Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/222

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174
THE RIVIERA

a crucifix, bathed in golden sunlight. Below, where it can root itself, is flowering laurestinus.

Farther up, after a succession of magnificent scenes, one drops upon a little house, where trout can be eaten, lying behind a waterfall; and to assist the visitor in reaching it, the proprietor runs out with a big umbrella to protect him from the torrent dissolved into rain. Further up the ravine come other and finer leaps of water, the main stream of the Loup, in maddest gambol of youth; and over all flash out gleams of the eternal snows.

Le Bar has a painting in the church, representing a Dance Macabre; it is, like all other such dances, of the fifteenth century. It represents Death armed with his bow among a party of dancers. Some are dying, and their souls are leaving their bodies. The picture is accompanied by a long Provençal inscription.

High above the entrance to the Gorge of the Loup stands the village of Gourdon, on the limestone terrace. The only spring water the place was supplied with came from a fountain in a cave in the face of a sheer precipice, reached by a thread of path, a foot to eighteen inches wide, along the cliff, and this, moreover, interrupted by a rift, usually crossed by a plank. But not infrequently this plank fell, or was carried away. Then those in quest of water leaped the gap, went on to the cave, filled their pitchers, and returned the same way, springing over the interval, where a false step would entail certain death.

At Mouans Sartoux, between Grasse and Cannes, stood the castle of a grim Huguenot Seigneur. The church was under the patronage of the Chapter of Grasse. The Sieur Reinaud invited two Calvinist