CASTILLON: THE MAIN STREET AND CHURCH DOOR.
CASTILLON: THE MAIN STREET AND CHURCH DOOR.
The desolation of the little town is unutterable. If it were a total ruin the human element would be lost; but it is so little a ruin, so like a living village of to-day—with the ashes of the kitchen fire still on the hearth—that it remains even now a vivid embodiment of a place dumb with panic and the fear of death.
XXXIXSOSPEL
SOSPEL lies at the bottom of a vast basin-shaped valley by the banks of the ever-chattering Bevera river. The sides of the valley are lined from base to summit with olive trees. It is not a pretty valley, for the green of the olive, being sad and wan, suggests rather the shabby dreariness of old age. In this sombre hollow Sospel appears as a patch of chocolate-brown. The valley is so immense and the town so small that it is little more than a dark stain at the bottom of a huge bowl. Sospel has fallen far from its high estate. It was once domineering and haughty and now it has become so humble and so insignificant. It once had the splendour of a soft-petalled rose, but it has dwindled in these days to a mere pinch of dry and shrivelled leaves. In Roman times it was a town of importance. It was a military station fully garrisoned and strongly fortified. It represented the mailed fist of Rome thrust defiantly into the land of Gaul. Those who are learned in these matters state that the lines of the Roman ramparts can still be traced about the outskirts of Sospel, but they are no longer visible to the eyes of the vulgar.
SOSPEL: THE OLD BRIDGE.
SOSPEL: THE OLD BRIDGE.
After the glory of Rome had passed away Sospel still remained a commanding city and, throughout the Middle Ages and for century after century, it held itsplace as a most influential town in this domain of France. It became the seat of a bishop as early as 1337 and Alberti, the historian of Sospel,[54]tells of its high clerics, of its consuls, of its judges and of its other exalted men. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a city with many thousands of inhabitants. It was surrounded by high walls, had five gates and many strong towers. It could boast of no fewer than one hundred and sixty-two shops and twomonti di pietà. It had a cathedral and as many as twenty churches and chapels, fifteen squares, many convents and monasteries, an academy and a college for lawyers.[55]A great fair was held every year on St. Luke’s Day in October in the Piazza di San Michele, for Sospel was a centre of commerce and of industry for miles around.
The town has seen much trouble and has endured periods of stress and times of calamity. Indeed so sad have been some phases of its history that, although it can boast of years of flamboyant glory, it is probable that its happiest days are now, when it has become a village of no account. About the end of the eighth century Sospel was almost entirely destroyed by fire. In 1516 it was ravaged by the Gascons and reduced, for the time, to a smouldering waste. In the sixteenth century the town became prominent as a place of horror by reason of the wholesale burning of heretics in the Piazza di San Michele.
Possibly the most terrible calamity that befell Sospel was through the visitations of the plague. The most disastrous of these visits was in the year 1688. Thepeople died as if the very air were poisoned. The streets were deserted; the shops were closed. Those who knelt in the church to pray could hear above their cries to heaven the thud of the mattock and the spade in the graveyard near at hand. It seemed as if Sospel was to be left desolate and that in a few dire weeks the river would be babbling seawards through a lifeless town.
The elders of the city met and resolved that all the inhabitants of the place, those whom the Terror as yet had spared, should make a pilgrimage to Laghet to confess their sins and implore the Madonna to intercede with heaven on their behalf. At sunrise one pleasant day in July the procession formed up outside the walls and started on its penitential march. It was a hard journey and very pitiable. The distance was great; for even as the bird flies it is no less than ten miles from Sospel to Laghet.
There was no road to follow, only a rough path that struggled over hills and vales, over rocks and stony slopes. The poor distracted company would climb first to Castillon, thence probably to Gorbio, then on to La Turbie and so to Laghet. It would be an arduous journey for a sturdy man, but for these panic-stricken folk it was as cruel a passage as the most relentless could devise.
In front of the column would walk the priests clad in white and bearing a cross. Then would come the great officers of the city with the nobles of Sospel, then the soldiers and after them the people of the town. Along the length of the column would break forth, again and again, the cry, “In the name of God on to Laghet!”
SOSPEL: THE RIVER FRONT.
SOSPEL: THE RIVER FRONT.
There would be old and young in the crowd, boys clinging to their mothers’ gowns, girls perched on their fathers’ shoulders and pleased for a while with the unwonted ride. The buxom maid would give an arm to her grandfather, the young husband a hand to his faltering wife. There would be some on mules and some on donkeys and at the wavering end of the procession would stumble the stragglers who were failing with every step.
