MORE ABOUT THE OLIVE-TREE--THE GATHERING OF THE OLIVES--LUNEL--A
NIGHT WITH A SCORE OF MOSQUITOES--AIGUES-MORTES--THE DEAD
LANDSCAPE--THE MARSH FEVER--A STRANGE CICERONE--THE LAST
CRUSADING KING--THE SALTED BURGUNDIANS--THE POISONED
CAMISARDS--THE MEDITERRANEAN.
Passing, for the present, Montpellier, where people with consumptions
used to be sent to swallow dust, as likely to be soothing to the lungs,
and to breathe the balmy zephyrs of the whispering mistral, I made
straight for Lunel, in order to get from thence to one of the strangest
old towns in France--Aigues-Mortes. All around us, as we hurried on,
were vines and olives--a true land of wine and oil. The olive-tree did
not improve on acquaintance--it got uglier and uglier--more formal, and
more cast-iron looking, the more you saw of it. And then it was
invariably planted in rows, at regular intervals, so as to give the
notion of a prim old garden--never of a wood. Like all fruit-trees in
France, the olive is most carefully trimmed, and clipped, and tortured,
and twisted into the most approved or fashionable shape. The man who can
make his _oliviers_ look most like umbrellas is the great cultivator;
and the services of the peasants who have got a reputation for olive
dressing are better paid than those of any agricultural labourers in
France. They are eternally snipping and slashing, and turning and
twisting the tree, until the unfortunate specimens have had any small
degree of natural ease and harmony which they possessed assiduously
wrenched out of them. And yet there are people in the South of France
who are enthusiastic on the hidden beauty of the olive. There are
technical terms for all the particular spreads and contortions given to
the branches; and the olive amateur will hold forth to you by the hour
upon the subtle charms of each. A gentleman from beyond Marseilles has
dilated with rapture to me on his delight, after a residence in
Normandy, in returning again to the hot South, and revisiting the dear
olives, so prim, and orderly, and symmetrical--not like the huge,
straggling, sprawling oaks and elms of the North, growing up in utter
defiance of all rule and system.
The olives of France, this gentleman informed me, are very inferior to
the trees of a couple of generations ago. Towards the close of the last
century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and when the morning
broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core. That year there was
not an olive gathered in Provence or Languedoc. The next season, some of
the stronger and younger trees partially revived, and slips were planted
from those to which the axe had been applied; but the entire species of
the tree, he assured me, had fallen off--had dwindled, and pined, and
become stunted; and the profits of olive cultivation had faded with it.
The gentleman spoke on the subject with a degree of unction which would
have suited the fall, not of the olive, but of man. It was a catastrophe
which coloured his whole life. He was himself an olive proprietor; and
very likely his fortunes fell on the fatal night as many points as the
thermometer. On our way to Lunel we saw the olive-gathering just
beginning; but, alas! it had none of the gaiety and bright associations
of the vintage. On the contrary, it was as business-like and unexciting
as weeding onions, or digging potatoes. A set of ragged peasants--the
country people hereabouts are poorly dressed--were clambering barefoot
in the trees, each man with a basket tied before him, and lazily
plucking the dull oily fruit. Occasionally, the olive-gatherers had
spread a white cloth beneath the tree, and were shaking the very ripe
fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor romance about the process.
The olive is a tree of association, but that is all. Its culture, its
manuring, and clipping, and trimming, and grafting--the gathering of its
fruits, and their squeezing in the mill, when the ponderous stone goes
round and round in the glutinous trough, crushing the very essence out
of the oily pulps--while the fat, oleaginous stream pours lazily into
the greasy vessels set to receive it;--all this is as prosaic and
uninteresting as if the whole Royal Agricultural Society were presiding
in spirit over the operations. And, after all, what could be expected?
"Grapes," said a clever Frenchman, "are wine-pills"--the notion of
conviviality and mirth is ever attached to them; and the vintagers, when
stripping the loaded branches, have their minds involuntarily carried
forward to the joyous ultimate results of their labours. But who--our
friends the Russians, and their cousins the Esquimaux excepted--could
possibly be jolly over the idea of oil? It may act balsamically and
soothingly; and the idea of the olive saucer, green amongst the bright
decanters, does approach, in some respect, towards the production of a
pleasant association of ideas; but still the elevated and poetic
feelings connected with the tree are remote and dim.
