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.
