It was a mistake to utter his name—and ironically. I don’t know why I did it—from natural perversity, I suppose. It re-created between us a little shadow, which was never wholly dissipated during the remainder of our walk.
At about a mile from Paradou we came, always climbing, to a sign-post, and thence, making to the right, in a moment there opened out before us the veritable wild glen of our pilgrimage, a vision from end to end of tumultuous beauty.
Is any description of les Baux wanted in these days? I suppose during the last dozen years or so it has been more “exploited” than throughout the whole interval of centuries dividing it from its heyday of power and prosperity, when the singing-men came flocking from all quarters of the land to its exotic love-pastures. Once and for long its towering silences existed but in vague report for the ordinary traveller. He heard of them, but as things not easily attainable—hazards a little remote from his purpose of orthodox sight-seeing. But the motor-car has altered all that; it has rendered accessible, to the read-as-it-runs class of tourist, fastnesses hitherto respected for their isolation and inhospitality. He whirls over from St. Remy, stops an hour to lunch, bolts a hasty snack of local gallimaufry, and rushes on again. Sadie and Goldshtein, with their voices nasal and nosey, invade the austere solitudes; and, though they may vex them but fitfully, the aggregate of their gothicisms must have done something to take its keen edge off the strangeness and romance of the place.
However, that desecration is relative, and, after all, quite inconsiderable. One may still spend a week, a month, a year, in les Baux, and never, if one likes, know more of the casual demons than is conveyed through the distant low of a horn, or the vision of gliding heads above a stone wall. And in time, no doubt, the speed-lust will spend itself, and these casemated defences of the mountains return to their primal loneliness—to be once more periodically discovered by earnest schoolmistresses and sentimental poets desiring copy.
Now, right in our front as we clomb, rose a mighty forehead of cliff. It was as the face of a sphinx, veiling the mysteries of the hills beyond. We passed it, and their stupendous contours unfolded themselves before us—rock upon rock, lifting to the sky, in derision of the toiling road, which struggled vainly to put itself on terms with that impossible ascent.
And as it toiled, so did we, atoms perspiring in the dust. The little farms, the patches of vine, the olive and the mulberry gardens in the valley below, sunk ever deeper and deeper as we laboured up and on. There was heavy green on the Titan groups across the glen; they were furred with thick pelt of juniper, and spike-lavender, and bushy rosemary. But on our side all appeared near naked rock, clambering by way of scarp and shelf and overhanging boulder to a giddy altitude, where it broke against the sky in a wave of jagged masonry, hardly to be distinguished from the mountain which gave it birth.
There clung the shattered stronghold, a city in itself, still rooted in the rock from which, manured by blood, it first grew rich and lusty. It bred fierce hawks and gladsome swallows once; it breeds them still. The old life contest between the gentle and the cruel is not ended there, but Berald, in the form of a hen-harrier, will still swoop on the little dove-wife Françoiso to drive his cruel beak into her heart. The hill of colossal ruin, like his wood to the melancholy lover in “Maud,” remains “a world of plunder and prey,” though its vivid antique spirits, bad and good, be all harlequinaded in these days into their fairy similitudes. Do you seek Guilhem de Beauvoire, who walled up his own mother for her sins, or Raymond de Seillans, who made his wife eat unknowingly of the heart of her lover? Turn this stone or that, and you will likely find them squatting in the shape of little scorpions underneath. There, in the sanctimonious form of a praying mantis, stands a false priest—rapacious, hypocritical. And as for the frailties—Briande, Béregère, Iseult, Bels, Midons, Etiennette, and what not—are not their very names become butterflies, as pretty and as light, on which the spider and the lizard will feed if they get the chance.
The lovely things came down and looped about our heads as we climbed on—commas, like baroque tortoiseshells, pale clouded yellows, Bath whites for every one of which, if netted in England, a collector would have given a small fortune. They danced before us, like giddy laughing girls, taking us, no doubt, with our pack, for some wandering jongleur and his commère—perhaps Raymond Ferraud himself and the beautiful Alète de Mauleon—and beckoning us on to the appreciative Courts of les Baux. And indeed we were only suffering to attain them, magnificent as the prospect about us was.
However, for myself, I was now on familiar ground, and could calculate the remainder way. It ran up to the valley end, where, above a tumbled sea of boulders, rose a sheer wall of rock, against which it appeared to fling itself and cease. But in reality, short of the cliff it turned on a sharp curve like that of a hairpin, and, mounting thence at a steeper gradient, brought us in brief space to the village eyrie and the comfortable hostelry de la Reine Jeanne.
We were glad and content to have reached our goal at last. It looked an unpretentious house from the outside—painted stone grey, and entered up a little double-sided flight of steps put parallel with its front. But, within, everything, though on a modest scale, was bright and clean, and the slim young landlord as inviting as his surroundings. He saluted us with cheery hospitality (Madame his wife was, alas, indisposed—her first!), and answered our request for rooms with the smiling alacrity of a right host. He could speak some English too, having served his term as waiter in a Marseilles hotel—which seemed rather wonderful in that context of wild rocks and praying mantises—and was altogether rather an admirable Boniface to have alighted on in the wilderness. There was only a single difficulty, he said—which after all was doubtless not insuperable—the difficulty of accommodation. The house, as one might understand, was of limited capacities, and circumstances had further curtailed those. There was but one exclusive bedroom, and that was already bespoken. What remained consisted of two rooms in one—that was to say, as it were, a bedroom, and bed-dressing-room, but with a door between. To leave the second, it was necessary to go through the first. Still, if Monsieur, and—