Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearing for their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field of gules—­themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands, blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning, raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchable glowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, in the sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained but cinders—­these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dusty titles.  Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles:  King of Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance; Prince of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Prince of Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Chalons, seized in all its emptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and came therewith to sit on England’s throne.

The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility.  They warred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghers of Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon.  Crusading, pillaging, betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it again by deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadour harps, presiding at courts of love,—­they filled a large page in the history of Southern France.  The Les Baux were very superstitious.  In the fulness of their prosperity they restricted the number of their dependent towns, or places baussenques, to seventy-nine, because these numbers in combination were thought to be of good omen to their house.  Beral des Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one day starting on a journey with his whole force to Avignon.  He met an old woman herb-gathering at daybreak, and said, ’Mother, hast thou seen a crow or other bird?’ ‘Yea,’ answered the crone, ’on the trunk of a dead willow.’  Beral counted upon his fingers the day of the year, and turned bridle.  With troubadours of name and note they had dealings, but not always to their own advantage, as the following story testifies.  When the Baux and Berengers were struggling for the countship of Provence, Raymond Berenger, by his wife’s counsel, went, attended by troubadours, to meet the Emperor Frederick at Milan.  There he sued for the investiture and ratification of Provence.  His troubadours sang and charmed Frederick; and the Emperor, for the joy he had in them, wrote his celebrated lines beginning—­

  Plas mi cavalier Francez.

And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal.  Hearing thereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of armed men.  But music had already gained the day; and where the Phoebus of Provence had shone, the AEolus of storm-shaken Les Baux was powerless.  Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the great Sordello chanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes of Christendom flock round and eat the heart of the dead