It is an odd town in the sense that it is made up of odd fragments. There are no two things alike in Cagnes, nothing that matches. It is indeed a pile of very miscellaneous houses inclined to set themselves askew like the parts of a cubist picture. Mixed up with dwellings, notable by their contrariness and their obvious revolt against all that is conventional in the shape and arrangements of a house, are portions of old ramparts, a ruined sentry tower and a gate that has got astray from its connections. There is a church too that is apparently out of drawing, that has a lane burrowing under its tower and that has become wedged in among bits of a town on a precarious slope. It looks like a very decrepit sick person who has slipped down in bed. Curious chimneys (some of which are wonderful to see) form conspicuous features of the dwellings of Cagnes. There are houses that seem to have rather overdone their efforts to be picturesque; as well as others that have carried their determination to be simple to excess. Of the super-simple house the old Maison commune affords a good example.
Cagnes is a quiet town with a total absence of traffic in its streets. Indeed as if to show that the highway is not intended for traffic an old lady has seated herself in the centre of the main road to knit, finding, no doubt, the light better in that position than in a house. The sudden way in which lanes drop headlong down the hill, to the right and to the left, is quite disturbing. It is a place of pitfalls and hazardous stairs that must be very trying to the village drunkard.
The centre of Cagnes—its Place de la Concorde—is a peasant-like little place, humble and very still, called the Place Grimaldi. It is made green by a line of acacia trees and is bounded on one side by a row of modest houses, ranged, shoulder to shoulder, like a company in grey. The buildings at the principal end are supported upon arches with sturdy old pillars which give the spot an air of mystery. On the other side of the square a double flight of stairs mounts pompously to the castle. The square is approached by a lane which, to add to the fantastic character of the Place, pops out unexpectedly through the base of the church tower.
CAGNES: THE TOWN GATE.
There was a time, long ago, when life in Cagnes was very gay and when, indeed, Cagnes’ society was so lively and so exuberant as to bring down upon the inhabitants a crushing reproof from the bishop of Vence. The reprimand was conveyed to the young men and women of Cagnes in a message of great harshness in which were unfeeling references to the pains of hell. This was in 1678. It appeared that the people of Cagnes had passion for dancing, a passion almost as uncontrolled as the craze of the present day. They danced in the streets, the bishop stated. As there are no level streets in Cagnes it is probable that the Place Grimaldi was the scene of this display of depravity. The young people seem to have favoured a kind of medi?val tango, for the bishop said some very unpleasant things to the ladies of Cagnes about their “indelicate postures and embraces.” As to the male dancers they are described as “forcenés”; so they may be assumed to have introduced into these street dances some of the violence and surprises of the madhouse.
The dancing took place, of course, principally on a Sunday and the dancers excused themselves to the bishop by saying that the church was so exceedingly dirty that they did not care to enter it and, therefore, there was nothing for them to do on the Sabbath but either to sit in the shade and yawn or to dance in the streets.
The bishop, who was clearly very “down upon” Cagnes, was severe too on the subject of the ladies’ dress, or rather lack of dress. He especially found fault with the low-necked costume and affirmed that women had been seen in church “with bare throats and chests and without even a kerchief or scarf to veil them.” It would be interesting to know what the bishop of Vence would say about the low-necked dress of to-day, which is carried down to the diaphragm in front and to the base of the spinal column behind.
The castle of Cagnes stands at the top of the town on a wide platform from which can be obtained a view of the sea, on the one hand, and of the snow-covered mountains on the other. This is a castle of the great Grimaldi family. It dates, Mr. MacGibbon[22] says, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is claimed to be the finest specimen of a medi?val stronghold in this part of France. It is simply a vast, square keep, as solid as a cliff and as grim as a prison. It is heavily machicolated below the parapet. It is frankly ugly, brutal and repellent, an embodiment of frightfulness, a frown in stone.
It is said that the great hall of the chateau possesses a ceiling painted by Carlone in the seventeenth century. The fresco represents the Fall of Ph?ton. The present state of this work of art is doubtful, for in 1815 the castle was occupied by Piedmontese soldiers who, lolling on sofas and divans, amused themselves by firing at the head of Ph?ton and apparently with some success.
The castle has, however, been disfigured in such a way as to render it pitiable and ridiculous. At some period huge modern windows have been cut in its fearsome walls. These windows, brazen and aggressive, have all the assurance of the windows of a pushing boarding house and to sustain that character are furnished with sun-shutters and lace curtains. The worst phase of this outrage is the cutting away of some of the glorious machicolations in order to make room for the blatant plate glass. This superb old castle, in its present plight, can only be compared to the figure of a sun-tanned and scarred veteran with a helmet on his grey head and a halberd in his hand and on his breast, in the place of the steel cuirass, a parlourmaid’s pinafore trimmed with lace.
