The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins Part 4

The seaward views are everywhere delicious; and when sunset lights up the bare white rocks with pink and purple, no richer coloring against the emerald green bay, can possibly be imagined in art or nature. It is as good as Torquay; and how can cosmopolitan say better?

On the Corniche, too, is the proper place nowadays to eat that famous old Ma.r.s.eillais dish, immortalized by Thackeray, and known as _bouillabaisse_.

The Reserve de Roubion in particular prides itself on the manufacture of this strictly national Provencal dainty, which proves, however, a little too rich and a little too mixed in its company for the fastidious taste of most English gourmets. Greater exclusiveness and a more delicate eclecticism in matters of cookery please our countrymen better than such catholic comprehensiveness. I once asked a white-capped Provencal _chef_ what were the precise ingredients of his boasted _bouillabaisse_; and the good man opened his palms expansively before him as he answered with a shrug, "Que voulez-vous? Fish to start with; and then--a handful of anything that happens to be lying about loose in the kitchen."

Near the end of the Prado, at its junction with the Corniche, modern Ma.r.s.eilles rejoices also in its park or Public Garden. Though laid out on a flat and uninteresting plain, with none of the natural advantages of the Bois de Boulogne or of the beautiful Central Park at New York, these pretty grounds are nevertheless interesting to the northern visitor, who makes his first acquaintance with the Mediterranean here, by their curious and novel southern vegetation. The rich types of the south are everywhere apparent. Clumps of bamboo in feathery cl.u.s.ters overhang the ornamental waters; cypresses and araucarias shade the gravel walks; the eucalyptus showers down its fluffy flowers upon the gra.s.s below; the quaint Salisburia covers the ground in autumn with its pretty and curious maidenhair-shaped foliage. Yuccas and cactuses flourish vigorously in the open air, and even fan-palms manage to thrive the year round in cosy corners. It is an introduction to the glories of Rivieran vegetation, and a faint echo of the magnificent tones of the North African flora.

As we wind in and out on our way back to Ma.r.s.eilles by the Corniche road, with the water ever das.h.i.+ng white from the blue against the solid crags, whose corners we turn at every tiny headland, the most conspicuous object in the nearer view is the Chateau d'If, with the neighboring islets of Pomegues and Ratonneau. Who knows not the Chateau d'If, by name at least, has wasted his boyhood. The castle is not indeed of any great antiquity--it was built by order of Francois I--nor can it lay much claim to picturesqueness of outline or beauty of architecture; but in historical and romantic a.s.sociations it is peculiarly rich, and its situation is bold, interesting, and striking. It was here that Mirabeau was imprisoned under a _lettre de cachet_ obtained by his father, the friend of man; and it was here, to pa.s.s from history to romance, that Monte-Cristo went through those marvelous and somewhat incredible adventures which will keep a hundred generations of school-boys in breathless suspense long after Walter Scott is dead and forgotten.

But though the Prado and the Corniche are alive with carriages on sunny afternoons, it is on the quays themselves, and around the docks and basins, that the true vivacious Ma.r.s.eillais life must be seen in all its full flow and eagerness. The quick southern temperament, the bronzed faces, the open-air existence, the hurry and bustle of a great seaport town, display themselves there to the best advantage. And the ports of Ma.r.s.eilles are many and varied: their name is legion, and their s.h.i.+pping manifold. As long ago as 1850, the old square port, the Phocaean harbor, was felt to have become wholly insufficient for the needs of modern commerce in Ma.r.s.eilles. From that day to this, the accommodation for vessels has gone on increasing with that incredible rapidity which marks the great boom of modern times. Never, surely, since the s.p.a.cious days of great Elizabeth, has the world so rapidly widened its borders as in these latter days in which we are all living. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean have joined the Atlantic. In 1853 the Port de la Joliette was added, therefore, to the Old Harbor, and people thought Ma.r.s.eilles had met all the utmost demands of its growing commerce. But the Ba.s.sin du Lazaret and the Ba.s.sin d'Arenc were added shortly after; and then, in 1856, came the further need for yet another port, the Ba.s.sin National. In 1872 the Ba.s.sin de la Gare Maritime was finally executed; and now the Ma.r.s.eillais are crying out again that the s.h.i.+ps know not where to turn in the harbor.

Everywhere the world seems to cosmopolitanize itself and to extend its limits: the day of small things has pa.s.sed away for ever; the day of vast ports, huge concerns, gigantic undertakings is full upon us.

Curiously enough, however, in spite of all this rapid and immense development, it is still to a great extent the Greek merchants who hold in their hands--even in our own time--the entire commerce and wealth of the old Phocaean city. A large h.e.l.lenic colony of recent importation still inhabits and exploits Ma.r.s.eilles. Among the richly-dressed crowd of southern ladies that throngs the Prado on a sunny afternoon in full season, no small proportion of the proudest and best equipped who loll back in their carriages were born at Athens or in the Ionic Archipelago.

