As if to keep more isolated and shut up within itself, the town is belted with old ramparts, which only serve to increase its gloom and render it more confined.  These ridiculous fortifications, preyed upon by ivy and crowned with wild gillyflowers, are about as high and as thick as the walls of a convent, and could be demolished by gunshot.  They have several openings, the principal of which, the Porte de Rome and the Grand’-Porte, afford access to the Nice road and the Lyons road, at the other end of town.  Until 1853 these openings were furnished with huge wooden two-leaved gates, arched at the top, and strengthened with bars of iron.  These gates were double-locked at eleven o’clock in summer, and ten o’clock in winter.  The town having thus shot its bolts like a timid girl, went quietly to sleep.  A keeper, who lived in a little cell in one of the inner corners of each gateway, was authorised to admit belated persons.  But it was necessary to stand parleying a long time.  The keeper would not let people in until, by the light of his lantern, he had carefully scrutinised their faces through a peep-hole.  If their looks displeased him they had to sleep outside.  This custom of locking the gates every evening was highly characteristic of the spirit of the town, which was a commingling of cowardice, egotism, routine, exclusiveness, and devout longing for a cloistered life.  Plassans, when it had shut itself up, would say to itself, “I am at home,” with the satisfaction of some pious bourgeois, who, assured of the safety of his cash-box, and certain that no noise will disturb him, duly says his prayers and retires gladly to bed.  No other town, I believe, has so long persisted in thus incarcerating itself like a nun.

The population of Plassans is divided into three groups, corresponding with the same number of districts.  Putting aside the functionaries—­the sub-prefect, the receiver of taxes, the mortgage commissioner, and the postmaster, who are all strangers to the locality, where they are objects of envy rather than of esteem, and who live after their own fashion—­the real inhabitants, those who were born there and have every intention of ending their days there, feel too much respect for traditional usages and established boundaries not to pen themselves of their own accord in one or other of the town’s social divisions.

The nobility virtually cloister themselves.  Since the fall of Charles X. they scarcely ever go out, and when they do they are eager to return to their large dismal mansions, and walk along furtively as though they were in a hostile country.  They do not visit anyone, nor do they even receive each other.  Their drawing-rooms are frequented by a few priests only.  They spend the summer in the chateaux which they possess in the environs; in the winter, they sit round their firesides.  They are, as it were, dead people weary of life.  And thus the gloomy silence of a cemetery hangs over their quarter of the town.  The doors and windows are carefully barricaded; one would think their mansions were so many convents shut off from all the tumult of the world.  At rare intervals an abbe, whose measured tread adds to the gloomy silence of these sealed houses, passes by and glides like a shadow through some half-opened doorway.