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The persons charged with this ghostly commission were Rainier, a Cistercian monk, Pierre de Castelnau, archdeacon of Maguelonne, who became also afterwards a Cistercian friar.
The proprietor has built a farmhouse near it, and has moved his children's bodies to the old cathedral, and purposes to be laid there himself, when his hour strikes surrounded by waters: the sea on one side, the great mere of Maguelonne on the other.
From the first Maguelonne was doomed. She had no schools that could rival those of Montpellier; she ceased to grow as the younger city increased in fame and size, till even history passed her by, and the stirring events of the times took place in the streets of her larger and more prosperous neighbour.
For several centuries Maguelonne was a sort of ecclesiastical republic, in which the bishop exercised the office of president. It became very rich and luxurious. The bishop, not too scrupulous, forged imitation Saracen coins, and was called to order for doing this by Clement IV. in 1266.
A Canon of Maguelonne, gentle and pure of heart, he wrote the story of 'Pierre de Provence et la belle Maguelone, a charming monument of the old Languedoc tongue worthy to range alongside with 'Aucassin et Nicolette. It has been translated into most European languages, Greek not excepted, and has become a favourite chapbook tale.
In 1536 my Lord Bishop, with much appropriate pomp and ceremony, rode out of her gates and entered those of Montpellier as titular Bishop for the first time. He did not find the townsmen so elated by the new dignity of the city as to have broken ground for a new Cathedral, nor did he himself seem ambitious, as his predecessors of Maguelonne had been, to build a church worthy of his rank.
The Magdalen is probably a personation of the perished city of Maguelonne, as one of the Marys is the Mar or Mere; and Martha, there can hardly be a question, is the Syrian prophetess who accompanied Marius, but who in her place inherited the attributes and cult of Martis, the Phoenician goddess, venerated, doubtless, at all the settlements of these mercantile adventurers along the coast.
The soil is so full of salt that it is impatient of tillage, and produces only such herbs as love the sea border. But its lagoons are alive with wild fowl, rose-coloured flamingoes, white gulls, and green metallic-throated ducks. And now for Maguelonne. I said that Aigues Mortes was a dead town, but Maguelonne was the ghost of one.
The port of Narbonne was choked with sand, and belonged to the viscounts of that town. The port of Maguelonne was under the sovereignty of the bishop. The lagoons and their openings into the sea of Montpellier were under the King of Aragon.
The stones of the dismantled buildings encumbered the ground till 1708, when they were all carried off for the construction of the new canal which runs along the coast through the chain of lagoons from Cette to Aigues Mortes. "A church and its archives," says the historian of Maguelonne, "that is all that the revolution of fate has respected of one of the principal monastic centres in the south.
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