Chapter XLI: Two Queer Old Towns

A LUXURIANT valley of pure delight mounts inland from the sea by Mentone. It is a happy, friendly-looking valley, richly cultivated, full of orange groves and vineyards, of comfortable gardens and of merry mills. The valley ends suddenly in a vast amphitheatre of bare heights which shuts out all the world beyond. As if by a stroke of magic vegetation ceases and the green becomes grey. In the centre of the semicircle and on a steep promontory that commands the valley stands Gorbio, like a monument at the end of an avenue. It is eight kilometres by road from Mentone, for the way to it twists about like a wounded snake.

It is difficult to determine what adjective should be applied to Gorbio. The guide book says that it is picturesque, but the “Concise Oxford Dictionary” defines “picturesque” as “fit to be the subject of a striking picture.” Now there is nothing about Gorbio that is fit for a striking picture. It may be fit for pieces of a picture as they lie in a toy-box as parts of a puzzle town waiting to be put together. Then a visitor told me that Gorbio was “awfully quaint”; but there is little in Gorbio to excite awe and the dictionary says that “quaint” means that which is “piquant in virtue of unfamiliar, especially old fashioned, appearance.” This town is happily of unfamiliar appearance and is also without pretence to any fashion old or new, but yet it is not piquant, except in its smell.

It would rather be called a whimsical town, a medley, a _revue_ of mediæval towns made up of selected fragments, an ancient mongrel of a town of involved and bewildering parentage. It is like three people all talking at once and in different languages. Those who regard a town as a place of habitation made by man, a place with streets, ordered residences, a square, a church and public buildings would maintain that Gorbio is not a town.

It begins well. It commences with an orthodox square containing a café on either side, an aged tree, a fountain, a postcard shop and a sleeping dog. All this is reassuring and in order. At one corner of the Place a few steps slope up to a gateway with a pointed arch. This also is quite a normal entry to a town. But once inside the gate everything is topsy-turvy and unexpected. You find yourself in a lane, but it is more like a passage through rocks than the high street of a town. The road at once dives under buildings and comes up in a narrow square on one side of which is an official-looking _Mairie_, very modern, with walls of a fashionable yellow, green sun-shutters and a flag pole. Opposite to it are some deserted houses of great age which are in a state of advanced decomposition.

You then come to a damp and dark tunnel. As there is a gleam of light at the end of it you enter and are at once seized by a smell—a smell of Augean stables. This is no “perfume wafted on the breeze”; but a smell that comes upon you like a shriek, grips you by the throat like a highwayman and throttles you. You rush forward to the open air and stumble among houses made up of loose rocks and superfluous doors propped up by outside stairs.

To the right are some steps climbing up through another tunnel that may be a passage in a mine. The exploring spirit urges you to mount this dark ascent. You come out into a real street with real houses and even a shop, but the street is narrow and the way is entirely occupied by a live cow. The cow is standing patiently outside a house that has white steps and a knocker and seems to be waiting for an answer to a message. It has a pleasant and motherly face, but appears, as to its body, to be of unreasonable size. As it is impossible to pass the cow without pushing it into a house you return by the tunnel to the original route. This route now takes the form of a country lane lined with boulders on which grow ferns and other plants of interest and here incontinently appears a church—a fine and ancient edifice bearing the date 1683. Beyond the church you find yourself—not in a cemetery but—on the ramparts of a fortified town and finally by the side of a quite new building of great height, clean and formal, which, at first sight, may be a barrack or a soap factory, but there are neither soldiers nor (I think) soap in Gorbio.

From this point the town becomes merely incoherent. It expresses itself in terms of delirium. There are streets that go up and down like the hump of a camel, streets that form parts of circles and streets that form parts of squares. A map of all the lanes, passages, stairs and tunnels of Gorbio would look like all the diagrams of Euclid mixed up together. The surface of the town reproduces the undulations of the waves of the sea. A man walking before you disappears and appears again as if he walked on the ocean. The path may now be on a level with the belfry of the church and now with the main door. Indeed the church goes up and down as if it were a pier seen from the deck of a rolling ship.

