The real traveller of enthusiasm, the kind that Sterne wrote for when he said “let us go to France,” will not be content merely to know Marseilles, the town, but will wander afield to Estaque, to Allauch, to Les Aygalades, and to any and all of the scores of excursion points which the Marseillais, more than the inhabitants of any other city in France, are so fond of visiting. Then, and then only, will one know the real life of the Marseillais.
The tour of the shores of the golfe alone will occupy a week of one’s time very profitably, be he poet or painter.
At Les Aygalades are the remains of a Carmelite chapel, which came under the special patronage of King René of Anjou, also a château constructed for the Maréchal de Villars.
A Cabanon
Back of the Bassin d’Arenc is a hamlet, now virtually a part of Marseilles itself, perched high upon a hill, from which one gets a marvellous panorama of all the life of the great seaport.
Seon-Saint-André was formerly a suburb composed entirely of vineyards, where picturesque peasants worked and sang as they do in opera, and spent their evenings rejoicing over the one great meal of the day. To-day all suggestion of this rural and sylvan life has disappeared, and brick-yards and soap-factories furnish an entirely different colour scheme for one’s canvas.
At St. Julien Cæsar had one of his many camps which he so plentifully scattered over Gaul, and, as usual, he selected it with judgment; certainly nothing but modern engines of war could ever have successfully attacked his intrenchments from land or sea.
All the country immediately back of Marseilles to the eastward was, in a former day, covered with a dense forest. A breach was made in it by Charles IX., who had not the least notion of what the preservation of the kingdom’s resources meant, though another monarch, René d’Anjou, came here frequently to the tiny chapel of St. Marguerite—the remains of which still exist in the suburb of the same name—to pray that he might be favoured by capturing “the deer of many horns.” From this latter fact it may be inferred that he was a true lover and preserver of forests, like the later François of Renaissance times.