Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Fortunate among all other great cities, Marseilles has preserved all the essential elements of its former glory and opulence, and even added to them with the advance of ages, remaining meanwhile “encore jeune, souriante, robuste, comme si le temps ne pouvait rien sur sa force sereine, sur sa triomphante beauté.”

Save the Byzance of antiquity, no seaport of history has enjoyed a rôle so brilliant or so extended as Marseilles. The great maritime cities of antiquity have disappeared, but Marseilles goes on aggrandizing itself for ever, with—in spite of very general transformation—the impress of the successive epochs, Greek, Roman, Frankish, and feudal, still in evidence, here and there where the memory of some quaint and bygone custom is unearthed or some mediæval monument is brought to light.

By no means is all of the butterfly order here in the Mediterranean metropolis. “Les affaires” are very serious affairs, and profitable ones to those engaged in their pursuit, and the Marseillais business man is as keen as his fellows anywhere. There is also a life redolent of science and art, as vivid as that of the capital itself, and the press of Marseilles is one of the most literary in a nation of literary newspapers. Taine slandered Marseilles when he said that it was wholly given up to “la grosse joie,” as he did also when he said that the pleasure of its inhabitants was to make money out of breadstuffs or gamble in oil, or some such words. And Taine was a Marseillais, too.

Here, as in many others of the old-world cities of France, are streets so narrow that a cart may not turn around in them, all busy with the little affairs of the lower classes, full of taverns, bars and débits de vin, cheap cafés-chantants,—from which the stranger had best keep out,—and from one end to the other full of straggling sailors of all nationalities and tongues under the sun.

This population of sailors and dock-labourers is of a certain doubtful social probity, but all the same the spectacle is unique, and far more edifying to witness than a midnight ramble through San Francisco’s Chinatown, though perhaps more fraught with danger to one’s person.

The Rue de la République has pushed its way through this old quartier, but it has brought with it none of the modern life of the newer parts of the town, and the narrow, tortuous streets around and about the “Hôtel Dieu” are as brutally uncouth as any old-time quarter of a great city peopled by the poorer classes; with this difference, that at Marseilles everything, good, bad, and indifferent, is exaggerated.

It is here in this old quarter that one finds the true type of the Marseillais as he was in other days, if one knows where to look for him, and what he looks like when he meets him, for Marseilles is so full of strange men and women that the bird of passage is likely enough to confound Greek with Jew and Lascar with Arab, to say nothing of the difficulty of putting the Maltese and Portuguese in their proper places in the medley. When it comes to distinguishing the Provençal from the Marseillais and the Niçois from the Catalan, the task is more difficult still.

The Marseillais pur sang (except that it has been many centuries since he has been pur sang) is a unique type among the inhabitants of France, the product of many successive immigrations from most of the Mediterranean countries. He is indeed an extraordinary development, though in no way outré or unsympathetic, in spite of being a bloodthirsty-looking individual. To describe him were impossible. The Marseillais is a Marseillais by his dark complexion, by his svelte figure, and by the exuberance of his gestures and his voice. Always ready for adventure or pleasure, he is the very stuff of which the sea-rovers of another day were made.

The Marseillais has been portrayed by many a French writer, and his virtues have been lauded and his faults exposed. Mèry, a Marseillais himself, has traced an amusing character, while Edmond About and Taine were both struck by the Marseillais love of lucre and violent amusements. Alexandre Dumas has drawn more or less idyllic portraits of him.

The topographical transformation of Marseilles in recent times has been great. It was the first among the great cities of France to cut new streets and build sumptuous modern palaces devoted to civic affairs. The Rue de la République, if still lined in part with inferior houses, is nevertheless one of the fine thoroughfares of the world. Its laying out was a colossal task, cutting through the most solidly built and most ancient quarter of the city. Neither the aristocratic nor the bourgeois population have ever come to it for business or residence, but it serves the conduct of affairs in a way which the tortuous streets of the old régime would not have done. Many of the great avenues of the city are as grand in their way as the best and most aristocratic of those in Paris, and the world of commerce, of the Bourse, and of the liberal professions, lives surrounded by as much sumptuousness and good taste as the same classes in the capital itself. In other words, “la société Marseillais” is no less endowed with good taste and the love of luxurious appointments and surroundings than is the most Parisian of Parisian circles,—a term which has come to mean much in the refinements of modern life. “Des plaisirs bruyants et grossiers” may have struck the Taines of a former day, but the twentieth-century student of men and affairs will not place the Marseillais and the things of his household very far down in the social scale, provided he is possessed of a mind which is trained to make just estimates.