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The principality became an absolute and free sovereignty, and had already descended, in defiance of the Salic law, through the three distinct families of Orange, Baux, and Chalons. In 1544, Prince Rene died at the Emperor's feet in the trenches of Saint Dizier.
Ever since James of Aragon came to Naples, the unhappy princess, married with a dagger at her throat, had desired to purchase her liberty at the expense of crime. Followed by four armed men, she entered the prison where Robert des Baux was still suffering for a fault more his father's than his own. Marie stood before the prisoner, her arms crossed, her cheeks livid, her lips trembling.
The Sieur des Baux ordered the pig to be given a feed and then to be thrown over the precipice. When the besiegers found that the besieged had a pig so well nourished they thought it was hopeless to reduce the place, and raised the siege. In the thirteenth century the little eagle's nest of a town numbered three thousand six hundred inhabitants. At the present time it cannot count four hundred.
But his interest in what was going forward revived again his legs being, also, by that time well warmed when his own praises were sounded by his daughter: in the story of how he stopped the runaway horse on the very brink of the precipice at Les Baux; and how his wife all the while sat calmly beside him in the cart, cool and silent, and showing no sign of fear.
Renaud des Baux, who was to come from Marseilles with a squadron of ten ships to defend the ports of the capital and secure the queen's flight, should the Hungarian army get possession of Naples, had been delayed by adverse winds and obliged to stop on the way. All things seemed to conspire in favour of the enemy.
The two oldest and most interesting monuments of Les Baux have been unnoticed in the last chapter. These are the sculptured stones of Tremaie and Gaie. They are two limestone blocks fallen from the precipices above, lying on the flounce of rubble near the bottom of the promontory of Les Baux, the one on the east the other on the south.
Again, in A.D. 480, when Earic, king of the Visigoths, took possession of Arles, the inhabitants fled to the heights of Les Baux and constructed dwellings for themselves there in the rock. These chambers, scooped out of the limestone crag, are locally called Baumes.
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.
This is Les Baux, the name in Provencal signifies cliffs. There is a little railway from Arles to Salon, by which one travels at a snail's pace to the station of Paradou, whence a walk of five miles takes one into a crater-like valley surrounded by bald white limestone crags, and there, towering overhead, are the walls and towers of Les Baux, in a position apparently inaccessible.
The Barony of Les Baux consisted of seventy-nine towns or bourgs, which formed the territory called La Baussenique. It was confiscated by Louis III., Duke of Anjou, and Count of Provence in 1414, after having been governed by one family from Pons des Baux, the first who appears in history, and who died in 970.
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