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.
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:
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.”
CHAPTER X.
AIX-EN-PROVENCE AND ABOUT THERE
MUCH sentimental and historic interest centres around the world-famed ancient capital of Aix-en-Provence.
To-day its position, if subordinate to that of Marseilles in commercial matters, is still omnipotent, so far as concerns the affairs of society and state. To-day it is the chef-lieu of the Arrondissement of the same name in the Département des Bouches du Rhône; the seat of an archbishopric; of the Cour d’Appel; and of the Académie, with its faculties of law and letters.
Aix-en-Provence, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Aix-les-Bains are all confused in the minds of the readers of the Anglo-Parisian newspapers. There is little reason for this, but it is so. Aix-la-Chapelle is the shrine of Charlemagne; Aix-les-Bains, of the god of baccarat—and in a later day bridge and automobile-boat races; but Aix-en-Provence is still prominent as the brilliant capital of the beauty-loving court of the middle ages. The remains of this past existence are still numerous, and assuredly they appeal most profoundly to all who have ever once come within their spell, from that wonderfully ornate portal of the Église de St. Sauveur to King René’s “Book of Hours” in the Bibliothèque Méjanes.
Three times has Aix changed its location. The ancient ville gauloise, whose name appears to be lost in the darkness of the ages, was some three kilometres to the north, and the ville romaine of Aquæ-Sextiæ was some distance to the westward of the present city of Aix-en-Provence.
The part played in history by Aix-en-Provence was great and important, not only as regards its own career, but because of the aid which it gave to other cities of Provence. For the assistance which she gave Marseilles, when that city was besieged by the Spanish, Aix was given the right to bear upon her blazoned shield the arms of the Counts of Anjou (the quarterings of Anjou, Sicily, and Jerusalem). This accounts for the complex and familiar emblems seen to-day on the city arms.
René d’Anjou was much revered in Aix, in which town he made his residence. It was but natural that the city should in a later day honour him with a statue bearing the inscription, “Au bon roi René, dont la mémoire sera toujours chère aux Provençaux.”
There were times when sadness befell Aix, but on the whole its career was one of gladsome pleasure. To René, poet of imagination as well as king, was due the founding of the celebrated Fête-Dieu. In one form or another it was intermittently continued up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Originally it was a curious bizarre affair, with angels, apostles, disciples, and the whole list of Biblical characters personated by the citizens. The “Fête de la Reine de Saba,” the “Danse des Olivettes,” and the “Danse des Épées” were other processional fêtes which contributed not a little to the gay life here in the middle ages and account for the survival to-day of many local customs.
Nostradamus, the prophet of Salon, gives the following flattering picture of “Le Prince d’Amour,” the title given to the head of the mediæval Courts of Love which nowhere flourished so gorgeously as here:
“He marched always at the head of the parade, alone and richly clad. Behind were his lieutenants, his nobles, his standard-bearers, and a great escort of horsemen, all costumed at his expense.”
It was Louis XIV. who decided to suppress the function, and a royal declaration to that effect was made on the 16th June, 1668.
Aix met the decree by deciding that the “Prince d’Amour” should be replaced by a “Lieutenant,” to whom should be allowed an annual pension of eight hundred livres. Apparently this was none too much, as one of the aspirants for the honour expended something like two thousand livres during his one year in office.
The costume officially prescribed for a “Lieutenant” or a “Prince d’Amour” was as follows:
“A corselet and breeches ‘à la romaine,’ of white moiré with silver trimmings, a mantle trimmed with silver, black silk stockings, low shoes tied with ribbons, and a plumed hat, together with ‘knee-ribbons,’ a sword-knot and a bouquet, also with streamers of ribbon.”
All this bespeaks a certain gorgeousness which was only accomplished at considerable personal expense on the part of him on whom the honour fell.
In one form or another this sort of thing went on at Aix until Revolutionary times, when the pageant was abolished as smacking too much of royal procedure and too little of republicanism.
