roof of tiles and a bell gable that lacks a bell. Over the door is the
date 1712. The church is locked; but so far as can be judged from the
outer walls it has escaped damage. The “pointed campanile,” however,
which is described and figured in older accounts is now no longer to be
seen. At the end of the street, on the point that looks towards Sospel,
are the ruins of the castle. Only some vaults and some crumbling walls
remain; but a gateway of stone with a pointed arch still stands unmoved
amidst the chaos of destruction. Many houses are little more than a
shell of bricks, but the greater number seem to have suffered little.
They are closed. The doors, the window frames and the sun-shutters are
grey, because in thirty-three years every trace of paint has vanished.
Many of the windows are still glazed.
To one house clings a precarious balcony of wood with half of its rail
intact. A few of the dwellings are doorless and it is possible to mount
stairs laden with débris, to enter rooms which seem to have been but
recently left and to climb down into hollow chambers echoing with
mystery and suspicion. One front door has a slit for letters—open as if
awaiting the postman. It is a trivial feature and yet it seems the most
pitiable mockery in the whole of this street of dead things.
[Illustration: 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.
XXXIX
SOSPEL
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.
[Illustration: 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 its place 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 two
_monti 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. The people 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!”
[Illustration: 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 the centre 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
realised that so many buckets are required to satisfy the needs of a
modern community.
[Illustration: 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 that _will_ run 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 the Rue 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 heard
the 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.
[Illustration: A SQUARE IN SOSPEL.]
[Illustration: 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.
[55] “Mentone,” by Dr. George Müller, London, 1910.
XL
SOSPEL 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.
[Illustration: A STREET IN SOSPEL.]
[Illustration: 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 of Mondovi. (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 Street followed 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.”
XLI
TWO QUEER OLD TOWNS
A LUXURIANT 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 stands
Gorbio, 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 of unfamiliar, 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, a _revue_ of
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-looking _Mairie_, 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.
[Illustration: A STREET IN GORBIO.]
[Illustration: 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
that comes 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 of Euclid 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 a _palazzo_ has 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.
[Illustration: 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 account of 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 (page 126). 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.