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After all, such a confession as this is a mere trifle, not only compared with martyrdoms of old, but with the constancy with which, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots endured persecution as, for instance, the large number of women who were imprisoned for thirty-eight years at Aigues Mortes; or again, with the steady resolution of the persecuted nuns of Port Royal against signing the condemnation of the works of Jansen.
While La Galissonière was asking for colonists, the agents of the Crown, set on by priestly fanaticism, or designing selfishness masked with fanaticism, were pouring volleys of musketry into Huguenot congregations, imprisoning for life those innocent of all but their faith, the men in the galleys, the women in the pestiferous dungeons of Aigues Mortes, hanging their ministers, kidnapping their children, and reviving, in short, the dragonnades.
A dead town The Rhones-morts Bars S. Louis and the Crusades How S. Louis acquired Aigues Mortes His canal The four littoral chains and lagoons The fortifications Unique for their date Original use of battlements Deserted state of the town Maguelonne How reached History of Maguelonne Cathedral The Bishops forge Saracen coins Second destruction of the place Inscription on door Bernard de Treviis His Romance of Pierre de Provence Provencal poetry not always immoral Present state of Maguelonne.
The battlements were retained, but were no longer roofed over. Consequently it is possible to tell approximately the epoch of a Mediaeval fortification, by a look at the battlements, whether they stand back flush with the walls, and have the beam-holes, or whether they stand forward, bracketed out from the walls. Aigues Mortes is a dead town.
I could walk about and amuse myself if I liked, but I must be at the inn before the return of my master and mistress to arrange a light repast collected at Arles, as we should have to lunch later at Nîmes, and the resources of Aigues Mortes were not supposed to be worthy of millionaires in search of the picturesque.
He names twenty-three different sorts of vagabonds known by cant names, such as "ruffers," "uprightmen," "priggers," "fraters," "palliards," "Abrams," "dummerers "; and of women, "demanders for glimmer or fire," "mortes," "walking mortes," "doxes," "kinching coves." London was esteemed by its inhabitants and by many foreigners as the richest and most magnificent city in Christendom.
But that is not all: the wash of the sea, its current settling west, and carrying with it the mud of the Rhone is gradually, but surely building up a fifth bar or bank, which will in time close the gulf from the point of Espignette to the bathing-place of Palavas, when the Gulf of Aigues Mortes will be converted into a second Etang de Berre.
This occasions the delta to be striped with what are locally termed Rhones-morts, whereas a flowing branch is called a Rhone-vif. Moreover the stagnant masses of water left by floods are called Aigues Mortes Dead Waters; and it is precisely on such that the little fortified town I am now writing about, stands.
And yet those were still more to blame who of old gave leave that criminals, to what sort of death soever condemned, should be cut up alive by the physicians, that they might make a true discovery of our inward parts, and build their art upon greater certainty; for, if we must run into excesses, it is more excusable to do it for the health of the soul than that of the body; as the Romans trained up the people to valour and the contempt of dangers and death by those furious spectacles of gladiators and fencers, who, having to fight it out to the last, cut, mangled, and killed one another in their presence: "Quid vesani aliud sibi vult ars impia ludi, Quid mortes juvenum, quid sanguine pasta voluptas?"
He even plays upon the word, using it in senses which it will hardly bear. Libycae mortes are serpents; Accessit morti Libye, "Libya added to the mortality of the army;" nulla cruentae tantum mortis habet; "no other reptile causes a death so bloody." To one so unhealthily familiar with the idea, the reality, when it came, seems to have brought unusual terrors.
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