Far, far below our mountain road lay a valley so flat that it might have been levelled on purpose for the tilting of knights in great tournaments.  Above and around us (for suddenly we were in as well as under it) was a City of Ghosts.

Huge masses of rock, like Titan babies’ playthings, had been hollowed out for dwellings, fit houses for our late cousins the cave-dwellers.  There were colossal pillars and dark, high doorways such as one sees in pictures of the temples at Thebes; but all this, said Mr. Jack Dane, was merely a preface for what was yet to come, only an immense quarry whence the stones to build Les Baux had been torn.  We were still on the road to the real Les Baux; and even as he spoke, the Aigle was clawing her way bravely up a hill steeper than any we had mounted.  At the top she turned abruptly, and stopped in a queer, forlorn little place, where to my astonishment our journey ended in front of a small house ambitiously named Hotel Monte Carlo.  Then I remembered the story I had read:  how a young prince of the Grimaldi family came begging Louis XIII. to protect him from Spain; how Louis, who didn’t want Spain to grab Monaco, promptly gave soldiers; how the Grimaldi’s shrewd wit did more to get the Spanish out of the little principality than did the fighting men from France; and how Louis, as a reward, turned poor, war-worn Les Baux into a Grimaldi marquisate.

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.

Against the rocks a few mean houses leaned apologetically, but on every side rose the ruins of a proud, dead past:  a past beginning with the ruts of chariot-wheels graven on the rock-paved street.  I thought, as I looked at the sordid little village of to-day, which had crawled into the very midst of the fortress, of some words I’d read last night:  “a rat in the heart of a dead princess.”

Strange, haggard hill, whispered about by history ever since Christians ran before Alaric the Visigoth, and hid in its caverns already echoing with legends of mysterious Phoenician treasure!  Strange robber house of Les Baux, founded thirteen hundred years ago, and claiming half Provence two centuries later!  No wonder, after all the fighting and plundering, loving and hating, that all it asks now is for its bleached, picked bones to be left in peace!

I thought this, standing by the little Hotel Monte Carlo, waiting for my mistress and her husband to be supplied with a guide.  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.