Aigues-Mortes and the Camargue

Aigues-Mortes, like Les Baux, is one of those places which are apt to dawn upon the traveller only when he is in reach of them. I might hesitate to confess that I had never heard of Les Baux before my first journey in Provence, or of Aigues-Mortes even then, if I had not met so many well-informed and well-travelled people who had never heard of either of them.

And yet Aigues-Mortes is a place of absorbing interest. It is romantically situated on the edge of the great plain of the Camargue, surrounded by salt marshes, lagoons, canals, and only a few miles from the sea. Here the town is entirely confined within its unbroken mediÆval fortifications, and its walls and gates and towers are more perfectly preserved than those of any other fortified town in Europe; more so even than those of Carcassonne, which owe much to modern restoration.

The story of its building is soon told, and it is a story that cannot be forgotten when one visits the place, for there has been nothing since that has overshadowed it. The poor little town, laid out in square "blocks" like an American village that hopes some day to become a city, has hardly a voice of its own, it is so nothing-at-all compared with its girdling ramparts. These are as nearly as possible a mile round, and probably the stones of all the buildings they enclose would not suffice for one side of them. So the walls and towers are everything at Aigues-Mortes, and speak insistently of the purpose for which they were built.

When St. Louis took his crusading vows in 1244, he had to acquire a port from which to embark. He exchanged land with the Abbey of Psalmodi for the site of Aigues-Mortes and the marshland between it and the sea. There was already an old fortified tower there, erected five hundred years before as a place of refuge from the Saracens, and this was rebuilt as the Tour de Constance. St. Louis also dug the long winding canal to the sea, which is now completely silted up, and its place taken, for the barge traffic to Beaucaire, by one quite straight and about half its length. By this he embarked an army of thirty-six thousand men in 1248.

In 1270 he embarked another great crusading army at Aigues-Mortes, but died almost immediately upon landing at Tunis.

Between the two crusades the walls of the fortress town had begun to be built, but it was St. Louis's son Philip III who completed the fortifications as we see them today. They have lasted for seven centuries and a half, and although the history of Aigues-Mortes did not quite end in the thirteenth century, they have sustained no destruction or decay, and no essential modification.

This, then, is what one sets out to see—a town which presents itself to our eyes exactly as it did to the eyes of the crusaders, who built it. Can one see the like anywhere else in Europe?

I left NÎmes on a bright Sunday morning and travelled by the pottering little train that runs across the plain of the Camargue. It was a little too far to walk in one day, and I wanted to see Aigues-Mortes that afternoon and start early the next morning for Saintes-Maries.

It was a very pleasant journey. The flat country lay soaking in a haze of sunshine, and the hills to the north showed lovely soft purples and golds and blues. At first the country reminded me very much of that stretch of reclaimed marshland across which one travels to get to our old English town of Rye. There were brooks and willows and green fields, and to one who has lived on "the Marsh" it was plain that all this fertility had the same origin—alluvial soil spread over what was once a bare expanse, from which the sea had receded. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I knew the fact and recognized the signs of it. But after a time this English-looking scenery gave place to the ProvenÇal rows of cypresses, to groups and dottings of stone pines, and to scattered buildings on an unkinder-looking soil.

After St. Laurent d'Aigouze, the next station before Aigues-Mortes and ten kilometres from it, the unreclaimed marsh begins, with stunted vegetation growing on poor stony soil, and water here and there, but not yet the great reed-bordered "Étangs," which are the home of so many wild fowl. To the left of the line straggles the broad road, and beyond it is the clean-cut line of the canal that leads from the sea through St. Gilles to Beaucaire. On a sort of island in the marsh stand the ruins of the Abbey of Psalmodi, and a little farther on is the outpost Tour CarbonniÈre, which is about two miles from Aigues-Mortes and its main fortifications.

The line, which runs quite straight from St. Laurent takes a right-handed turn just before it reaches Aigues-Mortes, and before the turn comes you can see the walled city in front of you, just as you can see the surprising picturesque little town of Rye, growing out of the marsh, as it were, before you come to it from Ashford.

"On this absolute level, covered with coarse grass," writes Mr. Henry James, "Aigues-Mortes presents quite the appearance of the walled town that a schoolboy 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."

