Vauban took this old foundation and surrounded it with walls anew, and gave the present formidable aspect to the place, building its ramparts of the red marble or porphyry extracted from the neighbouring mountains. Its naturally protected position, set deep in a rocky gorge, gave added strength to the fortress.
Louis XIV, in one of his irrational moments, built a château here and proposed living in it, but fate ruled otherwise. About the only connection of the king with it was when he chained up four women in a dungeon. The chains and rings in the walls may be seen to-day.
Villefranche, its fortifications and its château are admirable examples of the way of doing things in Roussillon between the tenth and fourteenth centuries; and the town is typically characteristic of a feudal bourg, albeit it has no very splendid or magnificent appointments.
Prades, just east of Villefranche, dates its years from the foundation of Charles-le-Chauve in 844, and has a fourteenth and fifteenth century château (in ruins) affectionately referred to by the habitant as "La Reine Marguerite." Assiduous research fails however to connect either Marguerite de France or Marguerite de Navarre with it or its history.
Near Villefranche is the little paradise of Vernet. It contains both a new and an old town, each distinct one from the other, but forming together a delightful retreat. It has a château, too, which is something a good deal better than a ruin, though it was dismantled in the seventeenth century.
Vernet has a regular population of twelve hundred, and frequently as many more visitors. This is what makes the remarkable combination of the new and the old. The ancient town is built in amphitheatre form on a rocky hillside above which rises the parish church and the château which, since its partial demolition, has lately been restored. The new Vernet, the thermal resort, dates from 1879, when it first began to be exploited as a watering-place, and took the name of Vernet-les-Bains for use in the guide books and railway timetables. Naturally this modern-built town with its hotels, its casino and its bath houses, is less lovely and winsome than its older sister on the hill. There are twelve springs here, and some of them were known to the Romans in the tenth century.