Avignon and Arles are intimately associated with the modern exponents of Provençal literature, but Aix will ever stand as the home of Provençal letters of a past time, Aix the nursery of the ancient troubadours.
As a touring-ground little exploited as yet, the region for fifty kilometres around Aix-en-Provence offers so much of novelty and charm that it may not be likened to any other region in France.
Off to the southwest is Les Pennes, one of those picturesque cliff-towns, scattered here and there about Europe, which makes the artist murmur: “I must have that in my portfolio,”—as if one could really capture its scintillating beauty and grandeur.
Les Pennes will be difficult to find unless one makes a halt at Aix, Marseilles, or Martigues, for it appears not to be known, even by name, outside of its own intimate radius.
It shall not further be eulogized here, for fear it may become “spoiled,” though there is absolutely no attraction, within or without its walls, for the traveller who wants the capricious delights of Monte Carlo or the amusements of a city like Aix or Marseilles.
On the “Route Nationale” between Aix and Marseilles is the little town of Gardanne, only interesting because it is a typical small town of Provence. It has for its chief industries the manufacture of aluminium and nougat, widely dissimilar though they be.
Just to the southward rises majestically the mountain chain of the Pilon du Roi, whose peak climbs skyward for 710 metres, overshadowing the towns of Simiane, with its remains of a Romanesque chapel and a thirteenth-century donjon, and Septèmes, with the ruins of its Louis XIV. fortifications, and Notre Dame des Anges, which was erected upon the remains of the ancient chapel of an old-time monastery.
From the platform of Notre Dame des Anges is to be had a remarkable view of the foot-hills, of the coast-line, and of the sea beyond, the whole landscape dotted here and there with yellow-gray hamlets and olive-trees, and little trickling streams. It suggests nothing so much as the artificial spectacular compositions which most artists paint when they attempt to depict these wide-open views, and which it is the fashion to condemn as not being true to nature. This may sometimes be the case; but often they are as true a map of the country as the average topographical survey, and far more true than the best “bird’s-eye” photograph that was ever taken.
The Pilon du Roi, so named from its resemblance to a great ruined or unfinished tower, rises two hundred or more metres above the platform of the church, and to climb its precipitous sides will prove an adventure as thrilling as the most foolhardy Alpinist could desire.
There is a little corner of this region, lying between Marseilles and Gardanne, which, in spite of the overhead brilliancy, will remind one of the grimness and austerity of Flanders. One comes brusquely upon a lusty and growing coal-mining industry as he descends the southern slope of the Chaîne du Pilon du Roi, and, while all around are umbrella-pines, olive-trees, cypress, and all the characteristics of a southern landscape, there are occasional glimpses of tall, belching chimneys and the sound of the trolleys carrying the coal down to a lower level. Here and there, too, one finds a black mountain of débris, sooty and grimy, against a background of the purest tints of the artist’s palette. The contrast is too horrible for even contemplation, in spite of the importance of the industry to the metropolis of Marseilles and the neighbouring Provençal cities.
At Auriol is another “exploitation houillère,” which is the French way of describing a coal-mine. To the tourist and lover of the beautiful this is a small thing. He will be more interested in the vineyards and olive orchards and the flower-gardens surrounding the little townlet, which here bloom with a luxuriance at which one can but marvel. The town is a “ville industrielle,” if there ever was one, since all of its inhabitants seem to be engaged in, or connected with, the coal-mining industry in one way or another. In spite of this, however, the real old-time flavour has been well preserved in the narrow streets, the sixteenth-century belfry, and the ruins of the old château, which still rise proudly above the little red-roofed houses of Auriol’s twenty-five hundred inhabitants. To-day there is no more fear of a Saracen invasion,—as there was when the château was built,—but there is the ever present danger that some yawning pit’s mouth will be opened beneath its walls, and that the old donjon tower will fall before the invasion of progress, as has been the fate of so many other great historic monuments elsewhere.
