V
MARSEILLES
Its Greek founders and early history—Superb view from the sea—The Cannebière—The Parado and Chemin de la Corniche—Château d’If and Monte-Cristo—Influence of the Greeks in Marseilles—Ravages by plague and pestilence—Treasures of the Palais des Arts—The chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde—The new Marseilles and its future.
About six hundred years before the birth of Christ, when the Mediterranean, ringed round with a long series of commercial colonies, was first beginning to transform itself with marvelous rapidity into “a Greek lake,” a body of adventurous Hellenic mariners—young Columbuses of their day—full of life and vigor, sailed forth from Phocæa in Asia Minor, and steered their course, by devious routes, to what was then the Far West, in search of a fitting and unoccupied place in which to found a new trading city. Hard pressed by the Persians on their native shore, these free young Greeks—the Pilgrim Fathers of modern Marseilles—left behind for ever the city of their birth, and struck for liberty in some distant land, where no Cyrus or Xerxes could ever molest them. Sailing away past Greece and Sicily, and round Messina into the almost unknown Tyrrhenian Sea, the adventurous voyagers arrived at last, after various false starts in Corsica and elsewhere, at some gaunt white hills of the Gaulish coast, and cast anchor finally in a small but almost land-locked harbor, under the shelter of some barren limestone mountains. Whether they found a Phœnician colony already established on the spot or not, matters as little to history nowadays as whether their leaders’ names were really Simos and Protis or quite otherwise. What does matter is the indubitable fact that Massalia, as its Greek founders called it, preserved through all its early history the impress of a truly Hellenic city; and that even to this moment much good Greek blood flows, without question, in the hot veins of all its genuine native-born citizens.
The city thus founded has had a long, a glorious, and an eventful history. Marseilles is to-day the capital of the Mediterranean, the true commercial metropolis of that inland sea which now once more has become a single organic whole, after its long division by the Mohammedan conquest of North Africa and the Levant into two distinct and hostile portions. Naples, it is true, has a larger population; but then, a population of Neapolitan lazzaroni, mere human drones lounging about their hive and basking in the sunlight, does not count for much, except for the macaroni trade. What Venice once was, that Marseilles is to-day; the chief gate of Mediterranean traffic, the main mart of merchants who go down in ships on the inland sea. In the Cannebière and the Old Port, she possesses, indeed, as Edmond About once graphically phrased it, “an open door upon the Mediterranean and the whole world.” The steamers and sailing vessels that line her quays bind together the entire Mediterranean coast into a single organic commercial whole. Here is the packet for Barcelona and Malaga; there, the one for Naples, Malta, and Constantinople. By this huge liner, sunning herself at La Joliette, we can go to Athens and Alexandria; by that, to Algiers, Cagliari, and Tunis. Nay, the Suez Canal has extended her bounds beyond the inland sea to the Indian Ocean; and the Pillars of Hercules no longer restrain her from free use of the great Atlantic water-way. You may take ship, if you will, from the Quai de la Fraternité for Bombay or Yokohama, for Rio or Buenos Ayres, for Santa Cruz, Teneriffe, Singapore, or Melbourne. And this wide extension of her commercial importance Marseilles owes, mainly no doubt, to her exceptional advantages of natural position, but largely also, I venture to think, to the Hellenic enterprise of her acute and vigorous Græco-Gaulish population.
And what a marvelous history has she not behind her! First of all, no doubt, a small fishing and trading station of prehistoric Gaulish or Ligurian villagers occupied the site where now the magnificent façade of the Bourse commemorates the names of Massalia’s greatest Phocæan navigators. Then the Phœnicians supervened upon the changeful scene, and built those antique columns and forgotten shrines whose scanty remains were recently unearthed in the excavations for making the Rue de la République. Next came the early Phocæan colonists, reinforced a little later by the whole strength of their unconquerable townsmen, who sailed away in a body, according to the well-known legend preserved in Herodotus, when they could no longer hold out against the besieging Persian. The Greek town became as it were a sort of early Calcutta for the Gaulish trade, with its own outlying colonies at Nice, Antibes, and Hyères, and its inland “factories” (to use the old familiar Anglo-Indian word) at Tarascon, Avignon, and many other ancient towns of the Rhône valley. Her admirals sailed on every known sea: Euthymenes explored the coasts of Africa as far as Senegal; Pytheas followed the European shore past Britain and Ireland to the north of the Shetlands. Till the Roman arrived upon the Gaulish coast with his dreaded short-sword, Massalia, in short, remained undisputed queen of all the western Mediterranean waters.
Before the wolf of the Capitol, however, all stars paled. Yet even under the Roman Empire Massilia (as the new conquerors called the name, with a mere change of vowel) retained her Greek speech and manners, which she hardly lost (if we may believe stray hints in later historians) till the very eve of the barbarian invasion. With the period of the Crusades, the city of Euthymenes became once more great and free, and hardly lost her independence completely up to the age of Louis XIV. It was only after the French Revolution, however, that she began really to supersede Venice as the true capital of the Mediterranean. The decline of the Turkish power, the growth of trade with Alexandria and the Levant, the final crushing of the Barbary pirates, the conquest of Algeria, and, last of all, the opening of the Suez Canal—a French work—all helped to increase her commerce and population by gigantic strides in half a dozen decades. At the present day Marseilles is the chief maritime town of France, and the acknowledged center of Mediterranean travel and traffic.
The right way for the stranger to enter Marseilles is, therefore, by sea, the old-established high road of her antique commerce. The Old Port and the Cannebière are her front door, while the railway from Paris leads you in at best, as it were, through shabby corridors, by a side entry. Seen from the sea, indeed, Marseilles is superb. I hardly know whether the whole Mediterranean has any finer approach to a great town to display before the eyes of the artistic traveller. All round the city rises a semicircle of arid white hills, barren and bare indeed to look upon; but lighted up by the blue Provençal sky with a wonderful flood of borrowed radiance, bringing out every jutting peak and crag through the clear dry air in distinct perspective. Their sides are dotted with small square white houses, the famous bastides or country boxes of the good Marseillais bourgeois. In front, a group of sunlit rocky isles juts out from the bay, on one of which tower the picturesque bastions of the Chateau d’If, so familiar to the reader of “Monte-Cristo.” The foreground is occupied by the town itself, with its forest of masts, and the new dome of its checkered and gaudy Byzantine Cathedral, which has quite supplanted the old cathedral of St. Lazare, of which only a few traces remain. In the middle distance the famous old pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde crowns the summit of a pyramidal hill, with its picturesque mass of confused architecture. Away to right and left, those endless white hills gleam on with almost wearying brightness in the sun for miles together; but full in front, where the eye rests longest, the bustle and commotion of a great trading town teem with varied life upon the quays and landing-places.