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!”
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.
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 Chateau, 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 fa?ade 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.
A SQUARE IN SOSPEL.
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 medi?val 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.