We have many streets over which wide eaves meet, and within which
twilight dwells at noonday. Some of the hand-wide streets run straight
up the _côte_, and are a succession of steep stairs climbing beside
crouching, timber-skeletoned houses perforated by narrow windows opening
upon vistas of shadow. Others seem only to run down from the _côte_
to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building. Upon
the very apex of the _côte_, visible miles away at sea, lives our
richest citizen. His house smiles serenely modern even if only
pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity
below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines
severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any
mediæval campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the
entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the
fortress-castles of the Goths.

Lower down the _côte_, convent walls raise themselves above
red-tiled and lichen-grown roofs. In one of these convents, behind
eyeless grim walls, are hidden cloistered nuns; from others the Sisters
go freely forth upon errands of both business and mercy. The convent of
cloisters, Couvent des Augustines, is passing rich, and has houses and
lands to let. Once upon a time an _Américaine_ coveted one of these
picturesque houses. She entered the convent and interviewed the
business-manager, a veiled nun behind close bars.

"Madame may occupy the house," said _ma Soeur_, "by paying five
hundred francs a year, by observing every fast and feast of the Church,
by attending either matins or vespers every day, and by attending
confession and partaking of the holy sacrament every month."