association with Christianity was certainly not of a very intimate kind. They were a blind, blood-stained race, believing in violence and retaliation as the one and only means of grace in this world and troubling themselves, till the moment of death, very little about the next. They generally reaped as they had sown; feared, hated, and often dying deaths as terrible as those which they had inflicted on their victims.

It is thought probable that the Princes of Les Baux were descended from the Visigoths who settled in Arles in the fifth century. There is a vast and ancient work by "Le Sieur de Bouche, Docteur en Theologie," printed at Aix-en-Provence in the 17th century. In the section treating of the Visigothic Kingdoms the author gives an account of their King Euric and the events in Provence of the year 475.

"L'on croit communement," he says, "que c'est en ce temps que le chateau de la Ville de Baux en Provence a estÉ bÂty et qu'il a tirÉ son nom de quelque illustre et grand Seigneur Visigoth et Prince de la Maison Royale, laquelle Était de la famille des Batthes...."

From the fifth to the fifteenth century the line can be traced. At the end of that era Charles III. of France died, and then the barony of Les Baux with the whole county of Provence, was united to the crown of France. Louis XIII. gave it to the Grimaldi who came in state each year from Monaco, to take up their abode here; but they finally had to give it back to the crown.

It was surprising to find the remains of a hospital on the plateau above the city, with the niches visible for the beds of the patients; so surprising, indeed, that one is almost tempted to set learned authority at defiance. Perhaps, however, with all the brawls and tournaments of those amazing times, some such place was really necessary for repairing damaged knights.

As one looks downwards from this altitude, the city presents a strange aspect indeed. The grey buildings are flung together among the boulders, a tumultuous mass of human and natural handiwork. Truly

Under the castle rock are the remains of a magnificent banqueting-hall, with caissoned vaulting like that of the Basilica of Constantine at Rome.

The Romans had been even at Les Baux, and it was they who built the walls which still here and there cling giddily to the sheer edge of the rock. But they had many successors. A Saracen tower stands shoulder to shoulder with Christian churches, and everywhere are signs of the great feudal era, with its religious enthusiasm, its din and its warfare.

Besides the Princes, who were Counts of Orange as well as Seigneurs of this little kingdom in the sky, there were powerful families in Les Baux.

The house of the Porcelets, one of the greatest, not only of the city, but of Provence, was nicknamed by King RenÉ, Grandeur des Porcelets. The Princes he called InconstÁnce des Baux.

Out of the stern soil blossomed many a beautiful and accomplished lady, famed in troubadour song.

Berengaria des Baux was celebrated by the luckless Guilhelm de Cabestaing. Ranebaude inspired the world-famous Sordel; the charms of Cecilia, the beautiful Passe Rose, as we know, kept half the troubadours of France busy with vielle and lute; and there were Étienette, Clairette, and a host of others whose true history one would give much to know.

But the scene of their lives is at once eloquent and reticent. Their homes are stonily silent, and not even a wild bird makes its nest in the tempting crannies of the great mantelpieces where the flames must so often have leaped and roared.

It is the mistral that roars now on winter nights in the grass-grown chimneys.