For even to this day, these modern Greeks hang together wonderfully with old Greek persistence. Their creed keeps them apart from the Catholic French, in whose midst they live, and trade, and thrive; for, of course, they are all members of the "Orthodox" Church, and they retain their orthodoxy in spite of the ocean of Latin Christianity which girds them round with its flood on every side. The Greek community, in fact, dwells apart, marries apart, wors.h.i.+ps apart, and thinks apart. The way the marriages, in particular, are most frequently managed, differs to a very curious extent from our notions of matrimonial proprieties. The system--as duly explained to me one day under the shady plane-trees of the Allees de Meilhan, in very choice modern Greek, by a h.e.l.lenic merchant of Ma.r.s.eilles, who himself had been "arranged for" in this very manner--is both simple and mercantile to the highest degree yet practised in any civilized country. It is "marriage by purchase" pure and simple; only here, instead of the husband buying the wife, it is the wife who practically buys the husband.

A trader or s.h.i.+p-owner of Ma.r.s.eilles, let us say, has two sons, partners in his concern, who he desires to marry. It is important, however, that the wives he selects for them should not clash with the orthodoxy of the h.e.l.lenic community. Our merchant, therefore, anxious to do the best in both worlds at once, writes to his correspondents of the great Greek houses in Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, and Alexandria; nay, perhaps even in London, Manchester, New York, and Rio, stating his desire to settle his sons in life, and the amount of _dot_ they would respectively require from the ladies upon whom they decided to bestow their name and affections. The correspondents reply by return of post, recommending to the favorable attention of the happy swains certain Greek young ladies in the town of their adoption, whose _dot_ and whose orthodoxy can be equally guaranteed as beyond suspicion. Photographs and lawyers' letters are promptly exchanged; settlements are drawn up to the mutual satisfaction of both the high contracting parties; and when all the business portion of the transaction has been thoroughly sifted, the young ladies are consigned, with the figs and dates, as per bill of lading, to the port of entry, where their lords await them, and are duly married, on the morning of their arrival, at the Greek church in the Rue de la Grande Armee, by the reverend archimandrite. The Greeks are an eminently commercial people, and they find this idyllic mode of conducting a courts.h.i.+p not only preserves the purity of the orthodox faith and the h.e.l.lenic blood, but also saves an immense amount of time which might otherwise be wasted on the composition of useless love-letters.

It was not so, however, in the earlier Greek days. Then, the colonists of Ma.r.s.eilles and its dependent towns must have intermarried freely with the native Gaulish and Ligurian population of all the tributary Provencal seaboard. The true antique h.e.l.lenic stock--the Aryan Achaeans of the cla.s.sical period--were undoubtedly a fair, a light-haired race, with a far more marked proportion of the blond type than now survives among their mixed and degenerate modern descendants. In Greece proper, a large intermixture of Albanian and Sclavonic blood, which the old Athenians would have stigmatized as barbarian or Scythian, has darkened the complexion and blackened the hair of a vast majority of the existing population. But in Ma.r.s.eilles, curiously enough, and in the surrounding country, the genuine old light Greek type has left its mark to this day upon the physique of the inhabitants. In the ethnographical map of France, prepared by two distinguished French savants, the other Mediterranean departments are all, without exception, marked as "dark" or "very dark," while the department of the Bouches du Rhone is marked as "white," having, in fact, as large a proportion of fair complexions, blond hair, and light eyes as the eastern semi-German provinces, or as Normandy and Flanders. This curious survival of a very ancient type in spite of subsequent deluges, must be regarded as a notable instance of the way in which the popular stratum everywhere outlasts all changes of conquest and dynasty, of governing cla.s.s and ruling family.

Just think, indeed, how many changes and revolutions in this respect that fiery Ma.r.s.eilles has gone through since the early days of her h.e.l.lenic independence! First came that fatal but perhaps indispensable error of inviting the Roman aid against her Ligurian enemies, which gave the Romans their earliest foothold in Southern Gaul. Then followed the foundation of Aquae s.e.xtiae or Aix, the first Roman colony in what was soon to be the favorite province of the new conquerors. After that, in the great civil war, the Greeks of Ma.r.s.eilles were unlucky enough to espouse the losing cause; and, in the great day of Caesar's triumph, their town was reduced accordingly to the inferior position of a mere Roman dependency. Merged for a while in the all-absorbing empire, Ma.r.s.eilles fell at last before Visigoths and Burgundians in the stormy days of that vast upheaval, during which it is impossible for even the minutest historian to follow in detail the long list of endless conquests and re-conquests, while the wandering tribes ebbed and flowed on one another in wild surging waves of refluent confusion. Ostrogoth and Frank, Saracen and Christian, fought one after another for possession of the mighty city. In the process her Greek and Roman civilization was wholly swept away and not a trace now remains of those glorious basilicas, temples, and arches, which must once, no doubt, have adorned the metropolis of Grecian Gaul far more abundantly than they still adorn mere provincial centers like Arles and Nimes, Vienne, and Orange. But at the end of it all, when Ma.r.s.eilles emerges once more into the light of day as an integral part of the Kingdom of Provence, it still retains its essentially Greek population, fairer and handsomer than the surrounding dark Ligurian stock; it still boasts its clear-cut Greek beauty of profile, its h.e.l.lenic sharpness of wit and quickness of perception. And how interesting in this relation to note, too, that Ma.r.s.eilles kept up, till a comparatively late period in the Middle Ages, her active connection with the Byzantine Empire; and that her chief magistrate was long nominated--in name at least, if not in actual fact--by the shadowy representative of the Caesars at Constantinople.

