Down below, in the damp crypt, with its low arched roof and naked walls,—a veritable dungeon,—upon a mutilated marble altar, is the little glass shrine containing the relics of Saint Sara, the patron saint of the gipsies. There, amid the smoke of their candles, in an atmosphere made foul by human exhalations, you can see them once a year, huddled together in a dense crowd, mumbling their questionable prayers.
In the days of the Saracen invasions this crypt served as a storehouse for supplies, when all the inhabitants of the little village were forced to take refuge in the fortress-church.
Aigues-Mortes has her walls and her Constance Tower, massive as Babel; Nîmes has her Arena and her Fountain—and the Pont du Gard, superb in its beauty, is also hers; Avignon her bridges, her ramparts, and her clocks with figures of armed men to strike the hours; Tarascon her Château, mirrored in the Rhône; Baux the fantastic ruins of her houses, hollowed, like the cells of a bee-hive, out of the solid rock of the hill-side; Montmajour has her tombs of little children, also dug, side by side, in the solid rock, and to-day filled with earth and flowers, like the troughs at which doves drink; Orange has her theatre and her triumphal arch; Arles has her theatre with the two pillars still upright in the centre; she has Saint-Trophime, too, with its sculptured façade and its Allée des Alyscamps, bordered with Christian sarcophagi and lofty poplars. But Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer has her church, which Monsieur le curé would not give for all the treasures of the other towns!
Marion saw plainly that Livette was depressed; Marion was touched when Livette said: “I must see Monsieur le curé,” and as her master would not be seriously discommoded, there being no occasion for him to leave the house, Marion ushered Livette into the parlor.
It was a whitewashed room, but the curé had transformed it into a veritable museum, and the walls were completely hidden behind wooden cabinets, made by himself, and all filled with his collections.
There were pieces of antique pottery and of rainbow-hued antique glass. There were old medals.
One of the latter attracted Livette’s attention. It represented a bull in the act of falling; one of his fore-legs had given way. A man, his conqueror, had seized him by the horns. That Grecian medal was struck centuries upon centuries ago. A label explained it to Livette, who thought at first that it was Renaud. Life is all repetition.
There were collections of plants and boxes filled with shells, and also many stuffed birds, all the varieties found in Camargue. For more than thirty years, fishermen and hunters had presented Monsieur le curé with curious objects and animals. Here was an otter from the Rhône, there a beaver, with his trowel-shaped tail and hooked teeth. It is a question of serious importance whether the beavers do not injure the dikes of the Rhône. The important point, you see, is that the water from the swamps should empty into the river or the sea through the canals, which run in all directions. Therefore, the dikes must hold firm and not let the Rhône overflow the swamps. And the beavers, they say, destroy the dikes. They gnaw into them when the great freshets come, to avoid the drift, and take refuge inside; and when the water comes in after them, they make a vertical hole through which to escape, and there is your dike, undermined, eaten into by the water! That is a bad state of affairs.
Livette raised her eyes. A reptile, with his mouth open, was hanging from the ceiling; he was very fat, and well he might be! he was a little crocodile, the last one killed in Camargue, a very long while ago!
In every nook left free by the natural curiosities some pious image was to be seen. Here the two Maries in their boat. There the Holy Women wrapping the Christ in his shroud. In another place, Magdalen at La Baume, kneeling in front of the death’s-head. But Livette saw no image of Saint Sara.