Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Dantes’s Mercédès was a Catalane of the Catalans, and is the most lovable figure in all the Dumas portrait gallery. Descended from the early settlers of the colony at Marseilles, Mercédès, the betrothed of the ambitious Dantes, was indeed lovely, that is, if we accept Dumas’s picture of her, and the author’s portraiture was always exceedingly good, whatever may have been his errors when dealing with historical fact.

Half-Moorish, half-Spanish, and with a very little Provençal blood, the Catalans kept their distinct characteristics, while the other settlers of Marseilles developed into the type well known and recognized to-day as the Marseillais.

Their looks, manners, and customs, their houses and their clothes were faithful—and are still, to no small extent—to the early traditions of the race, and, by intermarrying, the type was kept comparatively pure, so that in this twentieth century the Catalan women of Marseilles are as distinct a species of beautiful women as the Niçoise or the Arlesienne, both types distinct from their French sisters, and each of great repute among the world’s beautiful women.

Dumas was not very explicit with regard to the geography of this Catalan quarter of Marseilles, though his references to it were numerous in that most famous of all his romances, “Monte Cristo.”

At the time of which Dumas wrote (1815) its topographical aspect had probably changed but little from what it had been for a matter of three or four centuries, and the sea-birds then, even as now, hovered about the jutting promontory and winged their way backwards and forwards across the mouth of the old harbour, where the ugly but useful Pont Transbordeur now stretches its five hundred metres of wire ropes.

Around the Anse and the Pointe des Catalans were—and are still—grouped the habitations of the Catalan fisher and sailor folk. One sees to-day, among the men and women alike, the same distinction of type which Dumas took for his ideal, and one has only to climb any of the narrow stairlike streets which wind up from the sea-level to see the counterpart of Dantes’s Mercédès sitting or standing by some open doorway.

For a detailed, but not too lengthy, description of the manners and customs of the Catalans of Marseilles, one can not do better than turn to the pages of Dumas and read for himself what the great romancer wrote of the lovely Mercédès and her kind.

There are at least a half-dozen chapters of “Monte Cristo” which, if re-read, would form a very interesting commentary on the Marseilles of other days.

The opening lines of Dumas’s romance gives the key-note of old Marseilles: “On the 28th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre Dame de la Garde signalled the ‘trois-mâts’ Pharaon, from Smyrna, Triest, and Naples.”

The functions of Notre Dame de la Garde have changed somewhat since that time, but it is still the dominant note and beacon by land and sea, from which sailors and landsmen alike take their bearings, and it is the best of starting-points for one who would review the past history of this most cosmopolitan of all European cities.