Not a few would be smitten with death as they walked, would drop out of the throng and roll among the brambles by the way. None could linger behind to bear them company, for still the cry would ring forth along the line, “In the name of God on to Laghet!”
Think then of the town left behind! Silent but for the heartless chatter of the stream, empty save for the very old, the very weak, the dying and the dead.
Sospel, when viewed from a height, appears (as already stated) as a splash of chocolate-brown on the floor of a grey valley, chocolate-brown being the colour of its roofs. It is a small place of 3,500 inhabitants languidly busy in the construction of a railway which seems disinclined to develop and still more feebly concerned in a golf course which declines to “open.”
The town is divided into two parts by the Bevera river. The quarter on the north bank is poor and resigned to a damp and musty squalor; while the south side of the town contains all that Sospel can boast of in the matter of present prosperity and departed greatness. Two bridges—one old and one new—connect the towns. The old bridge is picturesque, being composed of two very ancient arches which have never come to an agreement as to what should be their common level. In thecentre of the bridge is a little, old, surly tower which forms an arch over the road after the manner of a village Temple Bar. The tower has been converted, with marked unsuccess, into a dwelling house with a bow window and balcony on its less dejected front and with gaudy advertisements on its other sides. Since no one appears to have the courage to live in this impossible dwelling it is empty. As a tower to defend the ford it is a monument of incompetence and as a house on a bridge of the type of those on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence it is a sorry thing. It is indeed neither a tower nor a house. It is merely a failure.
The north town is made up of old buildings and narrow lanes which are filled with gloom and with a smell so pressing that it can almost be felt with the hand. The main lane, and the most pungent, is called the Rue de la République. If it be intended by its title to flatter the Republic of France the compliment is doubtful.
The fronts of the houses that look into the lane are of great antiquity, but the backs that look on to the river are unreasonably modern. This river front of Sospel is one of its most curious sights. The houses are of four stories and each floor of each house is provided with a balcony. Except that they all look fragile and unsafe and the work of a rash amateur builder, no two balconies are quite alike. One may pertain to a kitchen, another to a sitting-room and a third to a bedroom and each balcony will contain the paraphernalia proper to its particular apartment. The united display of utensils shows how complex and exacting human life has become since the days of the cave man. I never before realisedthat so many buckets are required to satisfy the needs of a modern community.
SOSPEL: THE PLACE ST. MICHEL.
SOSPEL: THE PLACE ST. MICHEL.
Each balcony gives a demonstration of some phase of domestic life, conducted without any prudish pretence at concealment. Viewed as a whole they form a series of little stages upon which every episode of the home is being displayed in the open air. On a fourth floor balcony a woman will be cooking, while in the balcony below a young woman is “doing” her hair—a curious operation to watch since she tugs at her hair as if it belonged to a person she did not like. On a third balcony a woman may be stuffing a chair or mending a stocking; while on yet another may be witnessed in detail the whole tiresome process of dressing a child. One balcony has been turned into a fowl-house and another is devoted to the cultivation of a vine. On all these little galleries washing in some stage is in progress for washing among these people is like a familiar air running, with endless repetitions, through the music of a comedy of life.
The main town of Sospel is full of all the interest and charm that surrounds a relic of the Middle Ages. It is made up of unmanageable little streets thatwillrun where they like, of lanes so dim that they suggest the light of a dying lamp and of gracious houses whose beauty is soiled by grimy hands and marred by the patchwork of poverty, like a fine piece of tapestry that has been darned as uncouthly as a labourer’s sock. There are black passages as well as brilliant little squares, unaccountable stairways and mysterious arcades. Some of the streets are so narrow as to be mere cracks in a block of houses, while two at least, the Rue Pellegrini and theRue du Château, are no more than moist, obscure gutters.
Many of the houses, although they stand now in mean streets, have evidently been public buildings of importance or palaces of the great people of Sospel. These houses are built of stone, have noble entries and fine windows, some of which still parade pointed arches and delicate columns. There is an old mansion of this type in the Rue St. Pierre which is still magnificent in spite of the humiliating indignities to which it has been subjected. Less ambitious houses show traces of light-hearted decoration in the form of arcading or other fanciful work in stone.
The centre of the town is the Place St. Michel, a small, irregular square with the church on one side and, elsewhere, a medley of houses built over arcades. This piazza is quite Italian in character, is rather dissolute-looking and bears many evidences of having come down in the world.
