The situation of its Cathedral reveals a Nice of which but little is
written, the city of a people who live in the service of those whose
showy, new villas and hotels stretch along the promenades and lie dotted
on the hills in the Nice of "all the world." Besides this exotic city,
there is "the Nice of the Nicois," a small district of dark, crowded
streets that are too full of the sordid struggles of competing
work-people to be truly picturesque. Here, in the XVI century,
when the Citadel of Nice was enlarged and the Cathedral of
Sainte-Marie-de-l'Assomption destroyed, the Church of Sainte-Reparate
was re-built, and succeeded to the episcopal rank. Standing on a little
open square, surrounded by small shops and the poor homes of
trades-folk, it seems in every sense a church of the people. Here the
native Nicois, gay, industrious, mercurial, and dispossessed of his
town, may feel truly at home. Finished in the most exuberant rococo
style, it is an edifice from which all architectural or religious
inspiration is conspicuously absent. It is a revel of luxurious bad
taste; a Cathedral in Provence, a Cathedral by the Sea, but neither
Provencal nor Maritime,--rather a product of that Italian taste which
has so profoundly vitiated both the morals and the architecture of all
the Riviera.

II.

CATHEDRALS OF THE HILL-TOWNS.

[Sidenote: Carpentras.]

Carpentras is a busy provincial town, the terminus of three diminutive
railroads and of many little, lumbering, dust-covered stages. It stands
high on a hill, and from the boulevards, dusty promenades under
luxuriant shade-trees, which circle the town as its walls formerly did,
there is an extended view over the pretty hills and valleys of the
neighbouring country. At one end of the town the Hospital rises, an
immense, bare, and imposing edifice of the XVIII century, built by a
Trappist Bishop; and at the other is the Orange Gate, the last tower of
the old fortifications. Between these historic buildings and the
encircling boulevards are the narrow streets and irregular,
uninteresting buildings of the city itself. It is strange indeed that so
isolated a place, which seems only a big, bustling country-town, should
have been of importance in the Middle Ages, and that bits of its
stirring history must have caused all orthodox Europe to thrill with
horror. Stranger still would be the forgetfulness of modern writers, by
whom Carpentras is seldom mentioned, were it not that th