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 mediæval 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 château possesses a ceiling painted by Carlone in the seventeenth century. The fresco represents the Fall of Phæton. 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 Phæton 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.