city is our metropolis, with which we are
connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where
all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and
_roturier_ in taste to merit many of our shekels.

In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint
marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and
Sainte-Catherine's ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the
Place away from its Gothic church. Here we bargain and chaffer with
towering _bonnets blancs_ for peasant pottery and faience,
paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of
broken peasant households.

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 _cote_, 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 _cote_
to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building. Upon
the very apex of the _cote_, 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
mediaeval 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 _cote_, 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 _Americaine_ 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."

Madame is a zealous Catholic, therefore the terms, although peculiar,
did not