In the little vineyard country there are to be heard innumerable proverbs all connected with the soil, although, like the proverbs of Spain, they are applicable to any condition of life, as for instance: “Buy your house already finished and your vines planted,” or “Have few vines, but cultivate them well.”
There is a crop which is gathered in Provence which is not generally known or recognized by outsiders, that of the caper, which, like the champignon and the truffle, is to the “cuisine française” what paprika is to Hungarian cooking.
Without doubt, like many other good things of the table in the south of France, the caper was an importation from the Levant. It is a curious plant growing up beside a wall, or in the crevice of a rocky soil, and giving a bountiful harvest. In the early days of May the “boutons” appear, and the smaller they are when they are gathered,—so long as they are not microscopic,—the better, and the better price they bring. They must be put up in bottles or tins as soon as picked or they cannot be made use of, so rapidly do they deteriorate after they have been gathered.
The crop is gathered by women at the rate of five sous a kilo, which, considering that they can gather twenty or more kilos a day, is not at all bad pay for what must be a very pleasant occupation. The buyer—he who prepares the capers for market—pays seventy-five centimes a kilo, and after passing through his hands, by a process which merely adds a little vinegar (though it has all to be most carefully done), the price has doubled or perhaps trebled.
Like the olive and the caper, the apricot is a great source of revenue in the Var, particularly in the neighbourhood of Roquevaire, midway between Aix and Marseilles. Slopes and plains and valley bottoms are all given over, apparently indiscriminately, to the culture. Near by are great factories which slice the fruit, dry it, or make it into preserves. Formerly the growers sold direct to the factories; but now, having formed a sort of middleman’s association, they have united their forces with the idea of commanding better prices. This is a procedure greatly in favour with many of the agricultural industries of France. The growers of plums in Touraine do the same thing; so do the growers of cider-apples in Normandy; the vineyard proprietors of the Cognac region, and the cheese-makers of Brie and Gournay; and the plan works well and for the advantage of all concerned.
The apricots of the Var, in their natural state, formerly brought but five or six centimes a kilo, but by the new order of things the price has been raised to ten.
In the season as many as five hundred thousand kilos of apricots are peeled and stoned in a day by one establishment alone, employing perhaps two hundred women and young girls. From this twenty-five thousand kilos of stones or noyaux result, which, in turn, are sold to make orgeat and pâte d’amande,—which fact may be a surprise to many; it was to the writer.
Forty to forty-five centimes a kilo is the price the fruit brings when it is turned over to the canning establishment, where the process does not differ greatly from that in similar trades in America or Australia, though the “abricots conservés” of Roquevaire-en-Provence lead the world for excellence.
Roquevaire’s next-door neighbour is Aubagne, in the valley of the Huveaune. It might well be called a suburb and dependency of the metropolis of Marseilles, except that the little town claims an antiquity equal to that of Marseilles itself. To-day, lying in the fertile plain of Baudinard, and surrounded by innumerable plantations devoted to the growing of fruits, principally strawberries, it is noted chiefly as the place from which Marseilles draws its principal supplies of early garden fruits or primeurs, which is a French word with which foreigners should familiarize themselves. It is believed that Aubagne was the Albania of mediæval times, and it was so named on the chart of Provence made in the tenth century by Boson, Comte de Provence, by whom it was united with the Vicomté de Marseilles, and its civil and religious rights vested in the monks of the Abbey of St. Victor.
There is nothing of dulness here, and, while in no sense a manufacturing town, such as Gardanne, there are innumerable petty industries which have grown up from the agricultural occupations, such as the putting up of confitures, the distilling of those sweet, syrupy concoctions which the French of all parts, be they on the boulevards at Paris or at sea on board a Messageries liner, drink continually, no variety more than the grenadine, which is produced at its best here.
The little river Huveaune flows southwest till it drops down to the sea through the hills forming the immediate background of Marseilles, and gives to the aspect of nature what artists absolutely refuse to call by any other name than character.
