Possibly the most terrible calamity that befell Sospel was through the visitations of the plague. The most disastrous of these visits was in the year 1688. The people died as if the very air were poisoned. The streets were deserted; the shops were closed. Those who knelt in the church to pray could hear above their cries to heaven the thud of the mattock and the spade in the graveyard near at hand. It seemed as if Sospel was to be left desolate and that in a few dire weeks the river would be babbling seawards through a lifeless town. The elders of the city met and resolved that all the inhabitants of the place, those whom the Terror as yet had spared, should make a pilgrimage to Laghet to confess their sins and implore the Madonna to intercede with heaven on their behalf. At sunrise one pleasant day in July the procession formed up outside the walls and started on its penitential march. It was a hard journey and very pitiable. The distance was great; for even as the bird flies it is no less than ten miles from Sospel to Laghet. There was no road to follow, only a rough path that struggled over hills and vales, over rocks and stony slopes. The poor distracted company would climb first to Castillon, thence probably to Gorbio, then on to La Turbie and so to Laghet. It would be an arduous journey for a sturdy man, but for these panic-stricken folk it was as cruel a passage as the most relentless could devise. In front of the column would walk the priests clad in white and bearing a cross. Then would come the great officers of the city with the nobles of Sospel, then the soldiers and after them the people of the town. Along the length of the column would break forth, again and again, the cry, “In the name of God on to Laghet!” [Illustration: SOSPEL: THE RIVER FRONT.] There would be old and young in the crowd, boys clinging to their mothers’ gowns, girls perched on their fathers’ shoulders and pleased for a while with the unwonted ride. The buxom maid would give an arm to her grandfather, the young husband a hand to his faltering wife. There would be some on mules and some on donkeys and at the wavering end of the procession would stumble the stragglers who were failing with every step. Not a few would be smitten with death as they walked, would drop out of the throng and roll among the brambles by the way. None could linger behind to bear them company, for still the cry would ring forth along the line, “In the name of God on to Laghet!” Think then of the town left behind! Silent but for the heartless chatter of the stream, empty save for the very old, the very weak, the dying and the dead.