Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

Another harvest of the sea, little practised to-day, but formerly much more remunerative, is the gathering of a variety of coral which quite equals that of Italy or Dalmatia. This industry has of late grown less and less important here, as elsewhere, for the Italians, Greeks, and Maltese have so scraped over the bottom of the Mediterranean with their great hooked tridents that but little coral is now found.

Cassis figures in a story connected with the great plague or pest which befell Marseilles in the eighteenth century. Pope Clement XI. had sent to the Monseigneur de Belsunce a cargo of wheat to be distributed among the famished of Marseilles or elsewhere, “comme il le jugerait à propos.” In December, 1720, a fleet of tartanes,—the same lateen-rigged ships which one sees engaged to-day in the open-sea fishing industry of Martigues,—bringing the wheat to the stricken city, was forced to anchor in the Golfe des Lèques, just offshore from the little port of Cassis, “par suite de la violente mistral qui balayait la mer.” The same mistral sweeps the seas around Marseilles to-day, and works all sorts of disaster to small craft if they do not take shelter.

When the tartanes were discovered off Cassis, the famishing sailor-folk of the town hesitated not a moment to put off and board them. The papal tartane attempted to parley with them, but every vessel in the fleet was attacked in true Barbary-pirate fashion and captured; and the entire consignment was seized and distributed among the distressed people of Cassis and the surrounding country. The “pirates,” however, paid the Archbishop of Marseilles the full value of the shipment, “comme c’était justice.” Mgr. de Belsunce, “coming to Cassis on donkey-back,” brought back the money and founded a school for both sexes with the capital, besides giving to the poor of the town an annual sum equal to the interest on the principal. Whether this was a case of “heaping coals of fire” on the delinquent heads, or not, history does not say.

Cassis is the native city of the Abbé Barthélémy, a savant who, amid the constant study of ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, and Arabic, found time to write the “Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce,” a work which has placed his name high in the roll of writers who have produced epoch-making literature.

Cassis

Cassis is the perfect type of the small Mediterranean port. High above the houses of its nineteen hundred inhabitants, on the apex of a wooded, red-rock hill, are the ruins of a château. To the east is the grim and gray Cap, a mountain of considerable pretensions, while to the west is Pointe Pin, a height of perhaps fifteen hundred metres sloping gently down to the sea, and covered with scrub-pines save for occasional granite outcrops.

Cassis is a highly industrious little town, now mostly given over to the manufacture of cement, the coastwise shipping of which gives a perpetual liveliness to the port. The fishing, too, though, as before said, not very considerable, results in a constant traffic with the wharves of Marseilles, where the product is sold.

The white wine of Cassis, a “vrai vin parfumé,” which in another day was produced much more extensively than now, is as much the proper thing to drink with bouillabaisse and les coquillages as in the north are Chablis and Graves with oysters and lobsters.