lord.  ’Let Rambaude des Baux,’ cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearly meant, but at this distance almost unintelligible, ’take also a good piece, for she is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep it well who knows so well to husband her own weal.’  But the poets were not always adverse to the house of Baux.  Fouquet, the beautiful and gentle melodist whom Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wife of Berald, with long service of unhappy love, and wrote upon her death ‘The Complaint of Berald des Baux for Adelaisie.’  Guillaume de Cabestan loved Berangere des Baux, and was so loved by her that she gave him a philtre to drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad.  Many more troubadours are cited as having frequented the castle of Les Baux, and among the members of the princely house were several poets.

Some of them were renowned for beauty.  We hear of a Cecile, called Passe Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappy Francois, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won the grace and love of Joan of Naples by his charms.  But the real temper of this fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts of love and beauty.  The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, and the comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature.  History records no end of their ravages and slaughters.  It is a tedious catalogue of blood—­how one prince put to fire and sword the whole town of Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his wife; how a third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to undermine her chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a fourth was flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon.  There is nothing terrible, splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which an example may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated by their chronicler, Jules Canonge.

However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories of the ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel and picturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the old towns of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophime at Arles, and of S. Gilles—­a village on the border of the dreary flamingo-haunted Camargue.  Both of these buildings have porches splendidly encrusted with sculptures, half classical, half mediaeval, marking the transition from ancient to modern art.  But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer and more elaborate.  The whole facade of this church is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon the church steps, and with the old conventional wave-border that is called Etruscan in our modern jargon.  From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean mild faces of saints and Madonnas.  Symbols of evangelists with half-human, half-animal eyes and wings, are interwoven with the leafy bowers