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 _etang_; 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. It was also not easy to perceive how
Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy Land, set his
army afloat in such very undeveloped channels. An hour later I purchased
in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius Topin, who undertakes to
explain this latter anomaly and to show that there is water enough in
the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have sustained a fleet of
crusaders. I was unable to trace the channel that he points out, but was
glad to believe that, as he contends, the sea has not retreated from the
town since the thirteenth century. It was comfortable to think that
things are not so changed as that. M. Topin indicates that the other
French ports of the Mediterranean were not then _disponibles_, and that
Aigues-Mortes was the most eligible spot for an embarkation.

Behind the straight walls and the quiet gates the little town has not
crumbled like the Cite of Carcassonne. It can hardly be said to be
alive; but if it is dead it has been very neatly embalmed. The hand of
the restorer rests on it constantly; but this artist has not, as at
Carcassonne, had miracles to accomplish. The interior is very still and
empty, with small stony, whitewashed streets tenanted by a stray dog, a
stray cat, a stray old woman. In the middle is a little _place_, with
two or three cafes decorated by wide awnings--a little _place_ of which
the principal feature is a very bad bronze statue of Saint Louis by
Pradier. It is almost as bad as the breakfast I had at the inn that
bears the name of that pious monarch. You may walk round the enceinte of
Aigues-Mortes both outside and in; but you may not, as at Carcassonne,
make a portion of this circuit on the _chemin de ronde_, the little
projecting footway attached to the inner face of the battlements. This
footway, wide enough only for a single pedestrian, is in the best order,
and near each of the gates a flight of steps leads up to it; but a
locked gate at the top of the ste