Much more he told me of the early fortunes of the Place--how here Francis I. met his enemy, Charles V., in solemn conference, each monarch utterly disbelieving every sacred word uttered by the other; and how the celebrated Algerine pirate, Barbarossa, who was the very patriarch of buccaneers--the Abraham of the Mansveldts, and Morgans, and Dampiers, and who invented, and emblazoned upon his flags the famous motto, "The Friend of the Sea, and the Enemy of All who sail upon it"--how this red-bearded rover once cast anchor off the port, and by way of notifying to France that their ally against the Spaniard had arrived, set fire to a wood of Italian pine on the margin of the marshes, and lighted up the whole country by the lurid blaze. Of the Camisards, of whom I was more anxious to hear--of the poisoning in the tower of St. Constance, and of the band of braves who descended from the summit upon tattered strips of blankets--he knew comparatively little. His mind was mediæval. Aigues-Mortes in the day of Louis Quatorze, was a declining place. The glory had gone out of it, and the unappeasable fever was slowly, but surely, claiming its own. Indeed, for a century it had been master. Aigues-Mortes will probably vanish like Gatton and Old Sarum. A pile of ruins, girdled in by crumbling walls, will slowly be invaded by the sleeping waters of the marsh; and the heron, and the duck, and the meek-eyed gull wandering from the sea, will alone flit restlessly over the city built by Louis the Saint, walled by Philip the Bold, and blessed by one of the wisest and the holiest of the Popes. Reboul, the Nismes poet--I called upon him, but he was from home--is a baker, and lives by selling rolls, as Jasmin is a barber, and lives by scraping chins. Reboul is, like M. Auguste Saint Jean, an enthusiastic lover of the poor, dying, fever-struck Gothic town. Let me translate, as well as I may, half-a-dozen couplets in which he characterises the dear city of the Crusades. The poetry is not unlike Victor Hugo's--stern, rich, fanciful, and coloured, like an old cathedral window. "See, from the stilly waters, and above the sleepy swamp, Where, steaming up, the fever-fog rolls grim, and grey, and damp: How the holy, royal city--Aigues-Mortes, that silent town, Looms like the ghost of Greatness, and of Pride that's been pulled down. See how its twenty silent towers, with nothing to defend, Stand up like ancient coffins, all grimly set on end; With ruins all around them, for, sleeping and at rest, Lies the life of that old city, like a dead owl in its nest-- Like the shrunken, sodden body, so ghastly and so pale, Of a warrior who has died, and who has rotted in his mail-- Like the grimly-twisted corpse of a nun within her pall, Whom they bound, and gagged, and built, all living, in a wall."