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. X GRASSE GRASSE lies on a green slope at the foot of sheltering hills and in full view of the sea. From its height of one thousand feet a glorious stretch of undulating country sweeps down to the Mediterranean, some seven or eight miles to the south. The position of the town is suggestive of great ease. It is comparable to that of a man stretched out on a bank in the sun, with his hands under his head, his hat tilted over his eyes and with a rock behind him to ward away unkindly winds. It is a gentle and contented place, quiet and yet busy in its own peculiar way.