he driver was turning, for rising above a smiling little valley,
surrounded by fields of ripened grain, lay Riez. A donjon stands above a
broken wall, on the hillside houses cluster around a church's spire, and
alone, on the top of the hill, stands the little Chapel of Saint-Maxime,
the only relic of the Great Seminary that was destroyed by the
Revolutionists of '89. Here, after the destruction of one of the several
Cathedrals of Riez, the Bishop celebrated Masses, but the little chapel
was never consecrated a Cathedral. It has been recently restored and
re-built in an uninteresting style,--the exterior is bare to ugliness,
the interior so painted that the six old Roman columns which support the
choir are overwhelmed by the banality of their surroundings. The plateau
on which the chapel is built is now almost bare; olive-trees grow to its
edges and there is no trace of the Seminary that was once so full of
active life. The traveller, sitting in the shade of the few pine-trees,
looked over the broad view toward the peaks whose bare rocks rise with
awful sternness, and the little hills that stand between them and the
valley, till finally his eyes wandered to the town beneath, and the
firm, broad roads which approach it from every direction. For Riez,
although in the lost depths of Provence, far from railways and tourists,
is a bee-hive of industry, largely supplying the necessities of these
secluded little towns. Its hat-making, rope factories, and tanneries are
quite important; the shops of its main streets are not without a
tempting attractiveness, and there is all the provincial stateliness of
Saint-Remy with much less stagnancy.

Riez was the Albece Reiorum Apollinarium in the Colonia Julia Reiorum of
the Romans, but there are very few traces of the city with this
high-sounding name. The whole atmosphere of the little town is XII
century. Two of its old gates, part of the wall, and the crenellated
tower still stand, with ruined convents and monasteries of Capuchins,
Cordeliers, and Ursulines; and it may be inferred from the remains of
the Bishop's Palace and the broad promenade which was one of its
avenues, and from the episcopal chateau at Montagnac, that
ecclesiastical state was not less worthily upheld at Riez than in the
other Sees of the South of France.

Many difficulties, however, had beset the Cathedral-building prelates.
Their first church, Notre-Dame-du-Siege, dating partly from the
foundation of the See in