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.
