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Updated: June 4, 2025
Another troubadour, William de Cabestaing, sang the praises of Berengaria des Baux. Afterwards he lost his heart to Sermonda, wife of Raymond de Roussillon, who, not seeing the fun of this romantic spooning of his wife, waylaid and slew him, then plucked out his heart and had it served up at table in the evening.
The castle is a ruin, still capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair the state in which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them.
When Richard Coeur de Lion was on his way to Syria, he made some stay at Marseilles before going on to Genoa, where he was to embark, and there Fouquet insinuated himself into his good graces. He was married, but his wife was sorely neglected, and all his devotion was paid to the lady Adelasia des Baux. Provencal traditions diverge as to the result of his suit.
That little episode in history accounted for the Hotel Monte Carlo; and I wondered if it were put up on the site of the Grimaldis' miniature pleasure-palace, which the forest-burning revolutionists tore down just before Les Baux, after all its strange passings from hand to hand, became the property of the nation.
The sections were assembled; the members of the revolutionary tribunal were outlawed; the two representatives, Baux and Antiboul, were arrested, and an army of ten thousand men raised to advance on Paris.
The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid them homage. The chronicle of this old Provençal house has been written, in a style somewhat unctuous and flowery, by M. Jules Canonge.
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.
Presently we wandered away from them, scaled the higher places, seated ourselves among the ruins of the castle, and looked down from the cliff overhanging that portion of the road which I have mentioned as approaching Les Baux from behind.
Chamberlain's head was fantastically grafted on to the body of a prehistoric animal. We were just tracing Pierpont Morgan's profile, near a few of Hannibal's elephants, when the car sprang clear of the chasm, out upon the other side of the doorway; and there rose before us Les Baux, a hundred times more wonderful, more tragic, than I had hoped to find it.
Some of the houses are still inhabited; but most of them are open to the air and weather. Some of them have completely collapsed; others present to the street a front which enables one to judge of the physiognomy of Les Baux in the days of its importance.
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