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."
From the town, we partially floated, in a boat, and partially toiled through swamp and sand to the sea--Auguste constantly preaching on the antiquarian topography of the place, upon old canals, and middle-aged canals--one obliterating the other; on the route which the galleys of St. Louis followed from the walls to the ocean; on a dreary spot between sand-hills, which he called _les Tombeaux_, and where, by his account, the Crusaders who died before the starting of the expedition lie buried in their armour of proof. Then we toiled to a little harbour--a mere fisherman's creek--where it is supposed the ancient canal of St. Louis joined the sea, and which still bears the name of the _Grau Louis_, or the _Grau de Roi_--"grau" being understood to be a corruption of _gradus_. At this spot, rising in the midst of a group of clustered huts, the dwellings of fishermen and aged _douaniers_, one or two of whom were lazily angling off the piers--their chief occupation--there stands a lighthouse, about forty feet high.