The sight makes its instant appeal. One is back in a long past century, the aspect of which is familiar from just those pictures which Mr. James recalls, and from little illuminated drawings in old manuscripts. There is an agreeable sense of surprise and recognition, almost of awe. It is rather as if one had suddenly come face to face with some dead personage well known from portraits—such as Napoleon or Henry VIII. One had no idea that there was anything left quite like that.

You mount up through a fortified gateway into the little town, which although old is almost entirely devoid of interest. Its rectangular streets gave me a reminiscence of our old English Cinque Ports. About the time that Philip le Hardi was building Aigues-Mortes, Edward I was building, or causing to be built, the new town of Winchelsea in place of the old one that had been submerged by the sea; and Winchelsea was also laid out in rectangles, and surrounded by walls. The two princes had crusaded together. Perhaps they had talked over this new way of laying out a town, in place of the old way of radiating streets from a centre; but they could hardly have foreseen that it would be some hundreds of years before their plan would be generally adopted.

There is a good inn at Aigues-Mortes, for people make an excursion of it from NÎmes and Arles, and on the Sunday I was there there were a good many visitors. And all the inhabitants of the town seemed to be about the streets. There was a confirmation going on in the church, and after it a well attended funeral, in which none of the mourners were dressed in black. I would rather have struck the place on any other day, for the slight air of bustle and holiday-making did not suit it. M. Maurice BarrÈs has made it the background of "Le Jardin de Berenice," and every one who has read that remarkable novel will remember the atmosphere of brooding peace and suggestion in which he has bathed it.

Mr. Henry James indicates its charm no less skilfully:

"It is true that Aigues-Mortes does a little business; 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. 'C'est bien plaisant, c'est bien paisible,' said this worthy man, with whom I had some conversation; and pleasant and peaceful is the place indeed, though the former of these epithets may suggest an element of gaiety in which Aigues-Mortes is deficient. The sand, the salt, the dull sea view, surround it with a bright, quiet melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place three times (it doesn't take long) but lingered most under the southern wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt marshes and the still, shining surface of the Étang; and, as I did so, reflected that this was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took place, in 1538, between Francis I and Charles V."[29]

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This meeting between the Emperor and the Pope and the King of France is one of the few outstanding episodes in the history of Aigues-Mortes. It need only be remarked of it that Louis IX's channel had already fallen into disuse, and another and a shorter one had been dug out through the lagoons for the royal and papal galleys. This, from Grau de Croisette, has also ceased to be practicable, and the present canal starts from Grau de Roi, a little fishing and bathing resort at the nearest possible point on the coast, to which this railway also runs.

Another chapter in the history of Aigues-Mortes—the last before it sank to be the unimportant village it is now—is a long and painful one. It centres round the strong Tour de Constance, which was used as a prison for Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until the horror was finally removed from it in 1767. It was mostly women who were interned in it during long years, amidst circumstances of great cruelty. I quote, from Mr. T. A. Cook's pages, the account of one who accompanied the Prince de Beauvan in his mission of release.

"We found at the entry of the tower," writes de Boufflers, "an eager guardian, who led us through a dark and twisting passage, and opened a great clanging door on which Dante's line might well have been inscribed: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate. I have no colours in which to paint the terrors of the picture which gradually grew upon our unaccustomed eyes. The scene was hideous yet pathetic, and interest in its victims struggled with disgust at their condition. Almost without air and light, fourteen women languished in misery and tears within that stone-walled chamber. As the commandant, who was visibly touched, entered the apartment, they all fell down together at his feet. I can still see them, bathed in tears, struggling to speak, unable at first to do anything but sob. Encouraged by our evident sympathy they all began to tell us their sorrows at once. Alas, the crime for which they were then suffering was the fact that they had been brought up in the same religion as Henri Quatre. The youngest of them was fifty, and she had been here since she was eight years old. In a loud voice that shook with emotion the marshal said, 'You are free!' and I was proud to be his servant at that moment."[30]

You can visit the three round chambers, one above the other, in which these unfortunate women were imprisoned, which are in exactly the same structural state. Their walls are of enormous thickness, and they are lighted by mere slits of windows. They have been swept and furnished, and one can admire their vaulting and other architectural features, but not without a thought of the misery that they contained, which is too recent and too detailed to lose any of its horror in the mists of time.

