Of Aigues-Mortes Ch. Lentherie wrote, a quarter of a century ago:
"The country round about is incomparably melancholy, the sun scorches, and the sandy soil gives no nourishment to plants, flowers, vines, or grain. Cultivated land does not exist, it is a desert: ugly, melancholy, and abandoned. But Aigues-Mortes cannot, nay, must not perish, and will always remain the old city of St. Louis, a magnificent architectural diadem, with its deserted plage an aureole most radiant, a glorious yet touching reminder."
One other imaginative description is the poem of Charles Bigot on La Tour de Constance, in which the Huguenot women were many long years imprisoned. It is written in the charming Nimois patois, and runs thus in its first few lines:
"Tour de la simple et forte,
Simbol de glorie et de piété,
Tour de pauvres femmes mortes
Pour leur Dieu et la liberté."
These few introductory lines will recall to the memory of all who know the history of the Crusades and of St. Louis the part played by this old walled city of Aigues-Mortes.
More complete, and more frowning and grim, than Carcassonne, it has not a tithe of its interest, but, for all that, it is the most satisfying example of a walled stronghold of mediæval times yet extant.
With all its gloom, its bareness, and the few hundreds of shaking pallid mortals which make up its present-day population, the marsh city of Aigues-Mortes is a lively memory to all who have seen it.
One comes by road and drives his automobile in through the battlemented gateway over the cobbled main street, or struggles up on foot from the station of the puny and important little railway which brings people down from Arles in something over an hour's time. Ultimately, one and all arrive at the excellent Hôtel St. Louis, and eat bountifully of fresh fish of the Mediterranean, well cooked by the patron-chef, and well served by a dainty Arlésienne maiden of fifteen summers, who looks as though she might be twenty-two.
"C'est un chose à voir" every one tells you in the Bouches-du-Rhône when you mention Aigues-Mortes; and truly it is. As before suggested, you will not want to sleep within its dreary walls, but "it's a thing to see" without question, and to get away from as soon as possible, before a peculiarly vicious breed of mosquito inoculates you with the toxic poison of the marshes.
Now we are approaching the land of the poet Mistral, the most romantic region in all modern France, where the inhabitant in his repose and his pleasure still lives in mediæval times and chants and dances himself (and herself) into a sort of semi-indifference to the march of time.