May we not attribute to this continuous persistence of the Greek element in the life of Ma.r.s.eilles something of that curious local and self-satisfied feeling which northern Frenchmen so often deride in the born Ma.r.s.eillais? With the Greeks, the sense of civic individuality and civic separateness was always strong. Their _Polis_ was to them their whole world--the center of everything. They were Athenians, Spartans, Thebans first; Greeks or even Boeotians and Lacedaemonians in the second place only. And the Ma.r.s.eillais bourgeois, following the traditions of his Phocaean ancestry, is still in a certain sense the most thoroughly provincial, the most uncentralized and anti-Parisian of modern French citizens. He believes in Ma.r.s.eilles even more devoutly than the average boulevardier believes in Paris. To him the Cannebiere is the High Street of the world, and the Cours St. Louis the hub of the universe. How pleased with himself and all his surroundings he is, too! "At Ma.r.s.eilles, we do so-and-so," is a frequent phrase which seems to him to settle off-hand all questions of etiquette, of procedure, or of the fitness of things generally. "Ma.s.silia locuta est; causa finita est." That anything can be done better anywhere than it is done in the Cannebiere or the Old Port is an idea that never even so much as occurs to his smart and quick but somewhat geographically limited intelligence. One of the best and cleverest of Mars's clever Ma.r.s.eillais caricatures exhibits a good bourgeois from the Cours Pierre Puget, in his Sunday best, abroad on his travels along the Genoese Riviera. On the sh.o.r.e at San Remo, the happy, easy-going, conceited fellow, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over to the eyes with the happy-go-lucky c.o.c.kney joy of the South, sees a couple of pretty Italian fisher-girls mending their nets, and addresses them gaily in his own soft dialect: "He bien, mes pitchounettes, vous etes tellement croussetillantes que, sans ezaggerer, baga.s.se! ze vous croyais de Ma.r.s.eille!" To take anyone elsewhere for a born fellow-citizen was the highest compliment his good Ma.r.s.eillais soul could possibly hit upon.

Nevertheless, the Ma.r.s.eillais are not proud. They generously allow the rest of the world to come and admire them. They throw their doors open to East and West; they invite Jew and Greek alike to flow in unchecked, and help them make their own fortunes. They know very well that if Ma.r.s.eilles, as they all firmly believe, is the finest town in the round world, it is the trade with the Levant that made and keeps it so. And they take good care to lay themselves out for entertaining all and sundry as they come, in the handsomest hotels in Southern Europe. The mere through pa.s.senger traffic with India alone would serve to make Ma.r.s.eilles nowadays a commercial town of the first importance.

Ma.r.s.eilles, however, has had to pay a heavy price, more than once, for her open intercourse with the Eastern world, the native home of cholera and all other epidemics. From a very early time, the city by the Rhone has been the favorite haunt of the Plague and like oriental visitants; and more than one of its appalling epidemics has gained for itself a memorable place in history. To say the truth, old Ma.r.s.eilles laid itself out almost deliberately for the righteous scourge of zymotic disease. The _vieille ville_, that trackless labyrinth of foul and noisome alleys, tortuous, deeply worn, ill-paved, ill-ventilated, has been partly cleared away by the works of the Rue de la Republique now driven through its midst; but enough still remains of its Daedalean maze to show the adventurous traveller who penetrates its dark and drainless dens how dirty the strenuous Provencal can be when he bends his mind to it. There the true-blooded Ma.r.s.eillais of the old rock and of the Greek profile still lingers in his native insanitary condition; there the only scavenger is that "broom of Provence," the swooping _mistral_--the fierce Alpine wind which, blowing fresh down with sweeping violence from the frozen mountains, alone can change the air and cleanse the gutters of that filthy and malodorous mediaeval city. Everywhere else the _mistral_ is a curse: in Ma.r.s.eilles it is accepted with mitigated grat.i.tude as an excellent subst.i.tute for main drainage.

It is not to be wondered at that, under such conditions, Ma.r.s.eilles was periodically devastated by terrible epidemics. Communications with Constantinople, Alexandria, and the Levant were always frequent; communications with Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were far from uncommon.

And if the germs of disease were imported from without, they found at Ma.r.s.eilles an appropriate nest provided beforehand for their due development. Time after time the city was ravaged by plague or pestilence; the most memorable occasion being the great epidemic of 1720, when, according to local statistics (too high, undoubtedly), as many as forty thousand persons died in the streets, "like lambs on the hill-tops."

Never, even in the East itself, the native home of the plague, says Mery, the Ma.r.s.eilles poet-romancer, was so sad a picture of devastation seen as in the doomed streets of that wealthy city. The pestilence came, according to public belief, in a cargo of wool in May, 1720: it raged till, by September, the tale of dead per diem had reached the appalling number of a thousand.

