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 win-
dow, 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 Aigues-Mortes they give
place to wide salt-marshes, 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. Sud-
denly 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.
Aigues-Mortes 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 sur-
rounded 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
billiard-table without pockets. On this absolute level,
covered with coarse grass, Aigues-Mortes presents quite
the appearance of the walled town that a school-boy
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 speak-
ing, 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 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.
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