CHAPTER VIII.

MARSEILLES--COSMOPOLIS

Marseilles has more than once been called the Babylon of the south, and with truth, for such a babel of many tongues is to be heard in no Latin or Teuton city in the known world.

At Marseilles all is tumultuous and gay, and the Cannebière is the gayest of all. Mèry perpetuated its fame, or at any rate spread it far and wide, when he said, “_Si Paris avait une Cannebière, ce serait un petit Marseille_.” It is not a long thoroughfare, this Cannebière, in spite of its extension in the Rue de Noailles, but its animation and its gaiety give it an incontestable air of grandeur which many more pretentious thoroughfares entirely lack. Lyons has more beautiful streets, and Paris has avenues and boulevards more densely thronged, but the Cannebière has a character that is all its own, and a reputation for worldliness which it lives up to in every particular. In reality the Cannebière is Marseilles, the palpitating heart of the second city of France. One does not need to go far away, however, before he comes to the tranquillity and convention of the average provincial capital, and for this reason this great street of luxurious shops and grand hotels is the more remarkable, and the contrast the more absolute. By ten o’clock the whole city of convention sleeps, but the Cannebière and its cafés are as full of light and noise as ever, and remain so until one or two in the morning.

Not only does the Cannebière captivate the stranger, but each of the various _quartiers_ does the same, until one realizes that the life of Marseilles unrolls itself as does no other in provincial France. The arts, science, industry, commerce, and the shipping all have their separate and distinct quarters, where the life of their own affairs is ceaseless and brings a content which only comes from industry. Twenty-five centuries have rolled by since the foundations of the present prosperity of Marseilles were laid, and nowhere has the star of progress burned more brilliantly.

Fortunate among all other great cities, Marseilles has preserved all the essential elements of its former glory and opulence, and even added to them with the advance of ages, remaining meanwhile “_encore jeune, souriante, robuste, comme si le temps ne pouvait rien sur sa force sereine, sur sa triomphante beauté_.”

Save the Byzance of antiquity, no seaport of history has enjoyed a rôle so brilliant or so extended as Marseilles. The great maritime cities of antiquity have disappeared, but Marseilles goes on aggrandizing itself for ever, with--in spite of very general transformation--the impress of the successive epochs, Greek, Roman, Frankish, and feudal, still in evidence, here and there where the memory of some quaint and bygone custom is unearthed or some mediæval monument is brought to light.

By no means is all of the butterfly order here in the Mediterranean metropolis. “_Les affaires_” are very serious affairs, and profitable ones to those engaged in their pursuit, and the Marseillais business man is as keen as his fellows anywhere. There is also a life redolent of science and art, as vivid as that of the capital itself, and the press of Marseilles is one of the most literary in a nation of literary newspapers. Taine slandered Marseilles when he said that it was wholly given up to “_la grosse joie_,” as he did also when he said that the pleasure of its inhabitants was to make money out of breadstuffs or gamble in oil, or some such words. And Taine was a Marseillais, too.

Here, as in many others of the old-world cities of France, are streets so narrow that a cart may not turn around in them, all busy with the little affairs of the lower classes, full of taverns, bars and _débits de vin_, cheap _cafés-chantants_,--from which the stranger had best keep out,--and from one end to the other full of straggling sailors of all nationalities and tongues under the sun.

This population of sailors and dock-labourers is of a certain doubtful social probity, but all the same the spectacle is unique, and far more edifying to witness than a midnight ramble through San Francisco’s Chinatown, though perhaps more fraught with danger to one’s person.

The Rue de la République has pushed its way through this old _quartier_, but it has brought with it none of the modern life of the newer parts of the town, and the narrow, tortuous streets around and about the “Hôtel Dieu” are as brutally uncouth as any old-time quarter of a great city peopled by the poorer classes; with this difference, that at Marseilles everything, good, bad, and indifferent, is exaggerated.

It is here in this old quarter that one finds the true type of the Marseillais as he was in other days, if one knows where to look for him, and what he looks like when he meets him, for Marseilles is so full of strange men and women that the bird of passage is likely enough to confound Greek with Jew and Lascar with Arab, to say nothing of the difficulty of putting the Maltese and Portuguese in their proper places in the medley. When it comes to distinguishing the Provençal from the Marseillais and the Niçois from the Catalan, the task is more difficult still.

