Marseilles and its dependent towns must have intermarried freely with the
native Gaulish and Ligurian population of all the tributary Provençal
seaboard. The true antique Hellenic stock--the Aryan Achæans of the
classical 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 Marseilles, 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 Rhône 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 class and ruling family.
Just think, indeed, how many changes and revolutions in this respect that
fiery Marseilles has gone through since the early days of her Hellenic
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
Aquæ Sextiæ 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 Marseilles were unlucky enough to espouse the losing
cause; and, in the great day of Cæsar'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, Marseilles 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 Nîmes, Vienne, and
Orange. But at the end of it all, when Marseilles 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 Hellenic sharpness of wit and quickness of
perception. And how interesting in this relation to note, too, that
Marseilles 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 Cæsars at Constantinople.
May we not attribute to this continuous persistence of the Greek element
in the life of Marseilles something of that curious local and
self-satisfied feeling which northern Frenchmen so often deride in the
born Marseillais? 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 Lacedæmonians in the second
place only. And the Marseillais bourgeois, following the traditions of his
Phocæan ancestry, is still in a certain sense the most thoroughly
provincial, the most uncentralized and anti-Parisian of modern French
citizens. He believes in Marseilles even more devoutly than the average
boulevardier believes in Paris. To him the Cannebière 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 Marseilles, 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. "Massilia locuta est; causa finita est." That anything can be
done better anywhere than it is done in the Cannebière 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 Marseillais caricatures exhibits a good
bourgeois from the Cours Pierre Puget, in his Sunday best, abroad on his
travels along the Genoese Riviera. On the shore at San Remo, the happy,
easy-going, conceited fellow, brimming over to the eyes with the
happy-go-lucky Cockney joy of the South, sees a couple of pretty Italian
fisher-girls mending their nets, and addresses them gaily in his own soft
dialect: "Hé bien, més pitchounettes, vous êtes tellement croussetillantes
que, sans ézaggérer, bagasse! ze vous croyais de Marseille!" To take
anyone elsewhere for a born fellow-citizen was the highest compliment his
good Marseillais soul could possibly hit upon.
Nevertheless, the Marseillais 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 Marseilles,
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 passenger
traffic with India alone would serve to make Marseilles nowadays a
commercial town of the first importance.
Marseilles, 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 Rhône 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 Marseilles 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 République now driven through its midst; but
enough still remains of its Dædalean maze to show the adventurous
traveller who penetrates its dark and drainless dens how dirty the
strenuous Provençal can be when he bends his mind to it. There the
true-blooded Marseillais 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 mediæval city. Everywhere else the _mistral_ is a curse: in
Marseilles it is accepted with mitigated gratitude as an excellent
substitute for main drainage.
It is not to be wondered at that, under such conditions, Marseilles 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
Marseilles 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 Méry,
the Marseilles 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 noble
self-denial. Chief among them shines 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 mass, 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--"Marseilles' 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 Mass 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 Marseilles
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 Allées des Capucins
lead us direct by a short cut to the Boulevard Longchamp, which terminates
after the true modern Parisian fashion, 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 Château
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 shelly
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 Provençal
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 façade and the Château d'Eau. One good
Perugino covers, like charity, a multitude of sins of the Marseillais
architects.
Strange to say, old as Marseilles 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
Græco-Roman and mediæval remains. As Phocæan colony, imperial town,
mediæval republic, or Provençal 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 Nîmes, a mere second-rate provincial
municipality, and Arles, a local Roman capital, have preserved rich
mementoes of the imperial days--temples, arches, aqueducts,
amphitheaters--Marseilles, 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 mediæval 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
mediæval 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. Cassian in the fifth century, and
destroyed by the Saracens--those incessant scourges of the Provençal
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 Marseilles of the Paynim enemy. The interior, too, is not
unworthy of notice. It contains the catacombs where, according to the
naïve Provençal faith, Lazarus passed 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 Marseilles, 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 worship. 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
worshipers. 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 Provençal hills. The sanctity 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 goddess.
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 bloody 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 Provençal 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. Passing through the gates of those massive bastions a
strongly-guarded path still guided the faithful sailor-folk of Marseilles
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 Espérandieu, 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 workmanship--white
Carrara marble and African _rosso antico_ draped the interior with
parti-colored splendor. Corsican granite and Esterel porphyry supported
the massive 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 Marseilles 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 façade, 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 mass, 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 shore the waves
chafe the islets and the Château d'If; then come the Old Port and the busy
bassins; 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 Provençal seaboard.
The fortress that overhangs the Old Port at our feet itself deserves a few
passing 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 Marseilles 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 Marseillais. "Every citizen of our
town has one." "Moi aussi, je veux avoir ma bastide à Marseille," cried
the theatrical monarch, and straightway gave orders for building the Fort
St. Nicolas: so runs the tale that passes 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 Marseilles. After one has climbed Notre Dame, and explored
the Prado and smiled at the Château d'Eau and stood beneath the frowning
towers of St. Victor, one returns once more with real pleasure and
interest to the crowded Cannebière and sees the full tide of human life
flow eagerly on down that picturesque boulevard. That, after all, is the
main picture that Marseilles 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 Fraternité to the Allées de Meilhan, what
mirth and merriment, what life and movement! In every _café_, what warm
southern faces! At every shop-door, what quick-witted, sharp-tongued,
bartering humanity! I have many times stopped at Marseilles, 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 Phocæan colony. A Marseillais
crowd has to this very day something of the sharp Hellenic 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 chasse de race," and every Marseillais is a born Greek and a
born littérateur. 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 Phocæan city? From the days of the Troubadours, Raymond des
Tours and Barral des Baux, Folquet, and Rostang, and De Salles, and
Bérenger, through the days of D'Urfé, and Mascaron, and Barbaroux, and De
Pastoret, to the days of Méry, and Barthélemy, and Taxile Delord, and
Joseph Autran, Marseilles 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 Hellenic 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
Marseilles is dear to me; especially when I land there after a sound
sea-tossing.