but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue of
sepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field.

But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chief
attractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a special
expedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provencal desert where
one realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence,'--a
wilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, and
tufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passes
the Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all
periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but
henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and
terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast
Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their
decay than the older and austerer mediaeval towers, which rise up proud
and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at
length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you
find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into
bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient
art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and
nature are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl
with masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heaped
round fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; the
doors and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig
for tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and lead
to vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers--lady's
bower or poet's singing-room--now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks and
swallows. Within this rocky honeycomb--'cette ville en monolithe,'
as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one
mountain block--live about two hundred poor people, foddering their
wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud
beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in
calling the place a mediaeval town in its original state, for anything
more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly
be conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. At
the end of the last century, when revolutionary effervescence was
beginning to ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudality