CHAPTER IX.

A RAMBLE WITH DUMAS AND MONTE CRISTO

One day, something like four hundred years ago, a little colony of Catalans quitted Spain and, sailing across the terrible Gulf of Lions, came to Marseilles and begged the privilege of settling on that jutting tongue of land to the left of Marseilles’s Vieux Port, known even to-day as the Pointe des Catalans.

To reach the Pointe and Quartier des Catalans one follows along the quays of the old port and climbs the height to the left. Of course one should walk; no genuine literary pilgrim ever takes a car, though there is one leaving the Cannebière, marked “Catalans,” every few minutes.

Dantes’s Mercédès was a Catalane of the Catalans, and is the most lovable figure in all the Dumas portrait gallery. Descended from the early settlers of the colony at Marseilles, Mercédès, the betrothed of the ambitious Dantes, was indeed lovely, that is, if we accept Dumas’s picture of her, and the author’s portraiture was always exceedingly good, whatever may have been his errors when dealing with historical fact.

Half-Moorish, half-Spanish, and with a very little Provençal blood, the Catalans kept their distinct characteristics, while the other settlers of Marseilles developed into the type well known and recognized to-day as the Marseillais.

Their looks, manners, and customs, their houses and their clothes were faithful--and are still, to no small extent--to the early traditions of the race, and, by intermarrying, the type was kept comparatively pure, so that in this twentieth century the Catalan women of Marseilles are as distinct a species of beautiful women as the Niçoise or the Arlesienne, both types distinct from their French sisters, and each of great repute among the world’s beautiful women.

Dumas was not very explicit with regard to the geography of this Catalan quarter of Marseilles, though his references to it were numerous in that most famous of all his romances, “Monte Cristo.”

At the time of which Dumas wrote (1815) its topographical aspect had probably changed but little from what it had been for a matter of three or four centuries, and the sea-birds then, even as now, hovered about the jutting promontory and winged their way backwards and forwards across the mouth of the old harbour, where the ugly but useful Pont Transbordeur now stretches its five hundred metres of wire ropes.

Around the Anse and the Pointe des Catalans were--and are still--grouped the habitations of the Catalan fisher and sailor folk. One sees to-day, among the men and women alike, the same distinction of type which Dumas took for his ideal, and one has only to climb any of the narrow stairlike streets which wind up from the sea-level to see the counterpart of Dantes’s Mercédès sitting or standing by some open doorway.

For a detailed, but not too lengthy, description of the manners and customs of the Catalans of Marseilles, one can not do better than turn to the pages of Dumas and read for himself what the great romancer wrote of the lovely Mercédès and her kind.

There are at least a half-dozen chapters of “Monte Cristo” which, if re-read, would form a very interesting commentary on the Marseilles of other days.

The opening lines of Dumas’s romance gives the key-note of old Marseilles: “On the 28th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre Dame de la Garde signalled the ‘_trois-mâts_’ _Pharaon_, from Smyrna, Triest, and Naples.”

The functions of Notre Dame de la Garde have changed somewhat since that time, but it is still the dominant note and beacon by land and sea, from which sailors and landsmen alike take their bearings, and it is the best of starting-points for one who would review the past history of this most cosmopolitan of all European cities.

High up, overlooking the Château du Pharo, now a Pasteur Hospital; above the old Abbey of St. Victor, now a barracks; and above the Fort St. Nicholas, which guards one side of the entrance to Marseilles port, is the fort and sanctuary of Notre Dame de la Garde. The fort was one of the first erections of its class by François Premier, who had something of a reputation as a fortress-builder as well as a designer of châteaux and a winner of women’s hearts. Originally the fortress-château enfolded within its walls an ancient chapel to Ste. Marie, and an old tower which dated from the tenth century. This old tower, overlooking the town as well as the harbour, was given the name of La Garde, which in turn was taken by the château which ultimately grew up on the same site.

This was long before the days of the present gorgeous edifice, which was not consecrated until 1864.

The château bore the familiar escutcheon of the Roi-Chevalier, the symbolical salamander, but as a fortress it never attained any great repute, as witness the following poetical satire:

“C’est Notre Dame de la Garde, Gouvernement commode et beau, A qui suffit pour toute garde Un Suisse, avec sa hallebarde, Peint sur la port du château.”

The reference was to a painted figure of a Swiss on the entrance-door, and whatever the irony or cynicism may have been, it was simply a forerunner of the time when the fortress became no longer a place to be depended upon in time of war, though at the time of which Dumas wrote it was still a signal-station whence ships coming into Marseilles were first reported.

The modern church, in the Byzantine style, which now occupies this commanding site, is warm in the affections of the sailor-folk of Marseilles; besides which it is visited incessantly by pilgrims from all parts of the world and for all manner of reasons; some to bring a votive offering of a tiny ship and say a prayer or two for some dear one travelling by sea; another to place at the foot of the statue of “_La Bonne Mère_” a golden heart, as a talisman of a firm affection; and others to leave little ivory replicas of a foot or an arm which had miraculously recovered from some crippling accident. Add to these the curious, and those who come for the view, and the numbers who ascend to this commanding height by the narrow streets of steps, or the _funiculaire_, are many indeed. As an enterprise for the purpose of vending photographic souvenirs, the whole combination takes on huge proportions. The church is really a most ornate and luxurious work, built of the marbles of Carrara and Africa, on the pure Byzantine plan, and surmounted with an enormous gilded statue of the Virgin nearly fifty feet in height.