On the horizon one sees a great cross, planted on the summit of a height known as the Gardelaban. Beneath it is a great hole burrowed into the rock and anciently supposed to be of some religious significance, just what no one seems to know or care.
A few generations ago gold was supposed to be buried there; but, as no gold was found, this was one of the superstitions which soon died out. The new Eldorado was not to be found there, though a self-styled expert once gave the opinion (in print, and solicited subscriptions on the strength of the claim) that the ground was full of “des amas de fer hydraté, contenant des pyrites au reflet doré.” The claim proved false and so it was dropped.
Running northeasterly from Marseilles, at some little distance from the city, but near enough to be in full view from the height of Notre Dame de la Garde, is the mass of the Saint Pilon range, with Sainte Baume, a little to the southward, rising skyward 999 metres, which height makes it quite a mountain when it is considered that it rises abruptly almost from the sea-level.
The Forêt de Sainte Baume is one of those unspoiled wildwoods scattered about France which do much to make travel by road interesting and varied. To be sure Sainte Baume is on the road to nowhere; but it makes a pleasant excursion to go by train from Marseilles to Auriol, and thence by carriage to St. Zacharie and Sainte Baume. It will prove one of the most delightful trips in a delightful itinerary, and furthermore has the advantage of not being overrun with tourists.
St. Zacharie, like many other of the tiny hill towns of Provence, looks like a bit of transplanted Italy. The village is small, almost to minute proportions, but it has a pottery industry which is renowned for the beauty of its wares. There is also a church which was built in the tenth century, and moreover there is a most excellent hotel, the Lion d’Or. The surrounding hills are either thickly wooded or absolutely bare, and accordingly the scenic contrast is most remarkable, from the point of view of the lover of the unconventionally picturesque.
As for the Forêt de Sainte Baume itself, it is thickly grown with great oaks, poplars, aspens, lichen-grown beeches, sycamores, cypresses, pines, and all the characteristic undergrowth of a virgin forest, which this virtually is, for no forest tract in France has been less spoiled or better cared for. In addition nearly all the medicinal plants of the pharmacopœia are also found, and such exotics as mistletoe and orchids as would delight the heart of a botanist jaded with the commonplaces of a northern forest.
At the entrance to the wood is the Hôtellerie de la Sainte Baume, served by monks and nuns, who will cater for visitors in a most satisfactory manner—the women on one side and men on the other—and give them veritable monastic fare, a little preserved fish, an omelette, rice, perhaps, cooked in olive-oil, and a full-bodied red or white wine ad lib., and all for a ridiculously small sum.
The grotto of Sainte Baume, well within the forest, was, according to tradition, the resting-place for thirty-three years of Mary Magdalen, and accordingly it has become a place of pilgrimage for the faithful at Pentecost, la Fête Dieu, and the Fête de Ste. Madeleine (22d July). The grotto (from which the name comes, baume being the Provençal for baoumo, meaning grotto) has a length of some twenty metres and a width of twenty-five with a height of perhaps six or seven.
It is a damp, dark sort of a cave, with water always trickling from the roof, though a cistern on the floor never seems to run over. The falling drops make an uncanny sound, if one wanders about by himself, and he marvels at the fact that it has become a religious shrine so famous as to have been visited by Louis and Marguerite de Provence, Louise de Savoie, Claude de France, Marguerite, Duchesse d’Alençon, and a whole galaxy of royal personages, including Louis XIV., and Gaston d’Orleans.
On the Monday of Pentecost all Provence, it would seem, comes to make its devotions at this shrine of Mary Magdalen,—men, women, and children, and above all the young couples of the year, this pilgrimage being frequently stipulated in the Provençal marriage contract.