The church, which is approached by a flight of wide steps, belongs to the seventeenth century, has been judiciously restored and has a façade of no little beauty. By its side is a very ancient campanile of dingy grey stone surmounted by a curious pyramidal steeple. It has stood in this square for hundreds of vivid years and if it could tell of all that it has seen it would recount a story tragic enough. Its bells have many times clanged forth the alarm. Its watchman has often screamed from the tower that armed men were swarming down the hill. It has seen the ladies of the town, in silks and satins, step daintily across the Place on their way to Mass through a crowd of cap-doffing citizens. It has heardthe consul read out a proclamation to a sullen mob, while yells of dissent have belched forth from the dark arcades like a volley of musketry; and more lamentable than all it has seen a sinister column of smoke rise out of the square from the blaze of crackling faggots upon which shrieking heretics, bound hand and foot, were thrown like bundles of fuel.
A SQUARE IN SOSPEL.
A SQUARE IN SOSPEL.
SOSPEL: THE RUINS OF THE CONVENT.
SOSPEL: THE RUINS OF THE CONVENT.
Beyond the church, in an untidy garden, are the ruins of an old convent which still show the long colonnade of the cloisters and the windows of the upper rooms. Near by is one of the old square towers of the town, a mere shell of masonry that the sun of centuries has bleached as white as a bone. Alongside the tower runs a section of the city wall, pierced by a stone gateway with a pointed arch. This mediæval entry is very picturesque; for it serves to show how Sospel looked to the approaching traveller when it was a fortified city girt about by a great wall with many gates and many towers.
[54]“Istoria della citta de Sospello,” by S. Alberti, Torino, 1728.
[54]
“Istoria della citta de Sospello,” by S. Alberti, Torino, 1728.
[55]“Mentone,” by Dr. George Müller, London, 1910.
[55]
“Mentone,” by Dr. George Müller, London, 1910.
XLSOSPEL AND THE WILD BOAR
IT may be of some interest to state how the affairs of Sospel became involved with so curious a creature as a wild boar, and how the people of Sospel were led to have a kindly regard for this particular species of pig. In the year 1366 a respected citizen of Sospel named Guglielmo Viteola started off with his son to go to Mentone. On the way they were attacked by a gang of robbers and the lad was killed. The robbers spared Viteola because they considered that he would be of more value to them living than dead.
So they dragged him to a cave, bound him hand and foot, and left him in a doleful heap on the wet ground. They explained, with sarcastic apologies, that they must leave him for a time as they had to proceed to Mentone on urgent business; but cheered him by saying that they would look him up on their return and would then do dreadful things to him unless he made agreeable terms for his ransom. Failing a comfortable sum of money they explained that they would either leave him to starve or would cut him up in a leisurely way with knives of peculiar grossness that they showed him. With a cheerful “a rivederci” they departed.
A STREET IN SOSPEL.
A STREET IN SOSPEL.
SOSPEL: THE CITY WALL AND GATE.
SOSPEL: THE CITY WALL AND GATE.
Being in grievous pains both of body and mind Viteola began to pray to his particular saint, St. Theobald ofMondovi. (Mondovi, it may be explained, is a town some fifty miles from Sospel on the way to Turin.) Viteola had hardly finished his prayer when something or somebody rushed into the cave and fell at his feet. The darkness of the place rendered the identity of the intruder difficult. From his knowledge of natural history and possibly from his sense of smell Viteola decided that this visitor was a wild boar. The boar seemed fatigued and anxious to be quiet.
The animal’s rest was, however, soon disturbed for in a few moments five armed men burst into the cave. The cavern was becoming crowded. Odd things are often found in caves, but these new arrivals seemed very surprised at the combination of an ancient man tied up like a parcel in company with a languid boar. They requested Viteola to explain the unusual position. He did. The aged man further informed them that he had prayed to St. Theobald for help, but hardly expected that the relief would take the copious form of five men and a boar. He, at the same time, begged to be released from his bonds. This was promptly done. Whereupon the more prominent of the visitors introduced himself as the Lord of Gorbio and added that he was out hunting, that he had wounded a wild boar and had followed the animal to the cave.
The boar became extremely amiable. He may have been a little cool to the Lord of Gorbio, but towards the old man he made such demonstrations of affection as a weary boar is capable of making.
The party then proceeded to Sospel. Their arrival caused some amazement, for even in 1366 it was unusual to see a reigning prince walking down the High Streetfollowed by armed men and an esteemed citizen at whose heels a wild boar was limping like a faithful dog. The animal became a great pet, but it was probably a long time before Viteola’s wife was accustomed to the sight of a wild boar stretched out in front of the sitting-room fire.