It would seem as if, at one time, Gorbio had been in a plastic condition, like a town made of wax, and that it had then been ruffled by a hot and mighty wind and its streets and foundations thrown into ripples which have hardened into stone. It would also seem as if this convulsion had had the effect of mixing up the component parts of a mediæval town with more modern structures. Thrown up on the summit of Gorbio is the square tower of the old castle; but it is so fused with stables and poor dwellings that, but for its exquisite window, it might be a hayloft over a cow-house. Mule-paths are mixed up with vaulted passages and narrow lanes with cellar stairs, a prison wall with a grilled window has become the wall of a cottage, bits of a feudal fortress have been melted up with hovels, a fine arch of stone leads to a donkey-shed, the portal of a chapter house to a mean kitchen, while the hall of a _palazzo_ has become a pen for goats. Forever above this jumble of buildings there rises, like the steam from a witches’ cauldron, the smell of a stable of so horrible a kind that not even a Hercules could cleanse it.

Gorbio is a town of five hundred and fifty inhabitants, placed at a height of 1,425 feet above the sea. It is a very ancient place, for Dr. Müller finds an account of its castle as far back as the year 1002. The town has had its full share of misfortunes and horrors. It has been possessed, in turn, by the Counts of Ventimiglia, by the Genoese, by the Grimaldi and by the great family of the Lascaris. Each change of tenancy meant a more or less liberal amount of bloodshed. At one time, namely in 1257, it was the property of the beautiful Beatrix of Provence, she who was platonically beloved by the troubadour of Eze (page 126). It may be sure that under the rule of this gentle lady Gorbio had at least some days of peace. It is no wonder that with all its troubles and with all the assaults it has received it has been battered out of shape and has become, in its old age, so very queer.

A ragged mule-path mounts up from Gorbio to St. Agnes. It is very steep and its length is measured not by metres but by minutes; for if you ask how far it is to St. Agnes the answer is an hour to an hour and a half. St. Agnes as a town is not simply queer, it is frankly ridiculous. It is perched on the sharp point of a cone of precipitous rock and, from afar, looks like a brown beetle clinging to the top of a grey sugarloaf. How it came to be placed there no one can say, for a cautious eagle would hesitate to make its home at such a height. If it wanted to get away from the world it has succeeded, for it is nearly out of it. It can scarcely be said to be on the face of the earth, but rather on the tip of its nose.

There are no means of reaching St. Agnes except by a mule-path or a balloon. Nothing on wheels has ever entered the precincts of the town. Thus it happens that the most curious “sights” at St. Agnes are a piano and a great chandelier in one of the two excellent restaurants of the place. The interest inspired by these articles is not intrinsic, but is aroused by the wonder as to how they got there. The spectacle of a mule toiling up a path, as steep as a stair, with a piano on its back, followed by another mule bearing a wide-spreading chandelier and perhaps by a third laden with a wardrobe is a spectacle to marvel at.

St. Agnes is a town of about five hundred inhabitants standing at an altitude of 2,200 feet. How the people live and why they live where they do is an economic and social problem of the profoundest character, for the country just around St. Agnes is as bare as a boulder. The town itself is of the colour of sackcloth and ashes, being drab and brown. In general disposition it is very like Gorbio, being as old, as deranged and as inconsequent. There are the same arcades, the same vaulted passages, the same erratic lanes. The church resembles the church at Gorbio. It bears the date 1744 but represents a building many centuries older. High up above the town, on a point of apparently inaccessible rock, are the ruins of the castle which was, at one time, a famous Saracen stronghold. It is represented now by a few broken and jagged walls which can hardly be distinguished from the crags out of which they spring. It is needless to say that the views from St. Agnes, both towards the mountains and towards the sea, are superb.

The place is of great antiquity. Its early years are legendary, but from the twelfth century onwards it played a part—and no small part—in the affairs of the world around it. The details of its life and times differ but slightly from those of Gorbio; for the fortunes of the two queer towns were closely linked together.