This great beacon by land and sea, rising as it does to a height of considerably over five hundred feet, is the point of departure of that great deep-sea traffic which goes on so continually from the great port of Marseilles. An enthusiastic and imaginative Frenchman puts it as follows--and it can hardly be improved upon: “_Adieu! tu gardes jalousement ta couronne de reine de la mer._”

Of all the points of sentimental and romantic interest at Marseilles and in its neighbourhood, the Château d’If will perhaps most strongly impress itself upon the mind and memory. The Quartier des Catalans and the Château d’If are indeed the chief recollections which most people have of the city of the Phoceans, as well as of the romance of “Monte Cristo.”

The descriptions in the first pages of this wonderful romance could not be improved upon in the idea they convey of what this grim fortress was like in the days when the great Napoleon was languishing at Elba.

Little is changed to-day so far as the general outlines are concerned. The little islet lies off the harbour’s mouth scarce the proverbial stone’s throw, and visitors come and go and poke their heads in and out of the sombre galleries and dungeons, asking the guardian, meanwhile, if they are really those of which Dumas wrote. History defines it all with even more accuracy than does romance, for one may recall that the prison was one time the cage of the notorious Marquis de la Valette, the “Man of the Iron Mask,” and many others.

One’s mind always turns to Dantes and the gentle Abbé Faria, however, and your cicerone with great coolness tells you glibly, and with perfect conviction, just what apartments they occupied. You may take his word, or you may not, but it is well to recall that the Abbé Faria was no mythical character, though he never was an occupant of the island prison in which Dumas placed him.

The real Abbé Faria was a metaphysicist and a hypnotist of the first rank in his day, and one feels that there is more than a suggestion of this--or of some somnambulistic foresight or prophecy--in the last speech which Dumas gives him when addressing Dantes: “_Surtout n’oubliez pas Monte Cristo, n’oubliez pas le trésor!_”

Dumas’s own accounts of the Château d’If are indeed wonderful word-pictures, descriptive and narrative alike. It is romance and history combined in that wonderful manner of which Dumas alone was the master. The best guide, undoubtedly, to Château d’If is to be found in Chapters XIV., XV., XVII., and XX. of Dumas’s romance, though, truth to tell, the action of his plot was mostly imaginative and his scenario more or less artificial.

As it rounded the Château d’If, a pilot boarded Dantes’s vessel, the _Pharaon_, between Cap Morgion and the Ile de Riou. “Immediately, the platform of Fort St. Jean was covered with onlookers, for it always was an event at Marseilles for a ship to come into port.”

To-day the whole topography of the romance, so far as it refers to Marseilles, is all spread out for the enthusiast in brilliant relief; all as if one were himself a participant in the joyousness of the home-coming of the good ship _Pharaon_.

The old port from whose basin runs the far-famed Cannebière was the Lacydon of antiquity, and was during many centuries the glory and fortune of the town. To-day the old-time traffic has quite forsaken it, but it is none the less the most picturesque seaport on the Mediterranean. It is to-day, even as it was of yore, thronged with all the paraphernalia of ships and shipping of the old-school order. It is always lively and brilliant, with flags flung to the breeze and much cordage, and fishing-tackle, and what not belonging to the little sailing-craft which to-day have appropriated it for their own, leaving the great liners and their kind to go to the newer basins and docks to the westward.

Virtually the Vieux Port is a museum of the old marine, for, except the great white-hulled, ocean-going yachts, which seem always to be at anchor there, scarce a steam-vessel of any sort is to be seen, save, once and again, a fussy little towboat. Most of the ships of the Vieux Port are those indescribably beautiful craft known as _navaires à voiles de la Mediterranée_, which in other words are simply great lateen-rigged, piratical-looking craft, which, regardless of the fact that they are evidently best suited for the seafaring of these parts, invariably give the stranger the idea that they are something of an exotic nature which has come down to us through the makers of school histories. They are as strange-looking to-day as would be the caravels of Columbus or the viking ships of the Northmen.

All the Mediterranean types of sailing craft are found here, and their very nomenclature is picturesque--_bricks_, _goelettes_, _balancelles_, _tartanes_ and _barques de pêche_ of a variety too great for them all to have names. For the most part they all retain the slim, sharp prow, frequently ornamented with the conventional figurehead of the old days, a bust, or a three-quarters or full-length female figure, or perhaps a _guirlande dorée_.

One’s impression of Marseilles, when he is on the eve of departure, will be as varied as the temperament of individuals; but one thing is certain--its like is to be found nowhere else in the known and travelled world. Port Said is quite as cosmopolitan, but it is not grand or even picturesque; New York is as much of a mixture of nationalities and “colonies,” from those of the Syrians and Greeks on the lower East Side to those of the Hungarians, Poles, and Slavs on the West, but they have not yet become firmly enough established to have become picturesque,--they are simply squalid and dirty, and no one has ever yet expressed the opinion that the waterside life of New York’s wharves and locks has anything of the colour and life of the Mediterranean about it; Paris is gay, brilliant, and withal cosmopolitan, but there is a conventionality about it that does not exist in the great port of Marseilles, where each reviving and declining day brings a whole new arrangement of the mirror of life.

Marseilles is, indeed, “_la plus florissante et la plus magnifique des villes latines_.”