When the robbers returned from Mentone and entered the cave with derisive cheers and coarse laughter they were surprised to find themselves seized by armed men from Gorbio and their valued citizen gone. These wicked men were, without any tedious inquiry, hanged from a tree which the chronicle states, with topographical precision, “stood by the pathway leading from Sospello to Mentone.”
XLITWO QUEER OLD TOWNS
ALUXURIANT valley of pure delight mounts inland from the sea by Mentone. It is a happy, friendly-looking valley, richly cultivated, full of orange groves and vineyards, of comfortable gardens and of merry mills. The valley ends suddenly in a vast amphitheatre of bare heights which shuts out all the world beyond. As if by a stroke of magic vegetation ceases and the green becomes grey. In the centre of the semicircle and on a steep promontory that commands the valley standsGorbio, like a monument at the end of an avenue. It is eight kilometres by road from Mentone, for the way to it twists about like a wounded snake.
It is difficult to determine what adjective should be applied to Gorbio. The guide book says that it is picturesque, but the “Concise Oxford Dictionary” defines “picturesque” as “fit to be the subject of a striking picture.” Now there is nothing about Gorbio that is fit for a striking picture. It may be fit for pieces of a picture as they lie in a toy-box as parts of a puzzle town waiting to be put together. Then a visitor told me that Gorbio was “awfully quaint”; but there is little in Gorbio to excite awe and the dictionary says that “quaint” means that which is “piquant in virtue ofunfamiliar, especially old fashioned, appearance.” This town is happily of unfamiliar appearance and is also without pretence to any fashion old or new, but yet it is not piquant, except in its smell.
It would rather be called a whimsical town, a medley, arevueof mediæval towns made up of selected fragments, an ancient mongrel of a town of involved and bewildering parentage. It is like three people all talking at once and in different languages. Those who regard a town as a place of habitation made by man, a place with streets, ordered residences, a square, a church and public buildings would maintain that Gorbio is not a town.
It begins well. It commences with an orthodox square containing a café on either side, an aged tree, a fountain, a postcard shop and a sleeping dog. All this is reassuring and in order. At one corner of the Place a few steps slope up to a gateway with a pointed arch. This also is quite a normal entry to a town. But once inside the gate everything is topsy-turvy and unexpected. You find yourself in a lane, but it is more like a passage through rocks than the high street of a town. The road at once dives under buildings and comes up in a narrow square on one side of which is an official-lookingMairie, very modern, with walls of a fashionable yellow, green sun-shutters and a flag pole. Opposite to it are some deserted houses of great age which are in a state of advanced decomposition.
A STREET IN GORBIO.
A STREET IN GORBIO.
A STREET IN GORBIO.
A STREET IN GORBIO.
You then come to a damp and dark tunnel. As there is a gleam of light at the end of it you enter and are at once seized by a smell—a smell of Augean stables. This is no “perfume wafted on the breeze”; but a smell thatcomes upon you like a shriek, grips you by the throat like a highwayman and throttles you. You rush forward to the open air and stumble among houses made up of loose rocks and superfluous doors propped up by outside stairs.
To the right are some steps climbing up through another tunnel that may be a passage in a mine. The exploring spirit urges you to mount this dark ascent. You come out into a real street with real houses and even a shop, but the street is narrow and the way is entirely occupied by a live cow. The cow is standing patiently outside a house that has white steps and a knocker and seems to be waiting for an answer to a message. It has a pleasant and motherly face, but appears, as to its body, to be of unreasonable size. As it is impossible to pass the cow without pushing it into a house you return by the tunnel to the original route. This route now takes the form of a country lane lined with boulders on which grow ferns and other plants of interest and here incontinently appears a church—a fine and ancient edifice bearing the date 1683. Beyond the church you find yourself—not in a cemetery but—on the ramparts of a fortified town and finally by the side of a quite new building of great height, clean and formal, which, at first sight, may be a barrack or a soap factory, but there are neither soldiers nor (I think) soap in Gorbio.
From this point the town becomes merely incoherent. It expresses itself in terms of delirium. There are streets that go up and down like the hump of a camel, streets that form parts of circles and streets that form parts of squares. A map of all the lanes, passages, stairs and tunnels of Gorbio would look like all the diagrams ofEuclid mixed up together. The surface of the town reproduces the undulations of the waves of the sea. A man walking before you disappears and appears again as if he walked on the ocean. The path may now be on a level with the belfry of the church and now with the main door. Indeed the church goes up and down as if it were a pier seen from the deck of a rolling ship.