Above the grotto, on a rocky peak, are the remains of a convent founded by Charles II., Comte de Provence. The view from its platform is one of dazzling beauty. Off to the southwest lies Marseilles, with the great golden statue of Notre Dame de la Garde well defined against the blue of the sea; the Étang de Berre scintillates directly to the westward, like a great fiery opal, and still farther off are the mountains of Languedoc.
For many reasons the journey to Sainte Baume should be made by all visitors to Aix or Marseilles who have the time, and inclination, to know something of the countryside as well as of the towns.
PART II.
THE REAL RIVIERA
CHAPTER I.
MARSEILLES TO TOULON
THE coast just east of Marseilles is quite unknown to the general Riviera traveller, although it is accessible, varied, and an admirable foretaste of the beauties of the Riviera itself.
Just over the great bald-faced peak of Mount Carpiagne lie Cassis and the Bec de l’Aigle, the virtual beginning of the wonderful scenic panorama of the Riviera.
One would have expected that as time went on Carsicus Portus of the Romans, the present Cassis, would have exceeded Marseilles in magnitude, for its situation was much in its favour. Great treasure-laden ships from the Orient would have avoided doubling the rocky promontory which stretches seaward between Marseilles and Cassis, and thereby saved the worry of many ever-present dangers. This was not to be, however, and Marseilles has grown at the expense of its better situated rival. Cassis, however, was a port of refuge to ships coming from the East, and on more than one occasion they put in here and landed their cargoes, which were sent overland to the already firmly established trading colony at Marseilles.
The origin of the name is doubtful. It seems plausible enough that it may have come from the old Provençal classis, a filet or net, from the use of this in the fishing which was carried on here extensively in times past.
Some supposedly ancient quays, which may have dated from Roman times, were discovered in the eighteenth century, but the present port and its quays were constructed under the orders of Louis XIII.
The present fishing industry of Cassis is not very considerable, it being far less than that of Martigues or Port de Bouc. At Cassis there are but half a hundred men engaged, and the returns, as given in a recent year, were scarcely over eleven hundred francs per capita, which is not a great wage for a toiler of the sea.
Another harvest of the sea, little practised to-day, but formerly much more remunerative, is the gathering of a variety of coral which quite equals that of Italy or Dalmatia. This industry has of late grown less and less important here, as elsewhere, for the Italians, Greeks, and Maltese have so scraped over the bottom of the Mediterranean with their great hooked tridents that but little coral is now found.
Cassis figures in a story connected with the great plague or pest which befell Marseilles in the eighteenth century. Pope Clement XI. had sent to the Monseigneur de Belsunce a cargo of wheat to be distributed among the famished of Marseilles or elsewhere, “comme il le jugerait à propos.” In December, 1720, a fleet of tartanes,—the same lateen-rigged ships which one sees engaged to-day in the open-sea fishing industry of Martigues,—bringing the wheat to the stricken city, was forced to anchor in the Golfe des Lèques, just offshore from the little port of Cassis, “par suite de la violente mistral qui balayait la mer.” The same mistral sweeps the seas around Marseilles to-day, and works all sorts of disaster to small craft if they do not take shelter.
When the tartanes were discovered off Cassis, the famishing sailor-folk of the town hesitated not a moment to put off and board them. The papal tartane attempted to parley with them, but every vessel in the fleet was attacked in true Barbary-pirate fashion and captured; and the entire consignment was seized and distributed among the distressed people of Cassis and the surrounding country. The “pirates,” however, paid the Archbishop of Marseilles the full value of the shipment, “comme c’était justice.” Mgr. de Belsunce, “coming to Cassis on donkey-back,” brought back the money and founded a school for both sexes with the capital, besides giving to the poor of the town an annual sum equal to the interest on the principal. Whether this was a case of “heaping coals of fire” on the delinquent heads, or not, history does not say.
Cassis is the native city of the Abbé Barthélémy, a savant who, amid the constant study of ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, and Arabic, found time to write the “Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce,” a work which has placed his name high in the roll of writers who have produced epoch-making literature.