Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Marseilles in 1640

The passenger traffic of the great liners which come and go from this, the chief port of the south of Europe, is vast. The movement of paquebots and courriers is incessant, not only those that go to the Mediterranean ports of Algeria, Spain, Tunis, Corsica, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, and all those queer and little known ports of the near East as well, but also the great liners, French, English, German, Dutch, and Italian, which make the round voyages to the Far East and Australia with the regularity of Atlantic liners, but with vastly more romance about them, for the death-dealing pace of twenty-two or twenty-three knots an hour is unknown under the sunny skies of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

The old and new parts of Marseilles are one of the chief attractions for the stranger to this fascinating city. The Port Vieux and the new Bassins de la Joliette are separated by a peninsula which comprises the chief part of old Marseilles; indeed it is the site of the primitive city of the Phoceans, who came, it is undeniably asserted, six hundred years before Christ.

If the new ports of Marseilles have not the same picturesqueness as the Port Vieux, they at least overtop it in their intensity of action and the fever of commercialism. Here, too, hundreds of sailing-vessels (but of an entirely different species from those of the old port) come and go without cessation, bringing the diverse products of the Mediterranean shores to the markets of the world by way of Marseilles: piles of golden oranges from the Balearic Isles, figs from Smyrna, wool from Algeria, rice from Piedmont, arachides from Senegal, dyestuffs from Central America, pine from Sweden and Norway, and marbles from Italy. All this, and more, greets the eye at every turn, and the very sight of the varied cargoes tells a story which is fascinating and romantic even in these worldly times.

Take the orange cargoes for example; the mere handling of them between the ship and the shore is as picturesque as one could possibly imagine. The unloading is done by women called porteiris, all of whom it is said are Genoese, although why this should be is difficult for the tyro to understand, and the master longshoreman under whom they work apparently does not know either. The oranges are brought on shore in great baskets, which are poured out in a steady stream into the cars on the quay. During the process all is gay with song and laughter, it being one of the principal tenets of the creed of the southern labourers, men or women, that they must not be dull at their work.

CHAPTER IX.
A RAMBLE WITH DUMAS AND MONTE CRISTO

ONE day, something like four hundred years ago, a little colony of Catalans quitted Spain and, sailing across the terrible Gulf of Lions, came to Marseilles and begged the privilege of settling on that jutting tongue of land to the left of Marseilles’s Vieux Port, known even to-day as the Pointe des Catalans.

To reach the Pointe and Quartier des Catalans one follows along the quays of the old port and climbs the height to the left. Of course one should walk; no genuine literary pilgrim ever takes a car, though there is one leaving the Cannebière, marked “Catalans,” every few minutes.