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"Elise" I think her name is is a "character" almost as well known in Provence as the Master himself. So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a delightful chansonnier we had met at Les Baux.
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.
If I called Les Baux a city, just above, it was not that I was stretching a point in favour of the small spot which to-day contains but a few dozen inhabitants. The history of the place is as extraordinary as its situation.
I purchased the little book a modest pamphlet at the establishment of the good sisters, just beside the church, in one of the highest part 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 parlor for one of the ladies to come and speak to me.
For this imposing trial Bertram de Baux made great preparations. A platform was erected in the great hall of tribunal, and all the officers of the crown and great state dignitaries, and all the chief barons, had a place behind the enclosure where the magistrates sat.
I spent a couple of hours in visiting these objects, and there was a kind of pictorial sweetness in the episode; but I have not many details to relate. The isolated tower I just mentioned has much in common with the detached donjon of Montmajour, which I had looked at in going to Les Baux and to which I paid my respects in speaking of that excursion.
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 con- fusion of ruin.
He was the most intelligent and efficient-seeming guide imaginable, who looked as if he had the whole history of Les Baux behind his bright dark eyes; and I hoped that the humble maid and chauffeur might be allowed to follow the "quality" within respectful earshot. Soon they began to walk on, and I turned to look at my brother, who was lingering by the car.
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 neighboring country.
Baux a reports a case of a girl of fourteen in whom "there was no trace of fundament or of genital organs." Oberteuffer speaks of a case of absent vagina. Vicq d'Azir is accredited with having seen two females who, not having a vagina, copulated all through life by the urethra, and Fournier sagely remarks that the extra large urethra may have been a special dispensation of nature.
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