CAPUCHIN CLOISTER

Bordering the town’s public garden (Parc François Mitterrand), the Capuchin convent was built in 1620, and the cloister has preserved its meditative inscriptions, taken from the moral poem De mundi vanitate threnodia by the Italian Franciscan monk Jacopone de Todi. The entrance is through the south door, surmounted by a sundial engraved with the motto Vita fugit sicut umbra (Life flees like a shadow), also to be meditated upon, as is always the case with sundial mottos. After the departure of the monks in 1791, the convent was successively converted into a prison (1794), a central school (1799-1803), a municipal school (1803), an imperial high school (1854) and a hospital (1914-1918). Since 1996, this beautiful building has housed the departmental music conservatory.