One of the chief monuments is the Église St. Vincent, dating from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, and containing the tombs of many of the Seigneurs of Baux.
There is, too, a ragged old ruin of a Protestant temple, with a series of remarkable carvings, and the motto “Post tenebras lux” graven above its portal. The Palais des Porcelets, now the “communal” school, and the Église St. Claude, which has three distinct architectural styles all plainly to be seen, complete the near-by sights and scenes, all of which are of a weather-worn grimness, which has its charms in spite of its sadness of aspect.
Not far distant is the Grotte des Fées, known in the Provençal tongue as “Lou Trau di Fado,” a great cavern some five hundred or more feet in length, the same in which Mistral placed one of the most pathetic scenes of “Mirèio.” Of it and its history, and of the great Christmas fête with its midnight climax, nothing can be said here; it needs a book to itself, and, as the French say, “c’est un chose à voir.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE CRAU AND THE CAMARGUE
WHEN the Rhône enters that département of modern France which bears the name Bouches-du-Rhône, it has already accomplished eight hundred and seventy kilometres of its torrential course, and there remain but eighty-five more before, through the many mouths of the Grand and Petit Rhône, it finally mingles the Alpine waters of its source with those of the Mediterranean.
Its flow is enormous when compared with the other inland waterways of France, and, though navigable only in a small way compared to the Seine, the traffic on it from the Mediterranean to Lyons, by great towed barges and canal-boats, and between Lyons and Avignon, in the summer months, by steamboat, is, after all, considerable. Queer-looking barges and towboats, great powerful craft that will tow anything that has got an end to it, as the river folk will tell you, and “bateaux longs,” make up the craft which one sees as the mighty river enters Provence.
The boatmen of the Rhône still call the right bank Riaume (Royaume) and the left Empi (Saint Empire), the names being a survival of the days when the kingdom of France controlled the traffic on one side, and the papal power, so safely ensconced for seventy years at Avignon, on the other.
The fall of the Rhône, which is the principal cause of its rapid current, averages something over six hundred millimetres to the kilometre until it reaches Avignon, when, for the rest of its course, considerably under a hundred kilometres, the fall is but twenty metres, something like sixty-five feet.
This state of affairs has given rise to a remarkable alluvial development, so that the plains of the Crau and the Camargue, and the lowlands of the estuary, appear like “made land” to all who have ever seen them. There is an appreciable growth of stunted trees and bushes and what not, but the barrenness of the Camargue has not sensibly changed in centuries, and it remains still not unlike a desert patch of Far-Western America.
Wiry grass, and another variety particularly suited to the raising and grazing of live stock, has kept the region from being one of absolute poverty; but, unless one is interested in raising little horses (who look as though they might be related to the broncos of the Western plains), or beef or mutton, he will have no excuse for ever coming to the Camargue to settle.