So awful a public calamity was not without the usual effect in bringing forth counterbalancing examples of distinguished public service and n.o.ble self-denial. Chief among them s.h.i.+nes forth the name of the Chevalier Rose, who, aided by a couple of hundred condemned convicts, carried forth to burial in the ditches of La Tourette no less than two thousand dead bodies which infected the streets with their deadly contagion. There, quicklime was thrown over the horrible festering ma.s.s, in a spot still remembered as the "Graves of the Plague-stricken." But posterity has chosen most especially to select for the honors of the occasion Monseigneur Belzunce--"Ma.r.s.eilles' good bishop," as Pope calls him, who returned in the hour of danger to his stricken flock from the salons of Versailles, and by offering the last consolations of religion to the sick and dying, aided somewhat in checking the orgy of despair and of panic-stricken callousness which reigned everywhere throughout the doomed city. The picture is indeed a striking and romantic one. On a high altar raised in the Cours which now bears his name, the brave bishop celebrated Ma.s.s one day before the eyes of all his people, doing penance to heaven in the name of his flock, his feet bare, a rope round his neck, and a flaming torch held high in his hand, for the expiation of the sins that had brought such punishment. His fervent intercession, the faithful believed, was at last effectual. In May, 1721, the plague disappeared; but it left Ma.r.s.eilles almost depopulated. The bishop's statue in bronze, by Ramus, on the Cours Belzunce, now marks the site of this strange and unparalleled religious service.

From the Belzunce Monument, the Rue Tapis Vert and the Allees des Capucins lead us direct by a short cut to the Boulevard Longchamp, which terminates after the true modern Parisian fas.h.i.+on, with a vista of the great fountains and the Palais des Arts, a bizarre and original but not in its way unpleasing specimen of recent French architecture. It is meretricious, of course--that goes without the saying: what else can one expect from the France of the Second Empire? But it is distinctly, what the children call "grand," and if once you can put yourself upon its peculiar level, it is not without a certain queer rococo beauty of its own. As for the Chateau d'Eau, its warmest admirer could hardly deny that it is painfully _baroque_ in design and execution. Tigers, panthers, and lions decorate the approach; an allegorical figure representing the Durance, accompanied by the geniuses of the Vine and of Corn, holds the seat of honor in the midst of the waterspouts. To right and left a triton blows his sh.e.l.ly trumpet; griffins and fauns crown the summit; and triumphal arches flank the sides. A marvelous work indeed, of the Versailles type, better fitted to the ideas of the eighteenth century than to those of the age in which we live at present.

The Palais des Arts, one wing of this monument, encloses the usual French provincial picture-gallery, with the stereotyped Rubens, and the regulation Caraccio. It has its Raffael, its Giulio Romano, and its Andrea del Sarto. It even diverges, not without success, into the paths of Dutch and Flemish painting. But it is specially rich, of course, in Provencal works, and its Pugets in particular are both numerous and striking. There is a good Murillo and a square-faced Holbein, and many yards of modern French battles and nudities, alternating for the most part from the sensuous to the sanguinary. But the gem of the collection is a most characteristic and interesting Perugino, as beautiful as anything from the master's hand to be found in the galleries of Florence. Altogether, the interior makes one forgive the facade and the Chateau d'Eau. One good Perugino covers, like charity, a mult.i.tude of sins of the Ma.r.s.eillais architects.

Strange to say, old as Ma.r.s.eilles is, it contains to-day hardly any buildings of remote antiquity. One would be tempted to suppose beforehand that a town with so ancient and so continuous a history would teem with Graeco-Roman and mediaeval remains. As Phocaean colony, imperial town, mediaeval republic, or Provencal city, it has so long been great, famous, and prosperous that one might not unnaturally expect in its streets to meet with endless memorials of its early grandeur. Nothing could be farther from the actual fact. While Nimes, a mere second-rate provincial munic.i.p.ality, and Arles, a local Roman capital, have preserved rich mementoes of the imperial days--temples, arches, aqueducts, amphitheaters--Ma.r.s.eilles, their mother city, so much older, so much richer, so much greater, so much more famous, has not a single Roman building; scarcely even a second-rate mediaeval chapel. Its ancient cathedral has been long since pulled down; of its oldest church but a spire now remains, built into a vulgar modern pseudo-Gothic Calvary. St.

Victor alone, near the Fort St. Nicolas, is the one really fine piece of mediaeval architecture still left in the town after so many ages.

St. Victor itself remains to us now as the last relic of a very ancient and important monastery, founded by St. Ca.s.sian in the fifth century, and destroyed by the Saracens--those incessant scourges of the Provencal coast--during one of their frequent plundering incursions. In 1040 it was rebuilt, only to be once more razed to the ground, till, in 1350, Pope Urban V., who himself had been abbot of this very monastery restored it from the base, with those high, square towers, which now, in their worn and battered solidity, give it rather the air of a castellated fortress than of a Christian temple. Doubtless the strong-handed Pope, warned by experience, intended his church to stand a siege, if necessary, on the next visit to Ma.r.s.eilles of the Paynim enemy. The interior, too, is not unworthy of notice. It contains the catacombs where, according to the nave Provencal faith, Lazarus pa.s.sed the last days of his second life; and it boasts an antique black image of the Virgin, attributed by a veracious local legend to the skilful fingers of St. Luke the Evangelist.

Modern criticism ruthlessly relegates the work to a nameless but considerably later Byzantine sculptor.