At the other end of the north-west wall is the Tour des Bourgignans, round which also cling dreadful memories. In 1421 a party of Burgundians seized the town but were all massacred and their bodies were thrown into this tower, and covered with salt in order to avoid a plague.

To the south of Aigues-Mortes lie the shimmering lagoons and the desolate marshlands of the Carmague, which breed fever and ague, and make the peace of the little dead town not altogether so desirable. This great plain, which contains something like twenty thousand acres, has had a varied history. It is naturally formed by the RhÔne delta. The river rolls down its detritus which gradually chokes up its mouth. There is no tide in the Mediterranean to scour it out, and a bar is formed. Then the river has to find another outlet, and this happens again and again until it has wandered all over a large area, leaving behind it more and more deposit raised above the sea level. In the meantime, behind the bars thrown up both by the river and the sea, are left lagoons of fresh water, into which the sea sometimes rushes in times of storm, and leaves behind brackish and stagnant water.

Now in classical times it was well understood that if outlets to these lagoons were kept open, not only were their surroundings perfectly healthy, but that natural forces would do what was necessary to turn the great expanse of the Camargue from a desert waste into fertile corn-growing land. These natural forces were the simple ones which have made the Nile and other deltoid rivers the fertilizers of the land about them—periodical floodings and changes of their beds. In fact in the time of the Roman occupation the Camargue was called "The granary of the Roman army," and Arles, which was the market for its corn was so flowing with plenty as to be called "The Breasts."

Why is only part of this great stretch of land now fertile, and the rest a desolating waste? The mistake was made in the sixteenth century, when the engineers of Louis XIV examined the country and made recommendations for its treatment. The outlets from the lagoons had been allowed to get choked up, and the Camargue had for long been a fever-breeding waste instead of providing the rich corn land that it had once done. The king's engineers recommended the embanking of the RhÔne, so that it should be kept to its course, instead of flooding the adjacent land, and the building of dykes against the inrush of the sea. Drains, protected by traps, were also cut to carry out the stagnant water from the lagoons into the sea, and all this was done at an original cost of about a million pounds, and is kept up at an annual cost of about five thousand. There are now two hundred and thirty miles of dike, and although the land is fertile enough where the RhÔne is allowed its periodical overflow, and has been laboriously reclaimed elsewhere, the main effect of these works has been to reduce the Camargue to sterility. It has been estimated that at every overflow of the RhÔne, eighteen thousand cubic yards of rich alluvial soil was deposited over the land. This is now carried out to sea, and thrown down to make new bars. Perhaps some day the work will be done again, the dikes removed and the river allowed to take its natural course. All that would have to be done then would be to keep open the mouths of the lagoons, to prevent them from stagnating and breeding fever and ague; and then the whole Camargue would once more be one of the most fertile tracts of the earth.

In the meantime it has its own picturesque wild life, just as the fen country of eastern England had before it was drained. As in all flat countries it domed with magnificent skies; the mirage is a common effect of the scorched desolation; flights of rose-coloured flamingoes are to be seen among the commoner wild fowl. Bulls and horses roam the great solitudes in a wild state, until the time comes round for one of those great pastoral manoeuvres, half business, half sport, in which a whole countryside takes part, when the animals that are wanted are cut out from the rest and their ownership settled.

The Guardiens ride over the wide territory committed to their charge, mounted on wiry little white horses of the breed that is most common on the plain. They are splendid-looking young men, for the most part, and it gave me quite a thrill to see one of them a few days later. For there is a romance about them, and the wild yet anciently ordered life they lead, which is hardly of our civilization. You may read all about it in some of the novels of Jean Aicard, and especially in "Roi de Camargue," which seems to cry aloud for translation into English, it is so much finer than later ones by which he is chiefly known here. Now that Mistral and Daudet are dead Jean Aicard is the chief literary interpreter of ProvenÇal life, and in his pictures of this wild life of the great plains with its primitive pursuits and passions he stands supreme.