Читать книгу The Riviera of the Corniche Road - Sir Frederick Treves - Страница 24

VENCE: RUE DE LA COSTE.

The side chapels are all old and beautifully decorated. One chapel contains the body of St. Veran, who died in 492. The tomb—which forms also the altar—is a Roman sarcophagus. It presents some mysterious carving which is thus described in the Vence Handbook: In the centre are the busts of a man and a young woman enclosed in a large sea-shell. Below is a bird and three naked children playing. The rest of the surface is occupied by the waves of the sea. It may be conjectured that it was the last resting-place of a lover of the sea, who would wish to sleep with the waves about him, with a bird in the blue and with children at play on the sand. The high altar is of marble of many colours and the tabernacle is surmounted by angels’ heads in white. By the altar are the tombs of the Villeneuves, the Lords of Vence.

The west end of the church presents a very large gallery or tribune, which was placed there at the close of the fifteenth century. Here are the famous choir stalls which were transferred from the choir at the same period. These stalls, fifty-one in number, are of dark oak and are most elaborately wrought. Besides much architectural detail there are innumerable carvings of animals and plants, of human figures and of vague incidents. Some details, as the writer of the Handbook says, are serious, others are amusing, and a few are not “très convenables.” These exquisite stalls were the work of Jacques Bellot of Grasse. He commenced the work, according to Mr. Kaye,^[14] in 1455, when he was twenty-five years of age, and completed it in 1495. He was, therefore, twenty-five when the work began and sixty-five when it was finished.

In this gallery also is a very fine lectern, which is claimed to be even an earlier work than the stalls. In one of the chapels of the church (the Chapelle des Saints-Anges) is the wondrously carved door of the prévôté or chapter house. This work is older than the stalls and is generally ascribed to the artist who fashioned the lectern. Certain Roman figures or statuettes are to be found in the church, one let into the pillar before the chapel of St. Veran, and another, that of a senator, in the wall between this chapel and that of the Sacred Heart.

Behind the church is a poor, distracted-looking square, once the cemetery, now the Place Godeau. It is shaded by three large chestnut trees and contains some ancient houses, one notably with a two-arched Romanesque window and another with the date 1524 carved above the doorway. In the centre is a disconsolate column of bluish granite to which is ignominiously fixed a brass water-tap. This column seems to have wandered from some museum and to have lost both its way and its label. There are those who affirm that it was a gift of the Phocæans to the ancient town, others that it came from the temple of Mars; while those who range less far believe it to be a Roman boundary stone or borne. From this Place can be seen the great watch tower of Vence, often called the tower of the castle. It is square and very severely plain, and contains the belfry and a too modern clock. The tower belongs to the fifteenth century, or to even an earlier period. From this square can also be seen a little lancet window of the church which is perhaps the oldest of its present lights.

The town of old Vence is small and cramped. Around the church, crushed in between it and the city wall, is a maze of small streets. They still maintain the lines they followed long before the day when—in England—Elizabeth was queen. They are narrow, of course, and dark and crowded with houses of great age, houses of such antiquity that no modern mask can hide the hollow eyes or the shrunken cheeks. There are among them handsome windows and fine entries, good mason’s work and some decoration pitiable in its playfulness.

The place is almost empty. Certain houses are deserted; a few are ruinous, and in these the black, blank windows glare like the eye-sockets of a skull. Many show the tottering deformities of age and have become crippled, wizened and bent.

This almost silent city once held seven thousand people. Its streets were then crowded, full of life and colour, of fair women and stalwart men. The wayfarer would need squeeze himself into a doorway to allow the lady in a litter to pass by, or to make room for a company of young gallants rollicking along arm in arm, or for the wedding party on its way to the cathedral close. The place is now hushed like a house of mourning, while in many a lane there may be no one to be seen.

He who strolls alone through the city of Vence may find himself carried back into the past by some nightmare witchery, and imagine that he wanders in a strange country, amid the scenes of a half-forgotten tale. There is about the streets the faint, musty smell that clings to the leaves of an ancient missal or that hovers about the worm-eaten chest stuffed with lumber. To read the life of the town as it was in earlier times is like the turning over of a bundle of old letters that are fragmentary and partly illegible, that are strange in both the wording and the script, but that show now and then a sudden light that illumines the figure of a man or a woman who stands out amidst the gloom—alive.

[13]	“Vence,” by J. D., sold for the benefit of the Church and published at Vence in 1914. It is referred to in the text as “The Vence Handbook.”

[14]	“Grasse and its Vicinity,” by Walter J. Kaye, 1912.