The Marseillais _pur sang_ (except that it has been many centuries since he has been _pur sang_) is a unique type among the inhabitants of France, the product of many successive immigrations from most of the Mediterranean countries. He is indeed an extraordinary development, though in no way outré or unsympathetic, in spite of being a bloodthirsty-looking individual. To describe him were impossible. The Marseillais is a Marseillais by his dark complexion, by his svelte figure, and by the exuberance of his gestures and his voice. Always ready for adventure or pleasure, he is the very stuff of which the sea-rovers of another day were made.

The Marseillais has been portrayed by many a French writer, and his virtues have been lauded and his faults exposed. Mèry, a Marseillais himself, has traced an amusing character, while Edmond About and Taine were both struck by the Marseillais love of lucre and violent amusements. Alexandre Dumas has drawn more or less idyllic portraits of him.

The topographical transformation of Marseilles in recent times has been great. It was the first among the great cities of France to cut new streets and build sumptuous modern palaces devoted to civic affairs. The Rue de la République, if still lined in part with inferior houses, is nevertheless one of the fine thoroughfares of the world. Its laying out was a colossal task, cutting through the most solidly built and most ancient quarter of the city. Neither the aristocratic nor the bourgeois population have ever come to it for business or residence, but it serves the conduct of affairs in a way which the tortuous streets of the old régime would not have done. Many of the great avenues of the city are as grand in their way as the best and most aristocratic of those in Paris, and the world of commerce, of the Bourse, and of the liberal professions, lives surrounded by as much sumptuousness and good taste as the same classes in the capital itself. In other words, “_la société Marseillais_” is no less endowed with good taste and the love of luxurious appointments and surroundings than is the most Parisian of Parisian circles,--a term which has come to mean much in the refinements of modern life. “_Des plaisirs bruyants et grossiers_” may have struck the Taines of a former day, but the twentieth-century student of men and affairs will not place the Marseillais and the things of his household very far down in the social scale, provided he is possessed of a mind which is trained to make just estimates.

Le Prado is another of the fine streets of Marseilles. It is a majestic boulevard, the continuation of the Rue de Rome, beyond the Place Castellane. Practically it is a great tree-bordered avenue, which is lined with the gardens of handsome villas. It is as attractive as Unter den Linden or the Champs Élysées.

Marseilles has many specialities. _Bouillabaisse_ is one of them; flowers, which you buy at a ridiculous low price at those curious little pulpits which line the Cours St. Louis, are another; and a third are the strawberries, which are here brought to one’s door and sold in all the perfection of fresh picked fruit. They are sold in “pots” of porous stone, covered with a peculiar gray paper, and the size and capacity of the “pots” is regulated by a municipal decree. The “_grand pot_” must contain four hundred grammes, and the “_petit pot_” two hundred. All of which is vastly more satisfactory for the purchaser than the false-bottomed box of America or the underweighted scales of the greengrocer in England.

This “_pot-à-fraise_” of Marseilles is a commodity strictly local, and no fresh fruit is more in demand in season than the strawberries of Roquevaire, Beaudinard, and Aubagne. The season’s consumption of strawberries at Marseilles is 350,000 litres.

The street cries of Marseilles may not be as famous as those of London, but they are many and lively nevertheless. Fish, fruit, and many other things form the burden of the cries one hears at Marseilles in these days; but, like most of the picturesque old customs, this is being crowded out. The itinerant _vitrier_ still makes his round, however, and you may hear him any day:

“Encore un carreau cassé Voici le vitrier qui passe....”

In this connection it is interesting to recall that all glass made in Provence in the thirteenth century was by authorization of the Bishop of Marseilles, and that the industry was entirely in the hands of the Chartreux monks. Only in the fifteenth century, at the hands of the good King René, did the trade receive any extension.

