To-day it is a Pompeii, except it is a hill town worthy to rank with those picturesque peaks of Italy and Dalmatia. Its château walls have crumbled, but its subterranean galleries, cut three stories down into the rock itself, are much as they always were. Everywhere are grim, doleful evidences of a glory that is past and a population that is dead or moved away. The sixteen thousand souls of mediæval times have shrunk to something like two hundred to-day—most of them shepherds, apparently, and the others picture post-card sellers.
It is a very satisfactory little mountain climb from the surrounding plain up to the little plateau just below the peak at Les Baux, though the entire distance from Arles is scarcely more than fifteen kilometres, and the actual climb hardly more than four. The razor-back mountain chain, upon one peak of which Les Baux sits, is known as the Alpilles.
All of the immediate neighbourhood (scarce a dozen kilometres from where the beaten track passes through Arles) is a veritable museum of relics of the glory of the heroic age. Caius Marius entrenched himself within these walls of rock and two thousand years ago planted the foundations of the Mausoleum and Arc de Triomphe which are the pride of the inhabitant of St. Rémy and the marvel of what few strangers ever come. They are veritable antiques—"Les Antiquités," as the people of St. Rémy familiarly call them, and rise to-day as monuments of the past, gilded by the Southern sun and framed with all the brilliancy of a Provençal landscape.
We slept at St. Rémy, and made the next morning for Tarascon, with memories of Dumas and Daudet and Tartarin and the Tarasque pushing us on.
Tarascon has a real appeal for the stranger; at every step he will picture the locale of Daudet's whimsical tale, and will well understand how it was that the prisoners' view from the narrow-barred window of the Château at Tarascon was so limited.
There is a fine group of Renaissance architectural monuments at Tarascon, and a street of arcaded house-fronts which will make the artist of the party want to settle down to work.
Across the river is Beaucaire, famous for its great fair of ages past, the greatest trading fair of mediæval times, when merchants and their goods came from Persia, India, and Turkey, and all corners of the earth. The Château of Beaucaire is a fine ruin, but no more; it is not worth the climbing of the height to examine it.
A little farther on is Bellegarde, where Dumas placed Caderousse's little inn, the unworthy Caderousse and his still more unworthy wife, who finished the career of Edmond Dantès while he was masquerading as the Abbé. There is no inn here to-day which can be identified as that of the romance, but Dumas's description of its sun-burnt surroundings, the canal, the scanty herbage, and the white, parched roadway, is much the same as what one sees today, and there is a tiny auberge beside the canal, which might satisfy the imaginative.
Avignon, the city of the seven French popes, who reigned seventy years, was the next stopping-place on our itinerary.
We put up at the Hôtel Crillon and fared much as one fares in any provincial large town. We were served with imitation Parisian repasts, and were asked if we would like to read the London Times. Why the London Times no one knew: why not the New Orleans Picayune and be done with it?