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"Sed opinio omnium invidiam incendii in principem retorquebat, credebaturque imperator gloriam innovandae urbis quaesisse." "Videbaturque Nero condendae urbis novae et cognomento suo adpellandae gloriam quaerere." "Quin et novae mortes excogitatae, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent. Multi crucibus affixi, aut flamma usti.
The Crusaders embarked in the canal cut by S. Louis, and sailed through the lagoons before they reached the open Mediterranean. The most ancient maps show us Aigues Mortes bathed by one of those branches of the Rhone, now deserted, which go by the name of Rhones-morts.
It was as if I heard an echo from King Arthur's day, that dim, mysterious day when history was flushed with dawn; the Abbot of Psalmodi! The heart of Aigues Mortes for me was the great tower of Constance, but a very wicked heart, full of clever and murderous devices, which was at its wickedest, not in the dark ages, but in the glittering times of Louis XIV. and of other Louis after him.
It has risen in the far upland three thousand feet above this level and has made an arduous downward way, now by narrow gorges, more rarely across open spaces, where it crawls lazily in the summer sunlight: les eaux mortes, the French Canadians call such stretches.
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.
Alexander Dumas the elder went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles, driving along the Beaucaire Canal, on that famous tour of his which took him also to Les Baux; and we too went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles, though I'm sure the Turnours had no idea that it was a pilgrimage in famous footprints. Only the humble maid and chauffeur had the joy of knowing that.
Semlin and Belgrade are the entrepots of this trade. They have a singular phraseology; and it is amusing to hear them talk of their "marchandises mortes." One company had established a series of relays and reservoirs, into which the leeches were deposited, refreshed, and again put in motion; as the journey for a great distance, without such refreshment, usually proves fatal.
But at neap tides and eaux mortes, as the French say, there is nothing but a desert of brown, bare sand, with ripple-marks lying across it, and with shallow, ankle-deep pools of salt water here and there. Afar off on the western sky-line a silver fringe of foam, glistening in the sunshine, marks the distant boundary to which the sea has retreated.
Not that there is a conspicuous amount either of land or earth at Aigues Mortes, City of Dead Waters if the place really does exist, which I begin to doubt already; but I have only to shut my eyes to call it up; and in my memory I shall often use it as a background for some mediæval picture painted with my mind. For with my mind I can rival Raphael.
Denis, and received from the hands of the papal legate the famous standard known as the oriflamme of France, embarked at Aigues Mortes, and sailed for Cyprus, with his queen, Margaret of Provence, his brothers, the Counts of Artois, Poictiers, and Anjou, and many of the greatest lords of his kingdom. Meanwhile, the barons of England were not indifferent to what was passing on the Continent.
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