I.
THE CATHEDRALS OF THE SEA.
Marseilles.
Perhaps a Phœnician settlement, certainly a Carthaginian mart, later a Grecian city, and in the final years of the pagan era possessed by the Romans, no city of France has had more diverse influences of antique civilisation than Marseilles, none responded more proudly to its ancient opportunities; and not only was it commercially wealthy and renowned, but so rich in schools that it was called “another, a new Athens.” It was also the port of an adventurous people, who founded Nice, Antibes, la Ciotat, and Agde, and explored a part of Africa and Northern Europe; and at the fall of the Roman Empire it became, by very virtue of its riches and safe harbour, the envy and the prey of a succession of barbaric and “infidel” invaders. In the Middle Ages it had all the vicissitudes of wars and sieges to which a great city could be subjected. It had a Viscount, and from very early days, a Bishop; it was at one time part of the Kingdom of Arles; and later it recognised the suzerainty of the Counts of Provence. When these lords were warring or crusading, it took advantage of their absence or their troubles and governed itself through its Consuls; became a Provençal Republic after the type of the Italian cities and other towns of the Mediterranean country; treated with the Italian Republics on terms of perfect equality; and although finally annexed to France by the wily Louis of the Madonnas, its people were continually haunted by memories of their former independence, and not only struggled for municipal rights and liberties, but took sides for or against the most powerful monarchs of continental history as if they had been a resourceful country rather than a city. It succored the League, defied Henry IV and Richelieu; and treating Kings in trouble as cavalierly as declining Counts, Marseilles tried at the death of Henry III to secede from France and recover its autonomy under a Consul, Charles de Cazaulx. Promptly defeated, it still continued to think independently, and struggle, as best it might, for freedom of administration; and although from the time of Pompey to that of Louis XIV it has had an ineradicable tendency to stand against the government, it has survived the results of all its contumacies, its plagues, wars, and sieges, and the destructiveness of its phase of the Revolution, when it had a Terror of its own. Notwithstanding modern rivals in the Mediterranean, Marseilles is to-day one of the largest and most prosperous of French cities. Built in amphitheatre around the bay, it is beautiful in general view, its streets bustle with commercial activity, and its vast docks swarm with workmen. The storms of the past have gone over Marseilles as the storms of nature over its sea, have been as passionate, and have left as little trace. Instead of Temples, Forum, and Arena, there are the Palais de Longchamps, the Palais de Justice, and the Christian Arch of Triumph. Instead of the muddy and unhealthy alley-ways of Mediævalism, there are broad streets and wide boulevards, and in spite of its antiquity Marseilles is a city of to-day, in monuments, aspect, spirit, and even in class distinction. “Here,” writes Edmond About, “are only two categories of people, those who have made a fortune and those who are trying to make one, and the principal inhabitants are parvenus in the most honourable sense of the word.”
Entrevaux.
People gather around the mail-coach as it
makes its daily halt before the drawbridge. [To List]
“In the most honourable sense of the word,” the Cathedral of Marseilles is also typical of the city, “parvenue.” Its first stone was placed by Prince Louis Napoleon in 1852, and as the modern has overgrown the classic and mediæval greatness of Marseilles, so the new “Majeure” has eclipsed, if it has not yet entirely replaced, the old Cathedral; and except the stern Abbey-church of Saint-Victor, an almost solitary relic of true mediæval greatness, it is the finest church of the city.