It was Minerva's tree. When the gods assembled to decide the dispute
between Pallas and Neptune, as to which should baptize the rising
Athens, it was determined that the honour should belong to whichever of
the twain presented the greatest gift to man. Neptune struck the earth,
and a horse sprung to day. Minerva waved her hand, and the olive-tree
grew up before the conclave. The goddess won the day, inasmuch as the
sapient assemblage decided that the olive, as an emblem of peace, was
better than the horse, as an emblem of war. Now, I would put this
question to Olympus:--How could the olive or the horse be emblems before
they were created? And, even if they were emblems, was not the point at
issue the best gift--not the best allegorical symbol? I beg, therefore,
to assure Neptune that I consider him to have been an ill-used
individual, and to express a hope that, if he should ever again come
into power, he will not forget my having paid my respects to him in his
adversity.
I do not know if I have anything particular to record respecting Lunel,
which is a quiet, stupid, shadowy place, but that I passed the night
engaged in mortal combat with a predatory band of mosquitoes. I was
warned, before going to bed, to take care how I managed the operation,
and to whip myself through the gauze curtains so as to allow nothing to
enter _en suite_. The bed--I don't know why--had been placed in the
middle of the room, and the filmy net curtains, like fairy drapery, were
snugly tucked in beneath the bedding. Looking at them more particularly,
I distinguished a little card, accidentally left adhering to the net,
which informed me that it was the fabrication of those wondrous
lace-machines of Nottingham; and I trusted that as Britannia rules the
waves, she would also baffle the mosquitoes. Perhaps it was my own fault
that she did not. I remembered Captain Basil Hall's admirable
description of doing the wretched insects in question by leaping
suddenly into bed, like harlequin through a clock-dial, and frantically
closing up the momentary opening, and I performed the feat in question
with as much agility as I could. But what has befallen the gallant
captain, also on that night befell me. Mosquitoes shoot into a bed like
the Whigs into office--through the most infinitesimal crevices--but with
the entrance the resemblance ceases--once in office, with the country
sleeping tolerably comfortably, the Whigs do nothing. Not so, the
mosquitoes. Their policy is perfectly different, and their energies
vastly greater. For a true sketch of the style of mosquito
administration, I must again refer to Hall. His picture is true--true to
a bite, to a scratch, to a hum. I might paint it again, but any one can
see the original. So I content myself with simply stating that from
eleven o'clock, P.M., till an unknown hour next morning, I was leaping
up and down the bed, striking myself furious blows all over, but never,
apparently, hitting my blood-thirsty enemies, and only now and then
occasionally sinking into a momentary doze to be roused by that loud,
clear trumpet of war--the very music of spite and pique and greediness
of blood, circling round and round in the darkness, and ever coming
nearer and nearer, till at last it ceased, and then came--the bite, as
regularly as the applause after the cavatina of a prima donna. I made my
appearance next morning, looking exactly as if I had been attacked in
the night by measles, the mumps, swollen face, and erysipelas.
Between Aigues-Mortes and Lunel, there is no public vehicle, because
there is no travelling public; and so I hired a ricketty, shandry-dan
looking affair, to take me on; and away we started, under a perfect
blaze of hot, sickly sunshine. The road ran due south, through the
vineyards and olives, but they gradually faded away as the soil got more
and more spongy, and presently we saw before us a waste of the same sort
as that which I have described on approaching the sea by the Canal du
Midi. Shallow pools, salt marshes, and bulrush jungles, lay flat and
silent, glaring in the sunshine--the watchful crane, the sole living
creature to be seen amid these desolate swamps. It struck me that John
Bunyan, had he ever seen a landscape like this strange, stagnant expanse
of dreariness, would have made grand use of it in that great prose poem
of his. Perhaps he would have called it "Dead Corpse Land," or the
Slough--not of Despond, but of Despair. Presently we found the road
running upon a raised embankment, with two great lakes, spotted with
rushy islands on either hand, and before us a grim, grey tower, with an
ancient gateway--the gates or portcullis long since removed, but a
Gothic arch still spanning the roughly-paved causeway. As we rattled
beneath it, two or three lounging _douaniers_ came forth, and looked
lazily at us; and presently we saw the grey walls of Aigues-Mortes
rising, massive and square, above the level lines of the marshes,
fronted by one lone minaret, called the "Tower of Constance"--a gloomy
steeple-prison, where, in the time of the Camisards, a crowd of women
were confined--the wives and daughters of the brave Protestants of the
Cevennes, who fought their country inch by inch against the dragoons of
Louis Quatorze, and who--the prisoners, I mean--were forced to swallow
poison by the agents of that right royal and religious king, the pious
hero and Champion of the Faith, as it is in the Vatican. Outside the
town looks like a mere fortification--you see nothing but the sweep of
the massive walls reflected in the stagnant waters which lie dead around
them. Not a house-top appears above the ramparts. It is only by the thin
swirlings of the wood-fire smoke that you know that human life exists
behind that blank and dreary veil of stone. We entered by a deep Gothic
arch, and found ourselves in narrow, gloomy, silent streets, the houses
grey and ghastly, and many ruinous and deserted. 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."