By far the most interesting ecclesiastical edifice in Ma.r.s.eilles, however, even in its present charred and shattered condition, is the ancient pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, the antique High Place of primitive Phoenician and Ligurian wors.h.i.+p. How long a shrine for some local cult has existed on the spot it would be hard to say, but, at least, we may put it at two dozen centuries. All along the Mediterranean coast, in fact, one feels oneself everywhere thus closely in almost continuous contact with the earliest religious beliefs of the people. The paths that lead to these very antique sacred sites, crowning the wind-swept hills that overlook the valley, are uniformly worn deep by naked footsteps into the solid rock--a living record of countless generations of fervent wors.h.i.+pers. Christianity itself is not nearly old enough to account for all those profoundly-cut steps in the schistose slate or hard white limestone of the Provencal hills. The sanct.i.ty of the High Places is more ancient by far than Saint or Madonna. Before ever a Christian chapel crested these heights they were crested by forgotten Pagan temples; and before the days of Aphrodite or Pallas, in turn, they were crested by the shrines of some long since dead-and-buried Gaulish or Ligurian G.o.ddess.

Religions change, creeds disappear, but sacred sites remain as holy as ever; and here where priests now chant their loud hymns before the high altar, some nameless b.l.o.o.d.y rites took place, we may be sure, long ages since, before the lonely shrine of some Celtic Hesus or some hideous and deformed Phoenician Moloch.

It is a steep climb even now from the Old Port or the Anse des Catalans to the Colline Notre Dame; several different paths ascend to the summit, all alike of remote antiquity, and all ending at last in fatiguing steps.

Along the main road, hemmed in on either side by poor southern hovels, wondrous old witches of true Provencal ugliness drive a brisk trade in rosaries, and chaplets, and blessed medals. These wares are for the pilgrim; but to suit all tastes, the same itinerant chapwomen offer to the more worldly-minded tourist of the Cookian type appropriate gewgaws, in the shape of photographs, images, and cheap trinkets. At the summit stand the charred and blackened ruins of Notre Dame de la Garde. Of late years, indeed, that immemorial shrine has fallen on evil times and evil days in many matters. To begin with, the needs of modern defence compelled the Government some years since to erect on the height a fort, which encloses in its midst the ancient chapel. Even military necessities, however, had to yield in part to the persistent religious sentiment of the community; and though fortifications girt it round on every side, the sacred site of Our Lady remained unpolluted in the center of the great defensive works of the fortress. Pa.s.sing through the gates of those ma.s.sive bastions a strongly-guarded path still guided the faithful sailor-folk of Ma.r.s.eilles to the revered shrine of their ancestral Madonna. Nay, more; the antique chapel of the thirteenth century was superseded by a gorgeous Byzantine building, from designs by Esperandieu, all glittering with gold, and precious stones, and jewels. On the topmost belfry stood a gigantic gilded statue of Our Lady. Dome and apse were of cunning workmans.h.i.+p--white Carrara marble and African _rosso antico_ draped the interior with parti-colored splendor. Corsican granite and Esterel porphyry supported the ma.s.sive beams of the transepts; frescoes covered every inch of the walls: the pavement was mosaic, the high altar was inlaid with costly Florentine stonework. Every Ma.r.s.eilles fisherman rejoiced in heart that though the men of battle had usurped the sanctuary, their Madonna was now housed by the sons of the Faithful in even greater magnificence and glory than ever.

But in 1884 a fire broke out in the shrine itself, which wrecked almost irreparably the sumptuous edifice. The statue of the Virgin still crowns the facade, to be sure, and the chapel still shows up bravely from a modest distance; but within, all the glory has faded away, and the interior of the church is no longer accessible. Nevertheless, the visitor who stands upon the platform in front of the doorway and gazes down upon the splendid panoramic view that stretches before him in the vale beneath, will hardly complain of having had his stiff pull uphill for nothing.

Except the view of Montreal and the St. Lawrence River from Mont Royal Mountain, I hardly know a town view in the world to equal that from Notre Dame de la Garde, for beauty and variety, on a clear spring morning.

Close at our feet lies the city itself, filling up the whole wide valley with its ma.s.s, and spreading out long arms of faubourg, or roadway, up the lateral openings. Beyond rise the great white limestone hills, dotted about like mushrooms, with their glittering _bastides_. In front lies the sea--the blue Mediterranean--with that treacherous smile which has so often deceived us all the day before we trusted ourselves too rashly, with ill-deserved confidence, upon its heaving bosom. Near the sh.o.r.e the waves chafe the islets and the Chateau d'If; then come the Old Port and the busy ba.s.sins; and, beyond them all, the Chain of Estaques, rising grim and gray in serrated outline against the western horizon. A beautiful prospect though barren and treeless, for nowhere in the world are mountains barer than those great white guardians of the Provencal seaboard.

The fortress that overhangs the Old Port at our feet itself deserves a few pa.s.sing words of polite notice; for it is the Fort St. Nicolas, the one link in his great despotic chain by which Louis Quatorze bound recalcitrant Ma.r.s.eilles to the throne of the Tuileries. The town--like all great commercial towns--had always clung hard to its ancient liberties.