CAGNES: THE PLACE GRIMALDI.
CAGNES: THE CASTLE.
St. Paul du Var, on the way between Cagnes and Vence, affords a vivid realisation of the fortified town of the middle ages. It is but little altered and that only on the surface. Its fortifications, laid down in 1547, are still quite complete. Its circle of ramparts is unbroken. There are still the old gates, the towers, the bastions and the barbicans. The path along the parapet that the sentry patrolled is undisturbed. One almost expects to hear his challenge for the password. The town is as ready to withstand the attack of an army of bowmen or of halberdiers as it ever was. It might even defy cannon if they were as small and as weak as the old piece of ordnance that still occupies the battery by the main gate.
The streets are disposed as they were in the days of the leathern jerkin and the farthingale. There are more houses of obvious antiquity in the place than will be seen in any town of its size in Provence. The hand of improvement has of course passed clumsily over them. Whitewash can wipe out the past and it has done much in this way in St. Paul. If the stone wall of a house has become too rugged and worn it can be covered up with plaster and paint. If the balcony crumbles away its balustrade can be used in the fowl-house and can be replaced by something in cheap iron from a shop in Nice. When the stone chimney falls down a tin stovepipe can fill the void. If the Gothic window be too small it is easy to make a fine square opening that will take lace curtains and be worthy of Bermondsey, and when the oak door, whose black nails have been fumbled over by ten generations of boys and girls, has become shabby a door of deal, painted green and varnished and provided with a brass knocker will make the whole town envious. Still, in spite of all these sorry evidences of advance with the times, the town of St. Paul remains a rare relic worthy (if it were possible) to be placed bodily in a museum, for it is a museum specimen.
The visitor enters the town through the vaulted passage of the main gate and then makes his way by the inner guard and under a tower, with a channel for the portcullis, into the town. It is a rather terrifying entry that belongs to the old days of romance. A gateway that the reader of heroic tales has passed through, in imagination, many a time. It should be held with flashing swords by such men as the Three Musketeers, by Athos, Porthos and Aramis, but at the moment it is obstructed only by an aged woman with a perverse and overburdened donkey.
The town is quiet and clean, full of picturesque lanes, of quaint corners and of odd passages. As it was at one time a favourite resort of the nobles of the country and at all times a place of much dignity it contains still many houses with handsome stone staircases and elaborate chimney-pieces; while over door after door will be found carved the armorial bearings of old world tenants. The dates above many entries go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of the old wooden doors still standing are most beautiful, while examples of ancient windows and of ancient archways are very numerous.
In St. Paul du Var will be seen, in almost every street, examples of the little shop of the Middle Ages. Under a wide arch or in a square opening will be found a door approached by a step and by the door a window. The window only reaches to the level of the middle of the door. It there ends in a stone counter upon which the goods for sale were displayed. The window (which is, of course, not glazed) is closed by a shutter. Both shutter and door are usually studded with heavy nails. These curious little establishments are no longer used as shops, but through them the dwelling is still entered.
ST. PAUL DU VAR.
ST. PAUL DU VAR: THE ENTRY.
ST. PAUL DU VAR: THE MAIN GATE.
On the summit of the town is the church and, close to it, two great, square towers of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. The taller of these is the belfry of the church, while the more sturdy is the tower of the town. They are both severely plain and fine specimens of the period to which they belong.
The church dates from the same era as the towers and is—as regards its interior—one of the most beautiful churches in Provence and certainly one of the most interesting. Among its notable features are certain altar screens of exquisitely carved wood which date from between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The chapel of St. Clement the Martyr, completed in 1680, is a magnificent work of art, full of details of great merit. It is classed as a national monument. On the north side of the church is a bust of Saint Claire, carved in wood, a work of the sixteenth century. It represents the head of a young woman with a singularly beautiful and pathetic face. It is a haunting face, for whenever the church of St. Paul is recalled to mind this face at once comes back among the shadows of its aisles.
There is in the sacristy a collection of treasures which has made the church famous throughout France. It includes marvellous crucifixes in silver, silver statuettes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a tabernacle portatif and numerous old reliquaries, one of which—very curious in shape—contains the shoulder-bone of St. George.
[22]
“Architecture of Provence,” 1888.