The fishing industry has ever been prominent in the minor affairs of Marseilles. The ancient Provençal government guaranteed the fishing rights to certain “_patrons pêcheurs_,” and, when the province was united with the Crown of France, in 1481, the Grand Seneschal confirmed the privileges in the name of Louis XI. They were again confirmed, in 1536, by François I., and in 1557 by Henri II.

By letters patent, in December, 1607, Henri IV. gave a permit to the _pêcheurs_ of Marseilles which allowed them to sell their fish in all _villes de mer_ that they might choose, and to be free from paying any tax for the privilege. Thus it is seen that from the very earliest times the traffic was one which was bound to prosper and add to the city’s wealth and independence.

Louis XIII. was even more liberal. He extended the right of control of the fishing, even by strangers, to the “_Prud’hommes de Marseilles_” (a sort of a fishing guild, which endures even unto to-day), and forbade any taking of fish between Cap Couronne and Cap de l’Aigle, except with their permission.

Louis XIV., on a certain occasion, when he was passing through Marseilles, confirmed all that his predecessors had granted, and further accorded them 3,500 minots of salt, at a price of eleven livres per minot.

The “_Prud’hommes_” formed a sort of court or tribunal which regulated all disputes between members. To open a case one merely had to deposit two _sols_ in a box, the contents of which were destined for the poor (the other side contributing also), and four of the chosen number of the “_Prud’hommes_” sat in judgment upon the question at issue. The loser was addressed in the short and explicit formula, “_La loi vous condamne_,” and forthwith he either had to pay up, or his boats and nets were seized. “Never was there a law so efficacious,” says the historian of this interesting guild; and all will be inclined to agree with him.

The “_Prud’hommes_” of Marseilles still exist as an institution, but their picturesque costume of other days has, it is needless to say, disappeared. The old-time “_Prud’homme_,” with a Henri Quatre mantle, a velvet toque for a hat, and a two-handed sword, would be a strange figure on the streets of up-to-date Marseilles.

The amateur fisherman in France is not the minor factor that English Nimrods would have one believe, though the mere taking of fish is a side issue with him. Not always does he make of it a solitary occupation. At Marseilles he has his “fishing excursions” and his “chowder-parties,” and the deep-sea fishing bouts held off the Provençal coast would do credit to a Rockaway skipper.

Read the following announcement of the banquet of “La Société de Pêche la Girelle” of Marseilles, culled from a morning paper:

“Members will meet at six o’clock in the morning, and will leave for the Planier (Marseilles’ great far-reaching light) grounds ‘_sur le bateau à vapeur le Cannois_;’ the overflow in small boats. To return at noon for a grand banquet _chez_ Mistral. _Bouillabaisse et toute le reste_.”

Another great passion of the Marseillais, of all classes, is for the “_campagne_.” The wealthy _commerçant_ has his sumptuous villa--always gaily built, but a sad thing from an architectural point of view--in the valley of the Huveaune, or on the slopes of the “Corniche” overlooking the Mediterranean. The _petit bourgeois_, the shopkeeper or the man of small affairs, contents himself with a _cabanon_, but it is his _maison de campagne_ just the same. It is merely a stone hut with a tiny terrace fronting it on the sunny side, sheltered by a _tonnelle_, and that is all. The proprietor of this grand affair spends his Sundays and his fête-days throughout the year here on the slope of some rocky hill overlooking the sea, sleeps on a camp bedstead, and goes out early in the morning _pour la pêche_, in the hope of taking fish enough to make his _bouillabaisse_. Probably he will catch nothing, but he will have his _bouillabaisse_ just the same, even if he has to go back to town to get it in a quayside restaurant. This is a simple and healthful enough way to spend one’s time assuredly, so why cavil at it, in spite of its ludicrous and juvenile side,--a sort of playing at housekeeping.

The _cabanons_ are numerous for miles around Marseilles in every direction, above all on the hills overlooking the sea and in the valleys of the Oriol, the Berger, and the Huveaune, in fact, in any ravine where one may gain a foothold and hire a _pied-de-terre_ for fifty to a hundred francs a year.

