Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Great ungainly tubs are the boats of the fisherfolk of Martigues (all except the tartanes, which are graceful white-winged birds). The motor-boat has not come to take the picturesqueness away from the slow-moving bêtes, which are more like the dory of the Gloucester fishermen, without its buoyancy, than anything else afloat.

Before the town, though two or three kilometres away, is the Mediterranean, and back of it the Étang de Berre, known locally as “La Petite Mer de Berre.”

Here is a little corner of France not yet overrun by tourists, and perhaps it never will be. Hardly out of sight from the beaten track of tourist travel to the south of France, and within twenty odd miles of Marseilles, it is a veritable “darkest Africa” to most travellers. To be sure, French and American artists know it well, or at least know the lovely little triplet town of Martigues, through the pictures of Ziem and Galliardini and some others; but the seekers after the diversions of the “Côte d’Azur” know it not, and there are no tea-rooms and no “bière anglaise” in the bars or cafés of the whole circuit of towns and villages which surround this little inland sea.

The aspect of this little-known section of Provence is not wholly as soft and agreeable as, in his mind’s eye, one pictures the country adjacent to the Mediterranean to be. The hills and the shores of the “Petite Mer” are sombre and severe in outline, but not sad or ugly by any means, for there is an almost tropical glamour over all, though the olive and fig trees, umbrella-pines and gnarled, dwarf cypresses, with juts and crops of bare gray stone rising up through the thin soil, are quite in contrast with the palms and aloes of the Riviera proper.

At the entrance to the “Petite Mer,” or, to give it its official name, the Étang de Berre, is a little port which bears the vague name of Port de Bouc.

Port de Bouc itself is on the great Golfe de Fos, where the sun sets in a blaze of colour for quite three hundred days in the year, and in a manner unapproached elsewhere outside of Turner’s landscapes. Perhaps it is for this reason that the town has become a sort of watering-place for the people of Nîmes, Arles, and Avignon. There is nothing of the conventional resort about it, however, and the inhabitants of it, and the neighbouring town of Fos, are mostly engaged in making bricks, paper, and salt, refining petrol, and drying the codfish which are landed at its wharves by great “trois-mâts,” which have come in from the banks of Terre Neuve during the early winter months. There is a great ship-building establishment here which at times gives employment to as many as a thousand men, and accordingly Port de Bouc and Fos-sur-Mer, though their names are hardly known outside of their own neighbourhoods, form something of a metropolis to-day, as they did when the latter was a fortified cité romaine.

The region round about has many of the characteristics of the Crau, a land half-terrestrial and half-aquatic, formed by the alluvial deposits of the mighty Rhône and the torrential rivers of its watershed.

At Venice one finds superb marble palaces, and a history of sovereigns and prelates, and much art and architecture of an excellence and grandeur which perhaps exceeds that at any other popular tourist point. Martigues resembles Venice only as regards its water-surrounded situation, its canal-like streets and the general air of Mediterranean picturesqueness of the life of its fisherfolk and seafarers.

Martigues has an advantage over the “Queen of the Adriatic” in that none of its canals are slimy or evil-smelling, and because there is an utter absence of theatrical effect and, what is more to the point, an almost unappreciable number of tourists.