Perhaps the richest and most discreet part of historic Aix. Close packed convents, artisans, chapels, penitents rub shoulders in narrow streets, many of which give glimpses of gardens and trees crouching behind or spilling over walls and hiding behind forbidding façades. Vestiges of their origins remain in the restaurants, hotels, stores and houses and in the names of their squares and streets : the Cloister of the Franciscans (les Cordeliers) in the Hôtel du Manoir, the Place des Tanneurs - tanners and wool combers, la rue Fermée - closed off because of the plague, the rue Lisse des Cordeliers - the "lists" on the inside of the city ramparts - etc., an incoherent topography explicable only by history and imagination.