The real traveller of enthusiasm, the kind that Sterne wrote for when he said “let us go to France,” will not be content merely to know Marseilles, the town, but will wander afield to Estaque, to Allauch, to Les Aygalades, and to any and all of the scores of excursion points which the Marseillais, more than the inhabitants of any other city in France, are so fond of visiting. Then, and then only, will one know the real life of the Marseillais.

The tour of the shores of the _golfe_ alone will occupy a week of one’s time very profitably, be he poet or painter.

At Les Aygalades are the remains of a Carmelite chapel, which came under the special patronage of King René of Anjou, also a château constructed for the Maréchal de Villars.

Back of the Bassin d’Arenc is a hamlet, now virtually a part of Marseilles itself, perched high upon a hill, from which one gets a marvellous panorama of all the life of the great seaport.

Seon-Saint-André was formerly a suburb composed entirely of vineyards, where picturesque peasants worked and sang as they do in opera, and spent their evenings rejoicing over the one great meal of the day. To-day all suggestion of this rural and sylvan life has disappeared, and brick-yards and soap-factories furnish an entirely different colour scheme for one’s canvas.

At St. Julien Cæsar had one of his many camps which he so plentifully scattered over Gaul, and, as usual, he selected it with judgment; certainly nothing but modern engines of war could ever have successfully attacked his intrenchments from land or sea.

All the country immediately back of Marseilles to the eastward was, in a former day, covered with a dense forest. A breach was made in it by Charles IX., who had not the least notion of what the preservation of the kingdom’s resources meant, though another monarch, René d’Anjou, came here frequently to the tiny chapel of St. Marguerite--the remains of which still exist in the suburb of the same name--to pray that he might be favoured by capturing “the deer of many horns.” From this latter fact it may be inferred that he was a true lover and preserver of forests, like the later François of Renaissance times.

Offshore the islands of the bay contain much of historic interest, including the Château d’If with all its array of fact and romance, the Iles Pomegue and Rattonneau, and the Ile de Riou. The latter lies just eastward of the Planier and is so small as to be hardly recognizable on the map, and yet prolific in the remains of a civilization of another day. It was only within the present year (1905) that an engraved silex was discovered buried in its sandy soil. This stone was identical with those inscribed stones found in Egypt from time to time, and dating from a period long previous to any recorded history of that country.

This sermon in stone was presented to the French Academy of Inscriptions, and by them thought to prove that the Egyptians, even as far back as prehistoric times, had already learned the art of navigation by small craft (for they were then ignorant of working in metal), and in some considerable body had settled here in the neighbourhood of Marseilles long before the Phoceans. This is all conjecture of course, as the stone may have been a fragment of a larger morsel which formed the anchor of some fishing-boat, or a piece of ballast taken aboard off the Egyptian coast, which ultimately found a resting-place here on Riou. It may be, even, that some “collector” of ages ago brought the stone here as a curio; in short, it may have been transported by any one of a hundred ways and at almost any time. At any rate, it is all guesswork, regardless of the sensation which the finding of it made among archæologists; but it proves that all is not yet known of ancient history.

It is a remarkable view, looking landwards, that one gets from the height of the donjon of the Château d’If. Back of the city, which itself is but a short three miles distant, is a wonderful framing of mountainous rocks and gray hills set about with olive and fig trees, while in the immediate foreground is a forest of masts and belching, smoky chimneys which give a distance and transparency to the view which is almost too picturesque to be true. It is no dream, however, and there is nothing of illusion about it, and soon a tiny steamboat will have brought one back to shore and all the excitable diversions of the Cannebière. One makes his way to shore around and behind innumerable bales, boxes, and baskets, coils of rope, _charrettes_ and _camions_, and treads gingerly over sleeping roustabouts and sailors.

The docks and quays of Marseilles will have a surprise for those familiar only with the ports of La Manche and the western ocean. High or low water there makes a considerable economic and picturesque difference, but in the Mediterranean there is always a regular depth of water; its level is always practically the same, and fishing-boats and great Eastern liners alike come and go without thought of tides or dock-gates.

