assizes, and a
university--whose college of medicine was famous in the days of
Rabelais. It has the modern attributes of steam-heated,
electric-lighted hotels and restaurants, a tramway system that is
appalling and dangerous to all other traffic by reason of its
complexity, and an Opera House and a Hotel de Ville that would do
credit to a city ten times its size.

We merely took Montpellier _en route_, just as we had many other
places, and were really bound for Aigues-Mortes, where we proposed to
lunch: one would not willingly sleep in a place with a name like
that.

Of Aigues-Mortes Ch. Lentherie wrote, a quarter of a century ago:

"The country round about is incomparably melancholy, the sun
scorches, and the sandy soil gives no nourishment to plants, flowers,
vines, or grain. Cultivated land does not exist, it is a desert:
ugly, melancholy, and abandoned. But Aigues-Mortes cannot, nay, must
not perish, and will always remain the old city of St. Louis, a
magnificent architectural diadem, with its deserted _plage_ an _aureole_
most radiant, a glorious yet touching reminder."

One other imaginative description is the poem of Charles Bigot on _La
Tour de Constance_, in which the Huguenot women were many long years
imprisoned. It is written in the charming Nimois patois, and runs
thus in its first few lines:

"Tour de la simple et forte,
Simbol de glorie et de piete,
Tour de pauvres femmes mortes
Pour leur Dieu et la liberte."

These few introductory lines will recall to the memory of all who
know the history of the Crusades and of St. Louis the part played by
this old walled city of Aigues-Mortes.

More complete, and more frowning and grim, than Carcassonne, it has
not a tithe of its interest, but, for all that, it is the most
satisfying example of a walled stronghold of mediaeval times yet
extant.

With all its gloom, its bareness, and the few hundreds of shaking
pallid mortals which make up its present-day population, the marsh
city of Aigues-Mortes is a lively memory to all who have seen it.

One comes by road and drives his automobile in through the
battlemented gateway over the cobbled main street, or struggles up on
foot from the station of the puny and important little railway which
brings people down from Arles in something over an hour's time.
Ultimately, one and all arrive at the excellent Hotel St. Louis, and
eat bountifully of fresh fish of the Mediterranean, well cooked by
the _patron-