Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

No café in any small town in France is so crowded at the hour of the “apéritif,” and all the frequenters of Martigues’s most popular establishment have their own special bottle of whatever of the varnishy drinks they prefer from among those which go to make up the list of the Frenchman’s “apéritifs.” It is most remarkable that the cafés of Martigues should be so well patronized, and they are no mere longshore cabarets, either, but have walls of plate glass, and as many varieties of absinthe as you will find in a boulevard resort in Paris.

The Provençal historians state that Les Martigues did not exist as such until the middle of the thirteenth century, and that up to that time it consisted merely of a few families of fisherfolk living in huts upon the ruins of a former settlement, which may have been Roman, or perhaps Greek. This first settlement was on the Ile St. Geniez, which now forms the official quarter of the triple town.

Martigues is all but indescribable, its three quartiers are so widely diversified in interest and each so characteristic in the life which goes on within its confines,—Jonquières, with its shady Cours and narrow cobblestoned streets; the Ile, surrounded by its canals and fishing-boats, and Ferrières, a more or less fastidious faubourg backed up against the hillside, crowned by an old Capucin convent.

For a matter of fifteen hundred years there has been communication between the Étang de Berre and the Mediterranean, and the Martigaux have ever been alive to keeping the channel open. Through this canal the fish which give industry and prosperity to Martigues make their way with an almost inexplicable regularity. A migration takes place from the Mediterranean to the Étang from February to July, and from July to February they pass in the opposite direction.

Their capture in deep water is difficult, and the Martigaux have ingeniously built narrow waterways ending in a cul-de-sac, through which the fish must naturally pass on their passage between the Étang and the sea. The taking of the fish under such conditions is a sort of automatic process, so efficacious and simple that it would seem as though the plan might be tried elsewhere.

The name given to the sluices or fish thoroughfares is bourdigues, and the fishermen are known as bourdigaliers, a title which is not known or recognized elsewhere.

The bourdigue fishery is a monopoly, however, and many have been the attempts to break down the “vested interests” of the proprietors. Originally these rights belonged to the Archbishop of Arles, and later to the Seigneurs de Gallifet, Princes of Martigues, when the town was made a principality by Henri IV. It has continued to be a private enterprise unto to-day, and has been sanctioned by the courts, so there appears no immediate probability of the general populace of Martigues being able to participate in it.

There is a delicate fancy evolved from the connection of Martigues’s three sister faubourgs or quartiers. In the old days each had a separate entity and government, and each had a flag of its own; that of Jonquières was blue; the Ile, white; and Ferrières, red. There was an intense rivalry between the inhabitants of the three faubourgs; a rivalry which led to the beating of each other with oars and fishing-tackle, and other boisterous horse-play whenever they met one another in the canals or on the wharves. The warring factions of the three quartiers of Martigues, however, finally came to an understanding whereby the blue, white, and red banners of Jonquières, the Ile and Ferrières were united in one general flag. The adoption of the tricolour by the French nation was thus antedated, curiously enough, by two hundred years, and the tricolour of France may be considered a Martigues institution.

In the Quartier de Ferrières are moored the tartanes and balancelles, those great white-winged, lateen-rigged craft which are the natural component of a Mediterranean scene. Those hailing from Martigues are the aristocrats of their class, usually gaudily painted and flying high at the masthead a red and yellow striped pennant distinctive of their home port.

In the fish-market of Martigues the traveller from the north will probably make his first acquaintance with the tunny-fish or thon of the Mediterranean. He is something like the tarpon of the Mexican Gulf, and is a gamy sort of a fellow, or would be if one ever got him on the end of a line, which, however, is not the manner of taking him. He is caught by the gills in great nets of cord, as thick and heavy as a clothes-line, scores and hundreds at a time, and it takes the strength of many boatloads of men to draw the nets.