The church, which is approached by a flight of wide steps, belongs to the seventeenth century, has been judiciously restored and has a façade of no little beauty. By its side is a very ancient campanile of dingy grey stone surmounted by a curious pyramidal steeple. It has stood in this square for hundreds of vivid years and if it could tell of all that it has seen it would recount a story tragic enough. Its bells have many times clanged forth the alarm. Its watchman has often screamed from the tower that armed men were swarming down the hill. It has seen the ladies of the town, in silks and satins, step daintily across the Place on their way to Mass through a crowd of cap-doffing citizens. It has heard the consul read out a proclamation to a sullen mob, while yells of dissent have belched forth from the dark arcades like a volley of musketry; and more lamentable than all it has seen a sinister column of smoke rise out of the square from the blaze of crackling faggots upon which shrieking heretics, bound hand and foot, were thrown like bundles of fuel. [Illustration: A SQUARE IN SOSPEL.] [Illustration: SOSPEL: THE RUINS OF THE CONVENT.] Beyond the church, in an untidy garden, are the ruins of an old convent which still show the long colonnade of the cloisters and the windows of the upper rooms. Near by is one of the old square towers of the town, a mere shell of masonry that the sun of centuries has bleached as white as a bone. Alongside the tower runs a section of the city wall, pierced by a stone gateway with a pointed arch. This mediæval entry is very picturesque; for it serves to show how Sospel looked to the approaching traveller when it was a fortified city girt about by a great wall with many gates and many towers. ----- [54] “Istoria della citta de Sospello,” by S. Alberti, Torino, 1728. [55] “Mentone,” by Dr. George Müller, London, 1910. XL SOSPEL AND THE WILD BOAR IT may be of some interest to state how the affairs of Sospel became involved with so curious a creature as a wild boar, and how the people of Sospel were led to have a kindly regard for this particular species of pig. In the year 1366 a respected citizen of Sospel named Guglielmo Viteola started off with his son to go to Mentone. On the way they were attacked by a gang of robbers and the lad was killed. The robbers spared Viteola because they considered that he would be of more value to them living than dead.