The chapel front is the part most people photograph without knowing what they are looking at. It sits at a corner off Rue Bellecordière, wedged between café awnings and a modern glass shopfront, and the inscription cut into the stone above the door reads LE GRAND HOSTEL DIEV. Old spelling, U carved as V in the Roman manner. Above the door there is a Pietà in relief, which is the dedication itself: Notre-Dame de Pitié.

The building on the corner does not look like a museum. It looks like what it was, a merchant’s house from the seventeenth century, cream render going grey at the base, a wide gable with brown timber under the eaves, shutters that still work. You come over Pont Marengo from the other side of town, you notice the red banner, and without the banner you would keep walking. That is the Musée Basque et de l’histoire de Bayonne.

Fireworks always look a little unreal when they bloom against the night — too bright, too temporary, too dramatic to feel accidental. In the photo, sparks explode into wide arcs of gold and pink, drifting like slow-moving embers before falling back into darkness. The smoke glows red, lit from below as if the sky itself remembers fire, not just celebration. Somewhere beneath those sparks, silhouettes of architecture cut into shadow — a church spire, a roofline — calm and still while the night shakes with light and sound.