Ever rebellious when kings oppressed, it was a stronghold of the Fronde; and when Louis at last made his entry perforce into the malcontent city, it was through a breach he had effected in the heavy ramparts. The king stood upon this commanding spot, just above the harbor, and, gazing landward, asked the citizens round him how men called those little square boxes which he saw dotted about over the sunlit hillsides. "We call them _bastides_, sire," answered a courtly Ma.r.s.eillais. "Every citizen of our town has one." "Moi aussi, je veux avoir ma bastide a Ma.r.s.eille," cried the theatrical monarch, and straightway gave orders for building the Fort St. Nicolas: so runs the tale that pa.s.ses for history. But as the fort stands in the very best possible position, commanding the port, and could only have been arranged for after consultation with the engineers of the period--it was Vauban who planned it--I fear we must set down Louis's _bon mot_ as one of those royal epigrams which has been carefully prepared and led up to beforehand.

In every town, however, it is a favorite theory of mine that the best of all sights is the town itself: and nowhere on earth is this truism truer than here at Ma.r.s.eilles. After one has climbed Notre Dame, and explored the Prado and smiled at the Chateau d'Eau and stood beneath the frowning towers of St. Victor, one returns once more with real pleasure and interest to the crowded Cannebiere and sees the full tide of human life flow eagerly on down that picturesque boulevard. That, after all, is the main picture that Ma.r.s.eilles always leaves photographed on the visitor's memory. How eager, how keen, how vivacious is the talk; how fiery the eyes; how emphatic the gesture! With what teeming energy, with what feverish haste, the great city pours forth its hurrying thousands! With what endless spirit they move up and down in endless march upon its clattering pavements! _Circulez, messieurs, circulez_: and they do just circulate! From the Quai de la Fraternite to the Allees de Meilhan, what mirth and merriment, what life and movement! In every _cafe_, what warm southern faces! At every shop-door, what quick-witted, sharp-tongued, bartering humanity! I have many times stopped at Ma.r.s.eilles, on my way hither and thither round this terraqueous globe, farther south or east; but I never stop there without feeling once more the charm and interest of its strenuous personality. There is something of Greek quickness and Greek intelligence left even now about the old Phocaean colony. A Ma.r.s.eillais crowd has to this very day something of the sharp h.e.l.lenic wit; and I believe the rollicking humor of Aristophanes would be more readily seized by the public of the Alcazar than by any other popular audience in modern Europe.

"Bon chien cha.s.se de race," and every Ma.r.s.eillais is a born Greek and a born litterateur. Is it not partly to this old Greek blood, then, that we may set down the long list of distinguished men who have drawn their first breath in the Phocaean city? From the days of the Troubadours, Raymond des Tours and Barral des Baux, Folquet, and Rostang, and De Salles, and Berenger, through the days of D'Urfe, and Mascaron, and Barbaroux, and De Pastoret, to the days of Mery, and Barthelemy, and Taxile Delord, and Joseph Autran, Ma.r.s.eilles has always been rich in talent. It is enough to say that her list of great men begins with Petronius Arbiter, and ends with Thiers, to show how long and diversely she has been represented in her foremost citizens. Surely, then, it is not mere fancy to suppose that in all this the true h.e.l.lenic blood has counted for something! Surely it is not too much to believe that with the Greek profile and the Greek complexion the inhabitants have still preserved to this day some modest measure of the quick Greek intellect, the bright Greek fancy, and the plastic and artistic Greek creative faculty! I love to think it, for Ma.r.s.eilles is dear to me; especially when I land there after a sound sea-tossing.

Unlike many of the old Mediterranean towns, too, Ma.r.s.eilles has not only a past but also a future. She lives and will live. In the middle of the past century, indeed, it might almost have seemed to a careless observer as if the Mediterranean were "played out." And so in part, no doubt, it really is; the tracks of commerce and of international intercourse have s.h.i.+fted to wider seas and vaster waterways. We shall never again find that inland basin ringed round by a girdle of the great merchant cities that do the carrying trade and finance of the world. Our area has widened, so that New York, Rio, San Francisco, Yokohama, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay, and Melbourne have taken the place of Syracuse, Alexandria, Tyre, and Carthage, of Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople. But in spite of this cramping change, this degradation of the Mediterranean from the center of the world into a mere auxiliary or side-avenue of the Atlantic, a certain number of Mediterranean ports have lived on uninterruptedly by force of position from one epoch into the other. Venice has had its faint revival of recent years; Trieste has had its rise; Barcelona, Algiers, Smyrna, Odessa, have grown into great harbors for cosmopolitan traffic. Of this new and rejuvenescent Mediterranean, girt round by the fresh young nationalities of Italy and the Orient, and itself no longer an inland sea, but linked by the Suez Ca.n.a.l with the Indian Ocean and so turned into the main highway of the nations between East and West, Ma.r.s.eilles is still the key and the capital. That proud position the Phocaean city is not likely to lose. And as the world is wider now than ever, the new Ma.r.s.eilles is perforce a greater and a wealthier town than even the old one in its proudest days. Where tribute came once from the North African, Levantine, and Italian coasts alone, it comes now from every sh.o.r.e of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with Australia and the Pacific Isles thrown in as an afterthought. Regions Caesar never knew enrich the good Greeks of the Quai de la Fraternite: brown, black, and yellow men whom his legions never saw send tea and silk, cotton, corn, and tobacco to the crowded warehouses of the Cannebiere and the Rue de la Republique.

VI

NICE

The Queen of the Riviera--The Port of Limpia--Castle Hill--Promenade des Anglais--The Carnival and Battle of Flowers--Place Ma.s.sena, the center of business--Beauty of the suburbs--The road to Monte Carlo--The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche--Aspects of Nice and its environs.

