We stood before a grey, massive tower—a Gothic finger of mouldering stone. "Louis de Malagne," said my old cicerone, "a traitorous Frenchman, delivered these holy walls to our enemies of Burgundy, and a garrison of the Duke's held possession of the sacred city of Aigues-Mortes. But the sacrilege was fearfully avenged. The oriflamme was spread by the forces of the king, and the townspeople rose within the walls, and, step by step, the foreign garrison were driven back till they fought in a ring round this old tower. They fought well, and died hard, but they did die—every man—always round this old tower. So, when the question came to be, where to fling the corpses, a citizen said, 'This is a town of salt; salt is the harvest of Aigues-Mortes—let us salt the Burgundians.' And another said, 'Truly, there is a cask ready for the meat;' and he pointed to the tower. Then they laid the dead men stark and stiff, as though to floor the tower. Then they heaped salt on them, a layer two feet thick; then they put on another stratum of Burgundian flesh, and another stratum of salt—till the tower was as a cask—choke-full—bursting-full of pickled Burgundians."
Much more he told me of the early fortunes of the Place—how here Francis I. met his enemy, Charles V., in solemn conference, each monarch utterly disbelieving every sacred word uttered by the other; and how the celebrated Algerine pirate, Barbarossa, who was the very patriarch of buccaneers—the Abraham of the Mansveldts, and Morgans, and Dampiers, and who invented, and emblazoned upon his flags the famous motto, "The Friend of the Sea, and the Enemy of All who sail upon it"—how this red-bearded rover once cast anchor off the port, and by way of notifying to France that their ally against the Spaniard had arrived, set fire to a wood of Italian pine on the margin of the marshes, and lighted up the whole country by the lurid blaze. Of the Camisards, of whom I was more anxious to hear—of the poisoning in the tower of St. Constance, and of the band of braves who descended from the summit upon tattered strips of blankets—he knew comparatively little. His mind was mediæval. Aigues-Mortes in the day of Louis Quatorze, was a declining place. The glory had gone out of it, and the unappeasable fever was slowly, but surely, claiming its own. Indeed, for a century it had been master. Aigues-Mortes will probably vanish like Gatton and Old Sarum. A pile of ruins, girdled in by crumbling walls, will slowly be invaded by the sleeping waters of the marsh; and the heron, and the duck, and the meek-eyed gull wandering from the sea, will alone flit restlessly over the city built by Louis the Saint, walled by Philip the Bold, and blessed by one of the wisest and the holiest of the Popes.
Reboul, the Nismes poet—I called upon him, but he was from home—is a baker, and lives by selling rolls, as Jasmin is a barber, and lives by scraping chins. Reboul is, like M. Auguste Saint Jean, an enthusiastic lover of the poor, dying, fever-struck Gothic town. Let me translate, as well as I may, half-a-dozen couplets in which he characterises the dear city of the Crusades. The poetry is not unlike Victor Hugo's—stern, rich, fanciful, and coloured, like an old cathedral window.
"See, from the stilly waters, and above the sleepy swamp, Where, steaming up, the fever-fog rolls grim, and grey, and damp:
How the holy, royal city—Aigues-Mortes, that silent town, Looms like the ghost of Greatness, and of Pride that's been pulled down.
See how its twenty silent towers, with nothing to defend, Stand up like ancient coffins, all grimly set on end;
With ruins all around them, for, sleeping and at rest, Lies the life of that old city, like a dead owl in its nest—
Like the shrunken, sodden body, so ghastly and so pale, Of a warrior who has died, and who has rotted in his mail—
Like the grimly-twisted corpse of a nun within her pall, Whom they bound, and gagged, and built, all living, in a wall."
From the town, we partially floated, in a boat, and partially toiled through swamp and sand to the sea—Auguste constantly preaching on the antiquarian topography of the place, upon old canals, and middle-aged canals—one obliterating the other; on the route which the galleys of St. Louis followed from the walls to the ocean; on a dreary spot between sand-hills, which he called les Tombeaux, and where, by his account, the Crusaders who died before the starting of the expedition lie buried in their armour of proof. Then we toiled to a little harbour—a mere fisherman's creek—where it is supposed the ancient canal of St. Louis joined the sea, and which still bears the name of the Grau Louis, or the Grau de Roi—"grau" being understood to be a corruption of gradus. At this spot, rising in the midst of a group of clustered huts, the dwellings of fishermen and aged douaniers, one or two of whom were lazily angling off the piers—their chief occupation—there stands a lighthouse, about forty feet high.