In The Middle Is A Little _Place_, With Two Or Three Cafes Decorated By Wide Awnings, - A Little _Place_ Of Which The Principal Feature Is A Very Bad Bronze Statue Of Saint Louis By Pradier.

It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that bears the name of that pious monarch.

You may walk round the enceinte of Aigues-Mortes, both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carcassonne, make a por- tion of this circuit on the _chemin de ronde_, the little projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order, and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a locked gate, at the top of the steps, makes access im- possible, or at least unlawful. Aigues-Mortes, however, has its citadel, an immense tower, larger than any of the others, a little detached, and standing at the north- west angle of the town. I called upon the _casernier_, the custodian of the walls, - and in his absence I was conducted through this big Tour de Constance by his wife, a very mild, meek woman, yellow with the traces of fever and ague, - a scourge which, as might be ex- pected in a town whose name denotes "dead waters," enters freely at the nine gates. The Tour de Con- stance is of extraordinary girth and solidity, divided into three superposed circular chambers, with very fine vaults, which are lighted by embrasures of prodigious depth, converging to windows little larger than loop- holes. The place served for years as a prison to many of the Protestants of the south whom the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had exposed to atrocious penalties, and the annals of these dreadful chambers during the first half of the last century were written in tears and blood. Some of the recorded cases of long confinement there make one marvel afresh at what man has inflicted and endured. In a country in which a policy of extermination was to be put into practice this horrible tower was an obvious resource. From the battlements at the top, which is surmounted by an old disused light-house, you see the little com- pact rectangular town, which looks hardly bigger than a garden-patch, mapped out beneath you, and follow the plain configuration of its defences. You take possession of it, and you feel that you will remember it always.

XXVIII.

After this I was free to look about me at Nimes, and I did so with such attention as the place appeared to require. At the risk of seeming too easily and too frequently disappointed, I will say that it required rather less than I had been prepared to give. It is a town of three or four fine features, rather than a town with, as I may say, a general figure. In general, Nimes is poor; its only treasures are its Roman re- mains, which are of the first order. The new French fashions prevail in many of its streets; the old houses are paltry, and the good houses are new; while beside my hotel rose a big spick-and-span church, which had the oddest air of having been intended for Brooklyn or Cleveland. It is true that this church looked out on a square completely French, - a square of a fine modern disposition, flanked on one side by a classical _palais de justice_ embellished with trees and parapets, and occupied in the centre with a group of allegorical statues, such as one encounters only in the cities of France, the chief of these being a colossal figure by Pradier, representing Nimes. An English, an American, town which should have such a monu- ment, such a square, as this, would be a place of great pretensions; but like so many little _villes de province_ in the country of which I write, Nimes is easily ornamental. What nobler ornament can there be than the Roman baths at the foot of Mont Cavalier, and the delightful old garden that surrounds them? All that quarter of Nimes has every reason to be proud of itself; it has been revealed to the world at large by copious photography. A clear, abundant stream gushes from the foot of a high hill (covered with trees and laid out in paths), and is distributed into basins which sufficiently refer themselves to the period that gave them birth, - the period that has left its stamp on that pompous Peyrou which we ad- mired at Montpellier. Here are the same terraces and steps and balustrades, and a system of water-works less impressive, perhaps, but very ingenious and charm- ing. The whole place is a mixture of old Rome and of the French eighteenth century; for the remains of the antique baths are in a measure incorporated in the modern fountains. In a corner of this umbrageous precinct stands a small Roman ruin, which is known as a temple of Diana, but was more apparently a _nymphaeum_, and appears to have had a graceful con- nection with the adjacent baths. I learn from Murray that this little temple, of the period of Augustus, "was reduced to its present state of ruin in 1577;" the moment at which the townspeople, threatened with a siege by the troops of the crown, partly demolished it, lest it should serve as a cover to the enemy. The remains are very fragmentary, but they serve to show that the place was lovely. I spent half an hour in it on a perfect Sunday morning (it is en- closed by a high _grille_, carefully tended, and has a warden of its own), and with the help of my imagina- tion tried to reconstruct a little the aspect of things in the Gallo-Roman days. I do wrong, perhaps, to say that 1 _tried_; from a flight so deliberate I should have shrunk.

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