Who loves not Nice, knows it not. Who knows it, loves it. I admit it is windy, dusty, gusty. I allow it is meretricious, fas.h.i.+onable, vulgar. I grant its Carnival is a noisy orgy, its Promenade a meeting place for all the wealthiest idlers of Europe or America, and its clubs more desperate than Monte Carlo itself in their excessive devotion to games of hazard.

And yet, with all its faults, I love it still. Yes, deliberately love it; for nothing that man has done or may ever do to mar its native beauty can possibly deface that beauty itself as G.o.d made it. Nay, more, just because it is Nice, we can readily pardon it these obvious faults and minor blemishes. The Queen of the Riviera, with all her coquettish little airs and graces, pleases none the less, like some proud and haughty girl in court costume, partly by reason of that very finery of silks and feathers which we half-heartedly deprecate. If she were not herself, she would be other than she is. Nice is Nice, and that is enough for us.

Was ever town more graciously set, indeed, in more gracious surroundings?

Was ever pearl girt round with purer emeralds? On every side a vast semicircle of mountains hems it in, among which the bald and naked summit of the Mont Cau d'Aspremont towers highest and most conspicuous above its darkling compeers. In front the blue Mediterranean, that treacherous Mediterranean all guile and loveliness, smiles with myriad dimples to the clear-cut horizon. Eastward, the rocky promontories of the Mont Boron and the Cap Ferrat jut boldly out into the sea with their fringe of white das.h.i.+ng breakers. Westward, the longer and lower spit of the point of Antibes bounds the distant view, with the famous pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garoupe just dimly visible on its highest knoll against the serrated ridge of the glorious Esterel in the background. In the midst of all nestles Nice itself, the central gem in that coronet of mountains.

There are warmer and more sheltered nooks on the Riviera, I will allow: there can be none more beautiful. Mentone may surpa.s.s it in the charm of its mountain paths and innumerable excursions; Cannes in the rich variety of its nearer walks and drives; but for mingled glories of land and sea, art and nature, antiquity and novelty, picturesqueness and magnificence, Nice still stands without a single rival on all that enchanted coast that stretches its long array of cities and bays between Ma.r.s.eilles and Genoa.

There are those, I know, who run down Nice as commonplace and vulgarized.

But then they can never have strayed one inch, I feel sure, from the palm-shaded _trottoir_ of the Promenade des Anglais. If you want Italian mediaevalism, go to the Old Town; if you want quaint marine life, go to the good Greek port of Limpia; if you want a grand view of sea and land and snow mountains in the distance, go to the Castle Hill; if you want the most magnificent panorama in the whole of Europe, go to the summit of the Corniche Road. No, no; these brawlers disturb our pure wors.h.i.+p. We have only one Nice, let us make the most of it.

It is so easy to acquire a character for superiority by affecting to criticize what others admire. It is so easy to p.r.o.nounce a place vulgar and uninteresting by taking care to see only the most vulgar and uninteresting parts of it. But the old Rivieran who knows his Nice well, and loves it dearly, is troubled rather by the opposite difficulty. Where there is so much to look at and so much to describe, where to begin? what to omit? how much to glide over? how much to insist upon? Language fails him to give a conception of this complex and polychromatic city in a few short pages to anyone who knows it by name alone as the cosmopolitan winter capital of fas.h.i.+onable seekers after health and pleasure. It is that, indeed, but it is so much more that one can never tell it.

For there are at least three distinct Nices, Greek, Italian, French; each of them beautiful in its own way, and each of them interesting for its own special features. To the extreme east, huddled in between the Mont Boron and the Castle Hill, lies the seafaring Greek town, the most primitive and original Nice of all; the home of the fisher-folk and the petty coasting sailors; the Nicaea of the old undaunted Phocaean colonists; the Nizza di Mare of modern Italians; the mediaeval city; the birthplace of Garibaldi.

Divided from this earliest Nice by the scarped rock on whose summit stood the chateau of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century Italian town (the Old Town as tourists nowadays usually call it, the central town of the three) occupies the s.p.a.ce between the Castle Hill and the half dry bed of the Paillon torrent. Finally, west of the Paillon, again, the modern fas.h.i.+onable pleasure resort extends its long line of villas, hotels, and palaces in front of the sea to the little stream of the Magnan on the road to Cannes, and stretches back in endless boulevards and avenues and gardens to the smiling heights of Cimiez and Carabacel. Every one of these three towns, "in three different ages born," has its own special history and its own points of interest. Every one of them teems with natural beauty, with picturesque elements, and with varieties of life, hard indeed to discover elsewhere.

