, and trampling the
palace towers to dust.

The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, the
stagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea.
In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of Les
Baux; and whether they took their title from the rock, or whether,
as genealogists would have it, they gave the name of Oriental
Balthazar--their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi--to the rock
itself, remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving.

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
tu