Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

The general scheme was carried out further by Mazarin, the wily Italian who succeeded Richelieu. In company with Louis XIV., Mazarin visited Toulon, and then and there decided that it should take the first place in the kingdom as a stronghold for the navy.

Toulon then became the greatest naval arsenal the world had known. In 1670 it armed forty-two ships of the line, among them many three-deckers, which all lovers of the romance of the seas have come to accept as the most imposing craft then afloat, whatever may have been their additional virtues. Among those fitted for sea and armed at Toulon was the Magnifique, a vessel which excited universal enthusiasm all over Europe, not only because it mounted a hundred and four guns, but because the sculptor Puget had designed her decorations, and decorations on ships were much more ornate in those days than they are in the present vagaries of the “art nouveau.”

Puget lived at Toulon at the time, and had indeed already designed the caryatides which stand out so prominently in the Toulon’s Hôtel de Ville. His house in the Rue de la République, known by every one as the “Maison Puget,” is one of the shrines at which art-worshippers should not neglect to pay homage. It has some remarkably beautiful features, a fine stairway in wrought iron, an elaborate newel-post, and many similar decorations.

Back of Toulon is the great gray mass of the Faron, fortified, as is every height and point of view round about. From the summit of this great height (546 metres) one may see, on a clear day, Corsica and the Alps of Savoie. The fortifications are too numerous to call by name here, and, indeed, they are uninteresting enough to the lover of the romantically picturesque, regardless of their worth from a strategic point of view. Like the cannon, the forts are everywhere.

Formerly the port of Toulon was closed by sinking a great chain across the harbour-mouth. It went down with the sinking of the sun and only rose at daybreak. The guardianship of this defence was given to some “homme de confiance” of Toulon as a sort of deserved honour or glory. This was in the seventeenth century, and to-day, though the guard-ships and the search-lights of the forts do the same service, the name “Chaine Vieille” is still in the mouths of the old sailors and fishermen as they make their way to and fro from the Grande to the Petite Rade.

Toulon has among its great men of the past the name of the Chevalier Paul, perhaps first and foremost of all the seafarers of France since the day of Dougay-Trouin. He had fixed his residence in the valley of the Dardennes, with a roof over his head “tout à fait digne d’un prince.” In the month of February, 1660, the celebrated sailor received Louis XIV., Anne of Austria, the Duc d’Orléans, Cardinal Mazarin, “la grande Mademoiselle,” innumerable princes and seigneurs, four Secrétaires d’État, the ambassador of Venice, and the papal nuncio. This royal company was splendidly fêted, much after the manner of those assemblies held in the previous century in the châteaux of Touraine. The Chevalier bore until his death the title of supreme “Commandant de la Marine,” and when his death came, at the age of seventy, he made the poor of the city his heirs.

One memory of Toulon, which is familiar to students of history and romance, are the prisons and galleys of other days. Dumas draws a vivid picture of the life in the galleys in one of his little known but most absorbing tales, “Gabriel Lambert.”

To be sure, those who were condemned “à ramer sur les galères” were mostly culprits who deserved some sort of punishment, but the survival of the institution was one that one marvels at in these advanced centuries.

Really the galley, and the uses to which it was put at Toulon in the eighteenth century, was a survival of the galley of the ancients. It was a long slim craft, of light draught, propelled by a single, double, or treble bank of oars, and sometimes sails.

The punishment of the galleys, that is to say, the obligation to “ramer sur les galères,” was applied to certain classes of criminals who were known as forçats or galériens. The crime of Gabriel Lambert, of whom Dumas wrote with such fidelity, was that of counterfeiting.