The usual guide-book way to attack Nice is, of course, the topsy-turvey one, to begin at the Haussmannised white facades of the Promenade des Anglais and work backwards gradually through the Old Town to the Port of Limpia and the original nucleus that surrounds its quays. I will venture, however, to disregard this time-honored but grossly unhistorical practice, and allow the reader and myself, for once in our lives, to "begin at the beginning." The Port of Limpia, then, is, of course, the natural starting point and prime original of the very oldest Nice. Hither, in the fifth century before the Christian era, the bold Phocaean settlers of Ma.r.s.eilles sent out a little colony, which landed in the tiny land-locked harbor and called the spot Nicaea (that is to say, the town of victory) in grat.i.tude for their success against its rude Ligurian owners. For twenty-two centuries it has retained that name almost unchanged, now perhaps, the only memento still remaining of its Greek origin. During its flouris.h.i.+ng days as a h.e.l.lenic city Nicaea ranked among the chief commercial entrepots of the Ligurian coast; but when "the Province" fell at last into the hands of the Romans, and the dictator Caesar favored rather the pretensions of Cemenelum or Cimiez on the hill-top in the rear, the town that cl.u.s.tered round the harbor of Limpia became for a time merely the port of its more successful inland rival. Cimiez still possesses its fine ruined Roman amphitheater and baths, besides relics of temples and some other remains of the imperial period; but the "Quartier du Port," the ancient town of Nice itself, is almost dest.i.tute of any architectural signs of its antique greatness.

Nevertheless, the quaint little seafaring village that cl.u.s.ters round the harbor, entirely cut off as it is by the ramping crags of the Castle Hill from its later representative, the Italianized Nice of the last century, may fairly claim to be the true Nice of history, the only spot that bore that name till the days of the Bourbons. Its annals are far too long and far too eventful to be narrated here in full. Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Franks disputed for it in turn, as the border fortress between Gaul and Italy; and that familiar round white bastion on the eastern face of the Castle Hill, now known to visitors as the Tour Bellanda, and included (such is fate!) as a modern belvedere in the grounds of the comfortable Pension Suisse, was originally erected in the fifth century after Christ to protect the town from the attacks of these insatiable invaders. But Nice had its consolations, too, in these evil days, for when the Lombards at last reduced the hill fortress of Cimiez, the Roman town, its survivors took refuge from their conquerors in the city by the port, which thus became once more, by the fall of its rival, unquestioned mistress of the surrounding littoral.

The after story of Nice is confused and confusing. Now a va.s.sal of the Frankish kings; now again a member of the Genoese league; now engaged in a desperate conflict with the piratical Saracens; and now const.i.tuted into a little independent republic on the Italian model; Nizza struggled on against an adverse fate as a fighting-ground of the races, till it fell finally into the hands of the Counts of Savoy, to whom it owes whatever little still remains of the mediaeval castle. Continually changing hands between France and the kingdom of Sardinia in later days, it was ultimately made over to Napoleon III. by the Treaty of Villafranca, and is now completely and entirely Gallicized. The native dialect, however, remains even to the present day an intermediate form between Provencal and Italian, and is freely spoken (with more force than elegance) in the Old Town and around the enlarged modern basins of the Port of Limpia. Indeed, for frankness of expression and perfect absence of any false delicacy, the ladies of the real old Greek Nice surpa.s.s even their London compeers at Billingsgate.

One of the most beautiful and unique features of Nice at the present day is the Castle Hill a ma.s.s of solid rearing rock, not unlike its namesake at Edinburgh in position, intervening between the Port and the eighteenth century town, to which latter I will in future allude as the Italian city.

It is a wonderful place, that Castle Hill--wonderful alike by nature, art, and history, and I fear I must also add at the same time "uglification."

In earlier days it bore on its summit or slopes the _chateau fort_ of the Counts of Provence with the old cathedral and archbishop's palace (now wholly destroyed), and the famous deep well, long ranked among the wonders of the world in the way of engineering. But military necessity knows no law; the cathedral gave place in the fifteenth century to the bastions of the Duke of Savoy's new-fangled castle; the castle itself in turn was mainly battered down in 1706 by the Duke of Berwick; and of all its antiquities none now remain save the Tour Bellanda, in its degraded condition of belvedere, and the scanty ground-plan of the mediaeval buildings.

Nevertheless, the Castle Hill is still one of the loveliest and greenest spots in Nice. A good carriage road ascends it to the top by leafy gradients, and leads to an open platform on the summit, now converted into charming gardens, rich with palms and aloes and cactuses and bright southern flowers. On one side, alas! a painfully artificial cataract, fed from the overflow of the waterworks, falls in stiff cascades among hand-built rockwork; but even that impertinent addition to the handicraft of nature can hardly offend the visitor for long among such glorious surroundings. For the view from the summit is one of the grandest in all France. The eye ranges right and left over a mingled panorama of sea and mountains, scarcely to be equaled anywhere round the lovely Mediterranean, save on the Ligurian coast and the neighborhood of Sorrento. Southward lies the blue expanse of water itself, bounded only in very clear and cloudless weather by the distant peaks of Corsica on the doubtful horizon.

Westward, the coast-line includes the promontory of Antibes, basking low on the sea, the Iles Lerins near Cannes, the mouth of the Var, and the dim-jagged ridge of the purple Esterel. Eastward, the bluff headland of the Mont Boron, grim and brown, blocks the view towards Italy. Close below the spectator's feet the three distinct towns of Nice gather round the Port and the two banks of the Paillon, spreading their garden suburbs, draped in roses and lemon groves, high up the spurs of the neighboring mountains. But northward a tumultuous sea of Alps rises billow-like to the sky, the nearer peaks frowning bare and rocky, while the more distant domes gleam white with virgin snow. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. One glances around entranced, and murmurs to oneself slowly, "It is good to be here." Below, the carriages are rolling like black specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.