AIGUES MORTES, LOOKING ALONG THE WALLS.
By E. M. Synge.
After Carcassonne one felt there was nothing more to experience in the shape of a mediæval city. Yet Aigues Mortes—the city of St. Louis, the City of the Marsh, with its wonderful ramparts and square towers, all unchanged since the days of the Crusaders—brought before the eye of the imagination yet another aspect of the fascination of the Middle Ages. The walls are said to be built on the models of the fortified towns of Syria and to be almost a repetition of those of Ascalon. Here, as in many mediæval cities, were originally wooden balconies overhanging the base of the walls, the battlements being in fact a wall with ingress at intervals to the balcony. Later was substituted for the wooden balcony projecting galleries of stone on corbels, and these stone galleries or machicolations are comparatively recent.
To this scene belongs, among other historical events, the splendid procession of St. Louis and his followers as they embarked from this city of his founding for the first crusade.
The place is called Aigues Mortes from the dead branches of the river,[31] and its situation in this low-lying ground near the sea, with the whole Camargue lying flat and mournful before it, bears out the suggestion of the strange melancholy name.
Ancient writers of romance are fond of talking about the "frowning walls" of a city. On looking back at Aigues Mortes as one recedes from it across the Camargue one admits their justification. The dark high ramparts, with their stern-looking square towers—unlike the round extinguisher towers of Carcassonne—do most undeniably "frown."[32]
The city with its great gateway seems not to belong to our present life at all, in spite of its hotels and shops and the people in the market-place. It is as if a fragment of the tenth or eleventh century had been dropped by some accident when the Scroll of Time was being rolled up!
The illusion is almost painfully perfect, producing that curious bewilderment with which we provincial mortals (by no means yet citizens of the universe) are assailed when forced to realise—as well as intellectually to accept—the fact of a state of existence absolutely alien to our own experience.
Another delightful expedition in the Camargue is to the Church of St. Gilles on the outskirts of this extraordinary desert through which the main line runs at this point; and many of the trains stop at the little station only a short distance westward from Arles. By a singular chance the curé happened to be in the train on his way to Nimes, to read a paper about the many vexed archæological questions regarding this famous and exquisite church, this "ne plus ultra of Byzantine art," as Mèrimée calls it; and he was much delighted to talk about the building of which he is immensely proud.