The landlord had previously recommended a _cicerone_ to me, assuring me that I would not find him an ordinary man, that he was a sort of half-gentleman, and a scholar, and that he knew everything about Aigues-Mortes better than anybody else in it. Accordingly, I was presently introduced to M. Auguste Saint Jean, an old, very thin man, dressed in rusty black, and wearing--hear it, ye degenerate days!--powdered hair and a queue. M. Saint Jean looked like a broken-down schoolmaster, some touches of pedantry still giving formality to the humble sliding gait, and bent, bowing form. His face was nearly as wrinkled as Voltaire's, but he had black eyes which gleamed like a ferret's when you show him a rabbit.
In company with this old gentleman I passed a wandering day in and round Aigues-Mortes, rambling from gate to gate, scrambling up broken stairs to the battlements, and threading our way amid dim lanes, half choked up with rubbish, from one ghastly old tower to another. All this while my guide's tongue was eloquent. He gesticulated like the most fiercely fidgetty member of young France, and the ferret's eye gleamed as though upon a whole warren of rabbits. Aigues-Mortes seemed his one great subject, his one passion, his own idea. Aigues-Mortes was the bride of his enthusiasm, the soul of his body. He had been born in Aigues-Mortes; he had lived in it; he had the fever in it; and he hoped to die in it, and be buried among the stilly marshes. How well he knew every crumbling stone, every little Gothic bartizan, every relic of an ancient chapel, every gloomy tower haunted by traditions, as it might be by ghosts. His mind flew back every moment to the days of the splendid founding of Aigues-Mortes--to the crusading host, whose glory crowded it with armour, and banners, and cloth of gold, assembled round their king, St. Louis, and bound for Palestine. On the seaward side of the walls, Auguste shewed me rings sunk in the stone, and to these rings, he said, the galleys and caravels of the king had been fastened. The sea is about two miles and a half distant, but the traces of the canal which led to it are still visible amid the marsh and sand, so that, right beneath the walls, upon the smooth, unmoving _aguæ mortes_--whence, of course, Aigues-Mortes--floated the fleet of the Crusade, made fast to the ramparts of the fortress of the Crusade. And so Saint Louis sailed with a thousand ships, standing proudly upon the poop, while the bishops round him raised loud Latin chants, and the warriors clashed their harness. The king wore the pilgrim's scrip and the pilgrim's shell. Long and earnestly did my _cicerone_ dilate upon the evil fortunes of the Crusade--how, indeed, in the beginning it seemed to prosper, and how Damietta was stormed;--but the Saracens had their turn, and the King of France, and many of his best paladins were soon prisoners in the Paynim tents. Question of their ransom being raised, "A king of France," said Louis, "is not bought or sold with money. Take a city--a city for a king of France." The sentence and the sentiment are picturesque; but, after all, there is not much in one or the other. However, the followers of Mahound agreed. Louis was restored to France, and Damietta to its former owners; the rest of the European prisoners being thrown into the bargain for eight thousand gold bezants. Saint Louis, however, was too holy and too restless a personage to remain long at home, so that Aigues-Mortes soon saw him again; and this time he departed waving above his head the crown of thorns. The infidels had laid hands on him the first time, but a fiercer enemy now grappled with the king--the plague clutched him; and though a monarch of France could not be bought or sold for any number of gold bezants, the plague had him cheap--in fact, for an old song. "He died," says that bold writer, M. Alexandre Dumas, who spins you off the most interesting history, all out of his own head--"he died on a bed of ashes, on the very spot where the messenger of Rome found Marius sitting on the ruins of Carthage"--an interesting topographical fact, seeing that nobody, now-a-days, knows where Carthage stood at all--always saving and excepting M. Alexandre Dumas.