rom 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. Remy and the marvel of what few
strangers ever come. They are veritable antiques--"Les Antiquites,"
as the people of St. Remy 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 Provencal landscape.

We slept at St. Remy, 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 Chateau 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 mediaeval times, when merchants and
their goods came from Persia, India, and Turkey, and all corners of
the earth. The Chateau 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 Dantes while he was masquerading as
the Abbe. 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 Hotel Crillon and fared much as one fa