LES BAUX
"C'est le Moyen-age tragique,--l'acropole de la Provence
féodale."
PAUL MARIÉTON.
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.
[Illustration: QUARRY IN VALLEY BELOW LES BAUX.
_By E. M. Synge._]
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.
[Illustration: DAUDET'S WINDMILL.
_By Joseph Pennell._]
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.
[Illustration: LES BAUX FROM THE ROAD TO ARLES.
_By E. M. Synge._]
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
"The wind of ruin has passed this way."
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.
[Illustration: WINDOW IN RUINED HOUSE OF A SEIGNEUR OF LES BAUX.
_By E. M. Synge._]
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.