The sand, the salt, the dull sea-view, surround it with a bright, quiet
melancholy. There are fifteen towers and nine gates, five of which are on
the southern side, overlooking the water. I walked all round the place
three times (it doesn't take long), but lingered most under the southern
wall, where the afternoon light slept in the dreamiest, sweetest way. I
sat down on an old stone, and looked away to the desolate salt-marshes and
still, shining surface of the etang; and, as I did so, reflected that this
was a queer little out-of-the-world corner to have been chosen, in the
great dominions of either monarch, for that pompous interview which took
place, in 1538, between Francis I. and Charles V. It was also not easy to
perceive how Louis IX., when in 1248 and 1270 he started for the Holy
Land, set his army afloat in such very undeveloped channels.
An hour later I purchased in the town a little pamphlet by M. Marius
Topin, who undertakes to explain this latter anomaly, and to show that
there is water enough in the port, as we may call it by courtesy, to have
sustained a fleet of crusaders.
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