t the establishment of the good
sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest parts of Les
Baux. The sisters have a school for the hardy little Baussenques, whom I
heard piping their lessons while I waited in the cold _parloir_ for one
of the ladies to come and speak to me. Nothing could have been more
perfect than the manner of this excellent woman when she arrived; yet
her small religious house seemed a very out-of-the-way corner of the
world. It was spotlessly neat, and the rooms looked as if they had
lately been papered and painted: in this respect, at the mediaeval
Pompeii, they were rather a discord. They were, at any rate, the newest,
freshest thing at Les Baux. I remember going round to the church after I
had left the good sisters, and to a little quiet terrace which stands in
front of it, ornamented with a few small trees and bordered with a wall,
breast-high, over which you look down steep hillsides, off into the air
and all about the neighbouring country. I remember saying to myself that
this little terrace was one of those felicitous nooks which the tourist
of taste keeps in his mind as a picture. The church was small and brown
and dark, with a certain rustic richness. All this, however, is no
general description of Les Baux.

I am unable to give any coherent account of the place, for the simple
reason that it is a mere confusion of ruin. It has not been preserved in
lava like Pompeii, and its streets and houses, its ramparts and castle,
have become fragmentary not through the sudden destruction, but through
the gradual withdrawal, of a population. It is not an extinguished, but
a deserted city; more deserted far than even Carcassonne and
Aigues-Mortes, where I found so much entertainment in the grass-grown
element. It is of very small extent, and even in the days of its
greatness, when its lords entitled themselves counts of Cephalonia and
Neophantis, kings of Arles and Vienne, princes of Achaia and emperors of
Constantinople--even at this flourishing period, when, as M. Jules
Canonge remarks, "they were able to depress the balance in which the
fate of peoples and kings is weighed," the plucky little city contained
at the most no more than thirty-six hundred souls. Yet its lords (who,
however, as I have said, were able to present a long list of subject
towns, most of them, though a few are renowned, unknown to fame) were
seneschals and captains-general of Piedmont and Lombardy, grand admirals
of th