By Rhône And Saône
It is the dream of the Marseillais that some day the turgid Rhône may be made to empty itself at the foot of the famous Cannebière, and so add to the already great prosperity of the most cosmopolitan and picturesque of Mediterranean ports.
The idea has been thought of since Roman times, and Napoleon himself nearly undertook the work. In later days radical and vehement candidates for senatorships and deputyships have promised their Marseilles and Bouches-du-Rhône constituencies much more, with regard to the same thing, than the hand of man is ever likely to be able to accomplish.
The Rhône still pushes its way through the Crau and the Camargue and comes to the sea many kilometres west of the Planier light and Château d'If, which guard the entrance to Marseilles's Old Port.
We had backed and filled many times between Martigues and Marseilles during the interval which we so enjoyably spent chez Chabas, and we had come to know this unknown little corner of old Provence intimately, and to love it.
Marseilles was our great dissipation, its hotels, its cafés and restaurants, its cosmopolitan life and movement, its gaiety and the picturesqueness of its old streets and wharves. Marseilles is a neglected tourist point; it should be better known; but it is no place for automobilists, unless they are prepared for ten kilometres, in any direction, of the most villainous suburban roadway in France. The roadways themselves are good enough; it is the abnormal and the peculiar nature of the traffic that makes them so disagreeable; great hooting tramways, charettes loaded with all the products of the earth and the hands of man, and drawn by long tandem lines, three, four, five, and even six horses to a single cart. Added to this, the exits and entrances are all up and down hill, and, accordingly, the roadways of suburban Marseilles are a terror to stranger automobilists and an eternal regret to those who live near-by.
We went up the Rhône in a howling mistral, against it, mark you, for it pleases the Ruler of the universe to have that cyclonic breeze of the Rhône valley, one of the three plagues of Provence, blow always from the north.
We left Martigues in an extraordinary and unusual fog, reminiscent of London, except that it was not black and sooty. It was dense, however; dense as if it were enshrouding the Grand Banks, and of the same impenetrable, milky consistency. To be sure the morning sun had not had an opportunity as yet to burn it off—automobilists on tour are early birds, and the autumn sun rises late.
Up around the eastern shore of the Etang de Berre we went, and, crossing the Tête Noire, passed Salon just as a pale yellow light struggled through the rifts just topping the Maritime Alps off to the eastward. We could not see the mountains, but we knew they were there, for we still had lingering memories of a long pull we once made off in that direction, with an old crock of an automobile of primitive make in the early days of the sport, or the art, whichever one chooses to call it, though it unquestionably was an art then to keep an automobile going at all.