Day Seven: Tower of Power
Marshlands aren't normally atop my landscape hit parade, but gosh, the Camargue is purty. I saw all the things you're supposed to see -- flamingos and long-horned, saltgrass-eating taureaux and enough white horses to make a wish and a half on (do you know that one? If you count ten white horses on a journey, you get a wish...), as well as birds galore. I'm told that the startlingly skunk-like one is a cormorant.
The drive down was as pretty as could be -- though at this time of year the vines are all so bare and fiercely pruned that they look like rows of abused children -- but this may be the result of Dickens as current bedtime book -- and I didn't get appreciably lost (bar the sidetrip in the direction of Ales. Seems a damn shame to have two towns as close in name as "Ales" and "Arles" so near each other.) Miracle of miracles, I found parking within the very shadow of the Tour de Constance in Aigues-Mortes... although I paid for this later, in struggles with the diabolically obfuscating parking payment system of the Aigues-Morticians.
Do you pay when you drive in? No. Do you pay once you've parked, like those lovely ticket caisses in Nimes and Uzes? No (--though you do get a ticket). Do you pay when you drive out? No. Is it free? No.
What you do is at the end of your visit, tramp around the lot forlornly trying to find the caisse pour payer, carefully inspecting electric meters and trash cans and receptacles for used syringes and randomly placed square boxes with no features at all and just before you are ready to ask the man at the municipal petite train next door (who surely must be asked this question every day of his life in every language fallen from the Tower of Babel)... you joyfully descry the caisse pour payer ACROSS THE STREET -- you scamper across and feed it your ticket -- it tells you to give it sixteen francs, then regurgitates your ticket with the proper electronic markings that will allow the caisse de sortie to suck it up and let your Kid free.
Je voudrais de ne pas passer le total de ma vie dans cette parking.
(juh voo-DRAY duh nuh pah pas-SAY luh toe-TAHL duh mah VEE duhn SET par-KEENG)
"I would prefer not to spend the rest of my life in this parking lot."
Anyway, all this weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth was in the future when I entered the gates of Aigues-Mortes. Once you've paid the fare, you can mosey along the ramparts as far as you will, admiring the canals and the red clay roofs and the salt-green fields all around (and laughing uproariously at the guidebook's suggestion that you could see Mount Blanc on a clear day...)
I didn't spend very much time on the ramparts because the Tour de Constance, the principal prison for "obdurate" Protestant women, was so very, very... present. So solid. So impregnable. It said so clearly, "Here I am, and here you'll come, my dears, if you persist in your obstinacy." It is visible for miles around -- it was originally built to help sailors sight land when Aigue-Mortes was a port so long ago. Seeing its solidity made the solidity of faith that opposed it so much more real for me. It was the last stage on which a Huguenot woman could be stripped of everything she cared for and believed in -- her teachers and leaders hung or burned, her menfolk exiled onto galley ships, her children taken from her and placed in monasteries... and then herself walled up, without hope, in the Tour de Constance, to die of fever, hunger -- or more often, just plain heartbreak.
The first level concentrates on the Tower's life during the Crusades, with marble St. Louis looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. The interior of the tower is about the size of a large room. The second level talks about the Huguenot women -- there are some wax figures, surprisingly uncheesy, of them in one alcove. Marie Durand's creed is scratched into the rock of the floor -- "Register" -- Resist.
Between the very nice gift shop there and all the souvenir stands along the road outside, I had lots of goodies by the end of the day -- including a cheesy little flocked Camargue pony who looked at me too soulfully from a bin. If I wake and get moving early enough, I hope to hear the Easter service at the Protestant temple here in Nimes tomorrow morning -- and then on the Musee des Vallees Cevennoles. This begins to feel like a research trip, God wot.