The rotten remnants of the green _jalousies_ were mouldering week by week away, and moss and lichens were creeping up the walls; many roofs had fallen, and of some houses only fragments of wall remained. The next moment we were traversing an open space, strewn with rubbish of stone, brick, and rotten wood, with patches of dismal garden-ground interspersed, and all round the dim, grey, silent houses, dismal and dead. Aigues-Mortes could, and once did, hold about ten thousand people. It was a city built in whim by a king, the last of the royal crusaders, Louis IX. of France. By him and his immediate descendants, it was esteemed a holy place--the crusading port. The walls built round it, and which still remain--as the empty armour, after the knight who once filled it is dead and gone--were erected in imitation of those of the Egyptian town of Damietta, and all sorts of privileges were granted to the inhabitants. But one privilege the old kings of France could not grant: they could not, by any amount of letters patent, or any seize of seals, confer immunity from fever; and Aigues-Mortes has been dying of ague ever since it was founded. In its early times, the influence of royal favour struggled long and well against disease: one man down, another came on. What loyal Frenchman would refuse to go from hot fits to cold fits of fever, for a certain number of months, and then to his long home, if it were to pleasure a descendant of St. Louis? But the time and the influences of the Holy Wars went by, and the kings of France withdrew their smiles from Aigues-Mortes; so that their royal brother, King Death, had it all his own way. Funerals far outnumbered births or weddings, and gradually the life faded and faded from the stone-girt town, as the ebbing tide leaves a pier. Cette gave it the finishing stroke. A crowd of the inhabitants emigrated _en masse_ to Riquet's city; and here now is Aigues-Mortes--coffin-like Aigues-Mortes--with about a couple of thousand pallid, shaking mortals, striving their best against the marsh fever, among the ruined houses and within the smouldering walls of this ancient Gothic city. In a solemn, shady street, I found a decentish hotel, not much above the rank of an auberge, and where I was about as lonely as in the vast caravansary at Bagnerre. The landlord himself--a staid, decent man--waited at my solitary dinner. "Monsieur," he said, "is an artist, or a poet?" "What made him think so?" "Because nobody else ever came to Aigues-Mortes--no traveller ever turned aside across the marshes, to visit their poor old decayed town. There was no trade, no _commis voyageurs_. The people of Nismes and Montpellier were afraid of the fever; and even if they were not, why should they come there? It was no place for pleasure on a holiday--a man would as soon think of amusing himself in a hospital or a morgue, as in Aigues-Mortes."