It would seem as if, at one time, Gorbio had been in a plastic condition, like a town made of wax, and that it had then been ruffled by a hot and mighty wind and its streets and foundations thrown into ripples which have hardened into stone. It would also seem as if this convulsion had had the effect of mixing up the component parts of a mediæval town with more modern structures. Thrown up on the summit of Gorbio is the square tower of the old castle; but it is so fused with stables and poor dwellings that, but for its exquisite window, it might be a hayloft over a cow-house. Mule-paths are mixed up with vaulted passages and narrow lanes with cellar stairs, a prison wall with a grilled window has become the wall of a cottage, bits of a feudal fortress have been melted up with hovels, a fine arch of stone leads to a donkey-shed, the portal of a chapter house to a mean kitchen, while the hall of apalazzohas become a pen for goats. Forever above this jumble of buildings there rises, like the steam from a witches’ cauldron, the smell of a stable of so horrible a kind that not even a Hercules could cleanse it.
A STREET IN ST. AGNES.
A STREET IN ST. AGNES.
Gorbio is a town of five hundred and fifty inhabitants, placed at a height of 1,425 feet above the sea. It is a very ancient place, for Dr. Müller finds an accountof its castle as far back as the year 1002. The town has had its full share of misfortunes and horrors. It has been possessed, in turn, by the Counts of Ventimiglia, by the Genoese, by the Grimaldi and by the great family of the Lascaris. Each change of tenancy meant a more or less liberal amount of bloodshed. At one time, namely in 1257, it was the property of the beautiful Beatrix of Provence, she who was platonically beloved by the troubadour of Eze (page126). It may be sure that under the rule of this gentle lady Gorbio had at least some days of peace. It is no wonder that with all its troubles and with all the assaults it has received it has been battered out of shape and has become, in its old age, so very queer.
A ragged mule-path mounts up from Gorbio toSt. Agnes. It is very steep and its length is measured not by metres but by minutes; for if you ask how far it is to St. Agnes the answer is an hour to an hour and a half. St. Agnes as a town is not simply queer, it is frankly ridiculous. It is perched on the sharp point of a cone of precipitous rock and, from afar, looks like a brown beetle clinging to the top of a grey sugarloaf. How it came to be placed there no one can say, for a cautious eagle would hesitate to make its home at such a height. If it wanted to get away from the world it has succeeded, for it is nearly out of it. It can scarcely be said to be on the face of the earth, but rather on the tip of its nose.
There are no means of reaching St. Agnes except by a mule-path or a balloon. Nothing on wheels has ever entered the precincts of the town. Thus it happens that the most curious “sights” at St. Agnesare a piano and a great chandelier in one of the two excellent restaurants of the place. The interest inspired by these articles is not intrinsic, but is aroused by the wonder as to how they got there. The spectacle of a mule toiling up a path, as steep as a stair, with a piano on its back, followed by another mule bearing a wide-spreading chandelier and perhaps by a third laden with a wardrobe is a spectacle to marvel at.
St. Agnes is a town of about five hundred inhabitants standing at an altitude of 2,200 feet. How the people live and why they live where they do is an economic and social problem of the profoundest character, for the country just around St. Agnes is as bare as a boulder. The town itself is of the colour of sackcloth and ashes, being drab and brown. In general disposition it is very like Gorbio, being as old, as deranged and as inconsequent. There are the same arcades, the same vaulted passages, the same erratic lanes. The church resembles the church at Gorbio. It bears the date 1744 but represents a building many centuries older. High up above the town, on a point of apparently inaccessible rock, are the ruins of the castle which was, at one time, a famous Saracen stronghold. It is represented now by a few broken and jagged walls which can hardly be distinguished from the crags out of which they spring. It is needless to say that the views from St. Agnes, both towards the mountains and towards the sea, are superb.
A STREET IN ST. AGNES.
A STREET IN ST. AGNES.
The place is of great antiquity. Its early years are legendary, but from the twelfth century onwards it played a part—and no small part—in the affairs ofthe world around it. The details of its life and times differ but slightly from those of Gorbio; for the fortunes of the two queer towns were closely linked together.
To explain how St. Agnes ever came to exist it is necessary to resort to legend and to the very hackneyed subject of the princess who lost her way. The name of this particular royal lady was Agnes. She was unwisely making a tour in this barren and impossible country, when the usual terrific storm appeared with the usual result—the lady lost her way. She must have lost it badly, for she found herself near the summit of the crag upon which St. Agnes now stands. This is equivalent to a person climbing up to the dome of St. Paul’s in the hope of finding there a way that would lead to Fleet Street. The lady called upon her patron saint, St. Agnes, to guide her to shelter and was miraculously directed to a grotto near the spot where the town is now established. Hence the town and hence the name.
INDEX