The commerce of Marseilles is, as might be expected, highly varied, and the flags of all the great and small commercial nations are at one time or another within its port, whose importations--not counting the orange boats--greatly exceed the exports. Nearly a third of the imports are made up of cereals, Marseilles being by far the greatest port of entry in France for this class of product. Russia, Turkey, Algeria, the Indies, and America send their wheat, Piedmont and Asia their rice, Algeria, Tunis, and Russia their barley, while beans are sent in great quantities from the ports of the Black Sea.

Marseilles is the centre, the most important in all France, for the production of all manner of oils, vegetable, mineral, and animal. Petroleum, cotton-seed, the olive, and many kindred fruits and berries all go to make possible a vast industry which is famous throughout the world.

Sugar-refining, too, is of great proportions here, and the trade of importing and exporting the raw and refined sugars amounts to over one hundred millions of kilos per year. Of the raw sugar imported, more than two-thirds comes from the French colonies, so that, with the enormous production of beet-sugar as well, France alone, of all European nations, has the sugar question solved.

Coffee forms a considerable part of the trade of Marseilles, sixteen to twenty thousand tons being handled in one year. This of course demonstrates that the French are great coffee-drinkers, though the palm goes to Holland for the greatest consumption per capita. Cocoa and coffee come to France in large quantities from Brazil, and pepper from Indo-China.

It is an interesting fact to record that the receipts of cotton in the port of Marseilles are steadily on the decrease, by far the largest bulk now being delivered at Le Havre and Rouen by reason of their proximity to the great cotton-manufacturing centres in Normandy, while the mills in the east of France choose to bring their supplies through the gateway of Antwerp. The traffic at Marseilles has fallen, accordingly, from 125,000 bales in 1876 to less than 50,000 at the present day. On the other hand, the importation of the cocoons of the silkworm finds its natural gateway at Marseilles, this being the most direct route from China, Japan, Turkey, Greece, and Austria to the factories of Lyons.

Marseilles is the centre of the soap industry of the world, situated as it is in the very heart of the region of the olive, which makes not only the olive-oil of commerce but the best of common soaps as well, including the famous Castile soap, which has deserted Castile for Marseilles. One hundred and twenty-one million kilos of soap are made here every year, of which a fifth part, at least, is exported to all corners of the globe, the bulk being taken by the French colonies.

The passenger traffic of the great liners which come and go from this, the chief port of the south of Europe, is vast. The movement of _paquebots_ and _courriers_ is incessant, not only those that go to the Mediterranean ports of Algeria, Spain, Tunis, Corsica, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, and all those queer and little known ports of the near East as well, but also the great liners, French, English, German, Dutch, and Italian, which make the round voyages to the Far East and Australia with the regularity of Atlantic liners, but with vastly more romance about them, for the death-dealing pace of twenty-two or twenty-three knots an hour is unknown under the sunny skies of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

The old and new parts of Marseilles are one of the chief attractions for the stranger to this fascinating city. The Port Vieux and the new Bassins de la Joliette are separated by a peninsula which comprises the chief part of old Marseilles; indeed it is the site of the primitive city of the Phoceans, who came, it is undeniably asserted, six hundred years before Christ.

If the new ports of Marseilles have not the same picturesqueness as the Port Vieux, they at least overtop it in their intensity of action and the fever of commercialism. Here, too, hundreds of sailing-vessels (but of an entirely different species from those of the old port) come and go without cessation, bringing the diverse products of the Mediterranean shores to the markets of the world by way of Marseilles: piles of golden oranges from the Balearic Isles, figs from Smyrna, wool from Algeria, rice from Piedmont, _arachides_ from Senegal, dyestuffs from Central America, pine from Sweden and Norway, and marbles from Italy. All this, and more, greets the eye at every turn, and the very sight of the varied cargoes tells a story which is fascinating and romantic even in these worldly times.

Take the orange cargoes for example; the mere handling of them between the ship and the shore is as picturesque as one could possibly imagine. The unloading is done by women called _porteiris_, all of whom it is said are Genoese, although why this should be is difficult for the tyro to understand, and the master longshoreman under whom they work apparently does not know either. The oranges are brought on shore in great baskets, which are poured out in a steady stream into the cars on the quay. During the process all is gay with song and laughter, it being one of the principal tenets of the creed of the southern labourers, men or women, that they must not be dull at their work.