The eponymic monster of Tarascon is no longer led along the streets in glory once a year, accompanied by men and maidens, in commemoration of the day when St. Martha tamed the dragon by a prayer, and led him along in fraternal peace, tied in a leash of her slender neck ribbon. The recent law against processions has stopped all that. ’Tis a pity, for the monster is a pleasant, vivid, childish-looking monster, no more terrible than a devil by Fra Angelico. He made us remember the horrible Tarasque which is to be seen in Avignon Museum. This noble monster was excavated under the foundations of an Early-Christian chapel in the Church of Mondragon. He is a panther-like person; his fore-claws are dug deep into two half-scalped human heads. A portion of a human arm remains between his gruesome jaws. Flaxman himself never imagined a more hideous devil. “Progress is not an illusion, after all!” we sighed, as we looked at the amiable if vulgar Tarasque of Tarascon. VIII When people come to stay at St. Remy, it is nearly always in order to make the excursion to Les Baux; a more desolate one cannot well be imagined, nor one that places in stronger relief the contrast between the sane and beautiful relics of antiquity and the misery, the squalor of mediæval ruins. Who was the misguided man who first made it fashionable to admire barren mountains and ruins, and other such dismal monstrosities? I should like to quarter him to all eternity in a palace at Les Baux. The road thither quits the lovely flowery plain, to rise among arid limestone mountains. Flocks of sheep are grazing there, but there are more herbs than grass, and as the poor beasts climb ever in search of a more succulent blade, they send out beneath their feet the exquisite fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender and myrtle. On the steeper scaurs, the pale mountain roses of the cystus are all a-flower, and shed a spring-like beauty about the desolate scene. It soon becomes more desolate. We wind higher and higher up the barren flanks of the Alpilles. The wind-eaten crags of white friable stone defy even the mountain herbs. It is melancholy cinder-grey lunar landscape. This white stone is the sole harvest of these regions. As we advance we find the mountain scarred and hacked into countless quarries. Here and there, the great pale slabs are piled into a tomb-like dwelling for the quarrymen. Far off, on the very crest of the mountain, we see, above all this desolation, an orchard of almond-trees, the only thing that betokens a human presence more happy than the slave-like labours of the quarry. Behind these trees there rises, as it seems, an uttermost wall of crags, yet more jagged, more desolate than the others. They are, as a matter of fact, the ruins of churches and palaces, the residue of the once princely city of Les Baux.