Chapter 27 - Page 2

of Carcassonne, it has
at least the essential features of the family. Indeed,
it is even more like an image and less like a reality
than Carcassonne; for by position and prospect it
seems even more detached from the life of the present
day. It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little busi-
ness; 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 conversa-
tion; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed,
though the former of these epithets may suggest an
element of gayety 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 _etang_,
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. It was also not easy to perceive how
Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the
Holy Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped
channels. An hour later I purchased in the town a
little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes
to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that there
is water enough in the port, as we may call it by
courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of crusaders. I was
unable to trace the channel that he points out, but
was glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has
not retreated from the town since the thirteenth century.
It was comfortable to think that things are not so
changed as that. M. Topin indicates that the other
French ports of the Mediterranean were not then _dis-
ponsibles_, and that Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible
spot for an embarkation.

Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the
little town has not crumbled, like the Cite of Carcas-
sonne. It can hardly be said to be alive; but if it is
dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand
of the restorer rests on it