"On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass," writes Mr. Henry James, "Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a schoolboy draws upon his slate, or that we see in the background of early Flemish pictures,—a simple parallelogram, of a contour almost absurdly bare, broken at intervals by angular towers and square holes."
The sight makes its instant appeal. One is back in a long past century, the aspect of which is familiar from just those pictures which Mr. James recalls, and from little illuminated drawings in old manuscripts. There is an agreeable sense of surprise and recognition, almost of awe. It is rather as if one had suddenly come face to face with some dead personage well known from portraits—such as Napoleon or Henry VIII. One had no idea that there was anything left quite like that.
You mount up through a fortified gateway into the little town, which although old is almost entirely devoid of interest. Its rectangular streets gave me a reminiscence of our old English Cinque Ports. About the time that Philip le Hardi was building Aigues-Mortes, Edward I was building, or causing to be built, the new town of Winchelsea in place of the old one that had been submerged by the sea; and Winchelsea was also laid out in rectangles, and surrounded by walls. The two princes had crusaded together. Perhaps they had talked over this new way of laying out a town, in place of the old way of radiating streets from a centre; but they could hardly have foreseen that it would be some hundreds of years before their plan would be generally adopted.
There is a good inn at Aigues-Mortes, for people make an excursion of it from Nîmes and Arles, and on the Sunday I was there there were a good many visitors. And all the inhabitants of the town seemed to be about the streets. There was a confirmation going on in the church, and after it a well attended funeral, in which none of the mourners were dressed in black. I would rather have struck the place on any other day, for the slight air of bustle and holiday-making did not suit it. M. Maurice Barrès has made it the background of "Le Jardin de Berenice," and every one who has read that remarkable novel will remember the atmosphere of brooding peace and suggestion in which he has bathed it.
Mr. Henry James indicates its charm no less skilfully:
"It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; it sees certain bags of salt piled into barges which stand in a canal beside it, and which carry their cargo into actual places. But nothing could well be more drowsy and desultory than this industry as I saw it practised, with the aid of two or three brown peasants and under the eye of a solitary douanier, who strolled on the little quay beneath the western wall. 'C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible,' said this worthy man, with whom I had some conversation; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, though the former of these epithets may suggest an element of gaiety in which Aigues-Mortes is deficient. The sand, the salt, the dull sea view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn't take long) but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt marshes and the still, shining surface of the étang; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I and Charles V."[29]
AIGUES-MORTES, THE RAMPARTS