1936 On the Continent

fall of the Roman Empire.
    If you have any time to give to Arles and its surroundings, you certainly must go to Les-Baux, and I’d advise you to walk it, if you possibly can. Set out on the road from Arles to Les-Baux (about 11 miles, but the whole of the last 5 miles is fairly steep climbing) in the early morning, the earlier the better, and make your first stopping-place the Abbé de Montmajour. This weird jumble of architectural styles is perched on a hill about 2 or 3 miles outside Arles, or rather part of it is perched on the hill and the rest is at the base. At the bottom there is a lovely bare-walled Romanesque church of the tenth century, with fascinating chapels in the crypt vaguely reminiscent of the catacombs in Rome. Then just a little way up the hill lie the ruins of a twelfth-century cloister; and right on the top of the hill the remains of a Renaissance monastery knocked to pieces in the French Revolution. The whole place is overgrown witha riot of flowers and creepers and clouded with myriads of dancing butterflies. I have spent many a spring day there wandering among the ruins and sitting among the dwarf trees on the hill-top, looking out over the hazy plain stretching away to the Rhone and to the walls of Arles.
    From there you will have a long stretch of flat but pleasant walking, if the sun isn’t too high, until you get near the famous windmill of Alphonse Daudet, which is still a place of literary pilgrimage. It is about there that the winding hill starts, and the country suddenly changes into savage rocky land thick with gorse, heather and thyme. A perfect place for a knapsack lunch if you can stand that overpowering perfume of the thyme.
Les-Baux
    At last Les-Baux comes into sight, seemingly hewn out of the rock of the precipitous hill on which it stands. There are a couple of hotels there where you can get good food and pleasant lodging, but I would particularly recommend the one at the farther end of the town whose dining-room looks straight out over a sheer precipice on to the Devil’s valley, which is supposed to have given Dante his inspiration for the Inferno.
    Les-Baux is all remains. The population itself is just a remnant. It used to be an important town in the Middle Ages, and is still quite large from the standpoint of the number of houses and streets. But there are no more than a hundred inhabitants in all now, and hardly any of them under seventy years old. They are just the hangers-on of a past age, hoping to pick up occasional scraps from the tourists. All of them almost wear the badges of guides, and sell picture-postcards or souvenirs.
    The whole of the top of the hill consists of the scattered remains of a famous château, one of the principal Provençal courts of love in the Middle Ages, where the nobles and ladies of the time performed their strange rituals of Chivalrous love. Not orgies at all, but love games, with recitals of poetry and gallant and courtly deeds and gestures, all stereotyped into the well-known bowings and scrapings of a vast minuet.
    It is an amazing place though. The castle was in great part burrowed out of the side of the cliffs, and the hill is still punctured with innumerable caverns and passages which were once rooms and halls. The air is invigorating and the view for miles out over the plains of Provence unforgettable. Go there on a week-day, when you will avoid the crowds of charabancs which come snorting up to it on Saturdays and Sundays.

THE FRENCH ALPS
    Quite a lot of people seem to go through life under the fixed impression that all the high mountains of Europe are in Switzerland; and that you have to go to Switzerland if you want snow and ice and winter sports. Yet the French part of the Alps is quite as high and quite as good for winter sports as anything they have in Switzerland; in fact, I add in a shameful whisper that the highest mountain in Europe, the Mont Blanc, is in France.
    Another notion that people seem to be unable to get rid of is that mountains and mountain-climbing are absolute inseparables, and that anyone who goes to the Alps for any other purpose than ski-ing or bob-sleighing or climbing must be crazy. However, mountains have not only ups but also downs, and to me I have always found the valleys one of the most charming things about the mountains. This is all a very roundabout way of telling you that you can’t do better than to see, and stay in, the lovely valleys of Savoie and the Dauphiné, or spend a summer by the