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.
LES BAUX FROM THE ROAD TO ARLES.
By E. M. Synge.