I inquired more particularly about the fever, for I felt it difficult to
conceive how people could continue to remain in a place cursed by nature
with a perpetual chronic plague. My host informed me that those who
lived well and copiously, were well clothed, well lodged, and under no
necessity to be out early and late among the marshes, fared tolerably.
They might have an ague-fit now and then, but when once well-seasoned
they did pretty well. It was the poorer class who suffered, particularly
in spring and autumn, when vegetation was forming and withering, and
the steaming mists came out thickest over the fens. People seldom died
with the first attack; but the subtle disease hung about them, and
returned again and again, and wore, and tugged, and exhausted their
energies--kept nibbling, in fact, at body and soul, till, in too many
cases, the disease-besieged man surrendered, and his soul marched out. I
asked again, then, how the poor people remained in such a hot-bed of
pestilence? "_Que voulez vous_," was the reply--"the greater part can't
help it; they were born here, and they have a place here;--at Nismes, or
Marseilles, or Montpellier, they would have no place. Besides, they are
accustomed to it; they look upon fevers as one of the conditions of
their lives, like eating and drinking; and, besides, they have no energy
for a change. The stuff has been taken out of them; you will see what a
sallow, worn-out people we have at Aigues-Mortes. They can get a living
here, but they would be overwhelmed anywhere else."
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.
We stood before a grey, massive tower--a Gothic finger of mouldering
stone. "Louis de Malagne," said my old _cicerone_, "a traitorous
Frenchman, delivered these holy walls to our enemies of Burgundy, and a
garrison of the Duke's held possession of the sacred city of
Aigues-Mortes. But the sacrilege was fearfully avenged. The oriflamme
was spread by the forces of the king, and the townspeople rose within
the walls, and, step by step, the foreign garrison were driven back till
they fought in a ring round this old tower. They fought well, and died
hard, but they did die--every man--always round this old tower. So, when
the question came to be, where to fling the corpses, a citizen said,
'This is a town of salt; salt is the harvest of Aigues-Mortes--let us
salt the Burgundians.' And another said, 'Truly, there is a cask ready
for the meat;' and he pointed to the tower. Then they laid the dead men
stark and stiff, as though to floor the tower. Then they heaped salt on
them, a layer two feet thick; then they put on another stratum of
Burgundian flesh, and another stratum of salt--till the tower was as a
cask--choke-full--bursting-full of pickled Burgundians."
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."
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.
"Let us climb to the lantern," said Auguste, "and you will then see our
silent land, and our poor dear old fading town lying at our feet."
Accordingly up we went; only poor Auguste stopped every three steps to
cough; and before we had got half way, the perspiration came streaming
down his yellow face, proving what might have been a matter of dispute
before--that he had some moisture somewhere in his body. From the top we
both gazed earnestly, and I curiously, around. On one side, the sea,
blue--purple blue; on the other side, something which was neither sea
nor land--water and swamp--pond and marsh--bulrush thickets, and
tamarisk jungles, shooting in peninsular capes, points, and headlands,
into the salt sea lakes; in the centre of them--like the ark grounding
after the deluge--the grey walls of Aigues-Mortes. Between the great
_mare internum_ and the lagoons, rolling sand-hills--the barrier-line of
the coast--and upon them, but afar off, moving specks--the semi-wild
cattle of the country; white dots--the Arab-blooded horses which are
used for flails; black dots--the wild bulls and cows, which the mounted
herdsmen drive with couched lance and flying lasso.
"Is it not beautiful?" murmured Auguste; "I think it so. I was born
here. I love this landscape--it is so grand in its flatness; the shore
is as grand as the sea. Look, there are distant hills"--pointing to the
shadowy outline of the Cevennes--"but the hills are not so glorious as
the plain."
"But neither have they the fever of the plain."
"It is God's will. But, fever or no fever, I love this land--so quiet,
and still, and solemn--ay, monsieur, as solemn as the deserts of the
Arabs, or as a cathedral at midnight--as solemn, and as strange, and as
awful, as the early world, fresh from the making, with the birds flying,
and the fish swimming, on the evening of the fifth day, before the Lord
created Adam."