The weather the next day was equally fair,so that it seemed an imprudence not to make sure of AiguesMortes.Nimes itself could wait;at a pinch,I could attend to Nimes in the rain.It was my belief that AiguesMortes was a little gem,and it is natural to desire that gems should have an opportunity to sparkle.
This is an excursion of but a few hours,and there is a little friendly,familiar,dawdling train that will convey you,in time for a noonday breakfast,to the small dead town where the blessed SaintLouis twice embarked for the crusades.You may get back to Nimes for dinner;the run or rather the walk,for the train doesn't run is of about an hour.I found the little journey charming,and looked out of the carriage window,on my right,at the distant Cevennes,covered with tones of amber and blue,and,all around,at vineyards red with the touch of October.The grapes were gone,but the plants had a color of their own.
Within a certain distance of AiguesMortes they give place to wide saltmarshes,traversed by two canals;and over this expanse the train rumbles slowly upon a narrow causeway,failing for some time,though you know you are near the object of your curiosity,to bring you to sight of anything but the horizon.Suddenly it appears,the towered and embattled mass,lying so low that the crest of its defences seems to rise straight out of the ground;and it is not till the train stops,close before them,that you are able to take the full measure of its walls.
AiguesMortes stands on the edge of a wide etang,or shallow inlet of the sea,the further side of which is divided by a narrow band of coast from the Gulf of Lyons.Next after Carcassonne,to which it forms an admirable pendant,it is the most perfect thing of the kind in France.It has a rival in the person of Avignon,but the ramparts of Avignon are much less effective.Like Carcassonne,it is completely surrounded with its old fortifications;and if they are far simpler in character (there is but one circle),they are quite as well preserved.The moat has been filled up,and the site of the town might be figured by a billiardtable without pockets.On this absolute level,covered with coarse grass,AiguesMortes 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.Such,literally speaking,is this delightful little city,which needs to be seen to tell its full story.It is extraordinarily pictorial,and if it is a very small sister 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 AiguesMortes 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 Isaw 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 gayety in which AiguesMortes is deficient.
