Riviera Towns. Herbert Adams Gibbons

near the little ball. Had the older men been the only group, I should have got the idea that jeu aux boules is a game where the skill is all in cautious playing. But there were young chasseurs alpins, home on leave from the front, who were playing the game in an entirely different way. Instead of making each throw as if the destinies of the world were at stake, the soldiers played fast and vigorously, aiming rather to knock the opponent's ball away from a coveted position near the goal than to reach the goal. The older men's balls, to the number of a couple of dozen, clustered around the goal at the end of a round. Careful marking, by cane-lengths, shoe-lengths and handkerchief-lengths preceded agreement as to the winner. At the end of a round of the chasseurs alpins, two or three balls remained: the rest had gone wide of the mark, or had been knocked many feet from the original landing-place by a successor's throw. During half an hour I did not see the young men measure once. The winning throw was every time unmistakable.

      The Artist leaned against the château wall, putting it down. The thought of Mademoiselle Simone, playing the organ, came to me. How was the music going? I must not miss that service. The view and the château and the jeu aux boules no longer held me. Down the steps I went, and entered the first of the church doors. It was on the upper level, and took me into the gallery; I was surprised to find so large a church. One got no idea of its size from the outside.

      The daylight was all from above. Although only mid-afternoon, altar and chancel candles made a true vesper atmosphere, and the flickering wicks in the hanging lamps gave starlight. This is as it should be. The appeal of a ritualistic service is to the mystical in one's nature. Jewels and embroideries, gold and silver, gorgeous robes, rich decorations, pomp and splendor repel in broad daylight; candles and lamps sputter futilely; incense nauseates: for the still small voice is stifled, and the kingdom is of this world. But in the twilight, what skeptic, what Puritan resists the call to worship of the Catholic ritual? I had come in time for the intercessory visit to the stations of the cross. Priest and acolytes were following the crucifix from the chancel. Banners waved. Before each station the procession stopped, the priest and acolytes knelt solemnly (with bowed heads) and prayers were said. While the procession was passing from station to station, the girls sang their hymn in French. It was the age old pageantry of the Catholic church, a pageantry that perhaps indicates an age old temperamental difference between the Latin and the Anglo Saxon.

      When the service was over, I went around to the door under the tower. Of course, it was to meet the abbé. Still, when I realize that I had missed the organist, I was disappointed. The abbé soon appeared from the sacristy. I gave one more look around for Mademoiselle Simone while he was explaining that he had just twenty minutes before it was necessary to start down to the other church, but that it was long enough to take me through the Moorish quarter. Although I had come to Cagnes to see the old town, and to get into the atmosphere of past centuries, I must confess that I followed him regretfully.

      The houses of the Moorish quarter are built into the ancient city walls. Baked earth, mixed with straw and studded with cobblestones, has defied eight centuries. There are no streets wide enough for carts, for they hark back to the days when donkeys were common carriers. And in hill-towns the progressive knowledge of centuries has evolved no better means of transport. You pass through ruelles where outstretched hands can touch the houses on each side. Often the ruelle is like a tunnel, for the houses are built right over it on arches, and it is so dark that you cannot see in front of you. The abbé assured me that there were house doors all along as in any other passage. People must know by instinct where to turn in to their houses.

      When the abbé left me to go to his lower vesper service, after having piloted me back to the main streets, I decided to go up again to the place to rejoin the Artist. But under an old buttonwood tree, which almost poked its upper branches into the château windows, stood Mademoiselle Simone, waving good-by to another girl who was disappearing around the corner of a street above. Her aunt, she declared, was waiting for her at a villa half-way down the hill, at five. Just then five struck in the clock-tower behind us.

      "Had you looked up before you spoke?" I asked.

      "Clocks do strike conveniently," she answered.

      Although Mademoiselle Simone repulsed firmly my plea that she become my guide through the other side of the town, where two outlying quarters, the abbé had said, contained the best of all in old houses, queer streets and an ivy-covered ruin of a chapel, she lingered to talk under the buttonwood tree of many things that had nothing to do with Cagnes. When I tried to persuade her to show me what I had not yet seen, on the ground that I had made the climb up to the top because of my interest in hill cities and wanted to write about Cagnes, she immediately answered that she would not detain me for the world and made a move to keep her rendezvous with the aunt. So I hastened to contradict myself, and assure her that I had no interest whatever in Cagnes, that I was stuck here waiting for the Artist, who would come only with the fading light.

      After Mademoiselle Simone left me under the buttonwood tree, I thought of the Artist. He had finished and was smoking over a glass of vermouth at one of the tables by the parapet of the place.

      "Great town," he said. "Bully stuff here. In buildings and villagers have you found anything as fascinating as that purple and red on the mountain snow over there? It just gets the last sun, the very last."

      "Yes," I answered, "but neither in a building or a villager of Cagnes. There is a Parisienne—" And I told him about Mademoiselle Simone. He was silent, and his fingers drummed upon the table, tipity-tap, tipity-tap. "Show me your sketches," I asked.

      "No," he said scathingly. "No! You are not interested in sketches. Nor should I have been, had you been more generous. You had the luck in Cagnes."

      The prospect of a trout dinner at Villeneuve-Loubet took us rapidly down the hill. We soon passed out of the fifteenth century into the twentieth. Modern Cagnes, with its clang of tramway gong, toot of locomotive whistle, honk-honk of motor horn, café terraces crowded with Sunday afternooners, broad sidewalks and electric lights was another world. But it was our world—and Mademoiselle Simone's. That is why coming back into it from the hill of Cagnes was really like a cold shower. For a sense of refreshment followed immediately the shock—and stayed with us.

      The hill of Cagnes we could rave about enthusiastically because we did not have to go back there and live there. It will be "a precious memory," as tourists say, precisely because it is a memory. The bird in a cage is less of a prisoner than we city folk of the modern world. For when you open the cage door, the bird will fly away and not come back. We may fly away—but we do come back, and the sooner the better. We love our prisons. We are happy (or think we are, which is the same thing) in our chains. And in the brief time that we are a-wing, do we really love unusual sights and novel things? In exploring, is not our greatest joy and delight in finding something familiar, something we have already known, something we are used to? An appreciative lover and frequenter of grand opera once said to me, "'The Barber of Seville' is my favorite, because I know I am going to have the treat of 'The Suwanee River' or 'Annie Laurie' when I go to it." There is an honest confession, such as we must all make if we are to do our souls good.