To explain how St. Agnes ever came to exist it is necessary to resort to legend and to the very hackneyed subject of the princess who lost her way. The name of this particular royal lady was Agnes. She was unwisely making a tour in this barren and impossible country, when the usual terrific storm appeared with the usual result—the lady lost her way. She must have lost it badly, for she found herself near the summit of the crag upon which St. Agnes now stands. This is equivalent to a person climbing up to the dome of St. Paul’s in the hope of finding there a way that would lead to Fleet Street. The lady called upon her patron saint, St. Agnes, to guide her to shelter and was miraculously directed to a grotto near the spot where the town is now established. Hence the town and hence the name.

INDEX

A

“A Winter at Mentone,” 271, 282

Agel, Mont, 13, 112, 194, 204, 209, 269

Alban, Mont, Fort on, 113

Alberti, S., “Istoria della citta de Sospello,” 287

Alps, view of, from La Grande Corniche, 13

Amadeus of Savoy, Eze sold to, 120

Amilheta de Baus, 125

“Annals,” by John Stowe, 121

Anne of Orleans pays homage to “Our Lady of Laghet,” 233

Antoin, Prince, builds fort at Monaco, 169

Arabs (_see_ Saracens)

“Architecture of Provence,” by MacGibbon, 100

Arles, burial place of St. Trophime at, 51
Roman road to, 36, 194, 208, 279
Saracens at, 4

Augustus Cæsar at Monaco, 143, 144
monument at La Turbie, erected by, 194, 206, 214 _et seq._, 227, 260

“Aurelian Way” (_see_ Via Aureliana)

Avignon, sold by Queen Jeanne to the Pope, 87
trial of Queen Jeanne at, 86

Aymes, Count (Prince of Narbonne), story of, 221, 222

B

Balbo, Pierre, of Ventimiglia, purchase of Castillon by, 283

Baller, John, “Historical Particulars Relative to Southampton,” 121

Baoussé-Roussé, the, Mentone, Barma-Grande Cave at, 278
prehistoric caves at, 274 _et seq._

Barbarossa, Hariadan (Redbeard), attack on Eze by, 127, 128, 130, 131, 137
siege of Nice and, 28, 30, 127

Barbary pirates at Nice, 20

“Barbet,” history of term, 262

Barcelona, sacked by Carlo I, 166

Baring-Gould, S. “Riviera,” 34

“Bastard of Gorbio,” and betrayal of Eze, 129
attempt to betray La Turbie by, 133
capture and death of, 133

Bautucan, pre-historic camp of, 259

Beatrix of Provence, and Gorbio, 301

Beatrix of Savoy, marriage and children of, 126
story of, 80 _et seq._

Beaulieu, 112

Bellaudière, Bellaud de la, memorial tablet to, at Grasse, 75

Bellegarde, de, and Bellanda Tower, Nice, 23

Bellot, Jacques (of Grasse), carvings by, at Vence, 64

Beranger (IV), Raymond, and troubadours of Eze, 123, 126
story of, 80 _et seq._
war against Riviera towns by, 125

Beranger-Feraud, “Contes Populaires des Provençaux,” by, 80

Bevera River, 289

Blacas, troubadour of Eze, 122 _et seq._, 141
marriage of, 125

Blacasette, troubadour of Eze, story of, 123 _et seq._

“Black Death” at Vence, 56

Bonaparte, Princess Pauline, at Grasse, 72, 73

Bordighera, Via Aureliana at, 208
as seen from La Turbie, 216

Borghese, Prince, 73

Boron, Mont, 31

Bosio, Urbain, “La Province des Alpes Maritimes,” 21, 22, 254
“Le Vieux Monaco,” 154, 155, 157, 158, 262

Bouche, Honoré, “La Chorographie et l’Histoire de Provence,” by, 51

Bréa, General, House of, at Mentone, 270

Bréa, Ludovici, paintings by, at Cimiez, 39

Briançon and Louise de Cabris, 88, 89
quarrel with Mirabeau, 95

Brignole, Marchesa di, at reception of her daughter at Monaco, 183

Brignole, Maria Caterina, marriage with Honorius III of Monaco, 181 _et
seq._
marriage with Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, 186

Burgundians, invasion of Riviera by, 3