It is not to be wondered at that, under such conditions, Marseilles was periodically devastated by terrible epidemics. Communications with Constantinople, Alexandria, and the Levant were always frequent; communications with Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were far from uncommon. And if the germs of disease were imported from without, they found at Marseilles an appropriate nest provided beforehand for their due development. Time after time the city was ravaged by plague or pestilence; the most memorable occasion being the great epidemic of 1720, when, according to local statistics (too high, undoubtedly), as many as forty thousand persons died in the streets, “like lambs on the hill-tops.” Never, even in the East itself, the native home of the plague, says Méry, the Marseilles poet-romancer, was so sad a picture of devastation seen as in the doomed streets of that wealthy city. The pestilence came, according to public belief, in a cargo of wool in May, 1720: it raged till, by September, the tale of dead per diem had reached the appalling number of a thousand.

So awful a public calamity was not without the usual effect in bringing forth counterbalancing examples of distinguished public service and noble self-denial. Chief among them shines forth the name of the Chevalier Rose, who, aided by a couple of hundred condemned convicts, carried forth to burial in the ditches of La Tourette no less than two thousand dead bodies which infected the streets with their deadly contagion. There, quicklime was thrown over the horrible festering mass, in a spot still remembered as the “Graves of the Plague-stricken.” But posterity has chosen most especially to select for the honors of the occasion Monseigneur Belzunce—“Marseilles’ good bishop,” as Pope calls him, who returned in the hour of danger to his stricken flock from the salons of Versailles, and by offering the last consolations of religion to the sick and dying, aided somewhat in checking the orgy of despair and of panic-stricken callousness which reigned everywhere throughout the doomed city. The picture is indeed a striking and romantic one. On a high altar raised in the Cours which now bears his name, the brave bishop celebrated Mass one day before the eyes of all his people, doing penance to heaven in the name of his flock, his feet bare, a rope round his neck, and a flaming torch held high in his hand, for the expiation of the sins that had brought such punishment. His fervent intercession, the faithful believed, was at last effectual. In May, 1721, the plague disappeared; but it left Marseilles almost depopulated. The bishop’s statue in bronze, by Ramus, on the Cours Belzunce, now marks the site of this strange and unparalleled religious service.

From the Belzunce Monument, the Rue Tapis Vert and the Allées des Capucins lead us direct by a short cut to the Boulevard Longchamp, which terminates after the true modern Parisian fashion, with a vista of the great fountains and the Palais des Arts, a bizarre and original but not in its way unpleasing specimen of recent French architecture. It is meretricious, of course—that goes without the saying: what else can one expect from the France of the Second Empire? But it is distinctly, what the children call “grand,” and if once you can put yourself upon its peculiar level, it is not without a certain queer rococo beauty of its own. As for the Château d’Eau, its warmest admirer could hardly deny that it is painfully baroque in design and execution. Tigers, panthers, and lions decorate the approach; an allegorical figure representing the Durance, accompanied by the geniuses of the Vine and of Corn, holds the seat of honor in the midst of the waterspouts. To right and left a triton blows his shelly trumpet; griffins and fauns crown the summit; and triumphal arches flank the sides. A marvelous work indeed, of the Versailles type, better fitted to the ideas of the eighteenth century than to those of the age in which we live at present.

The Palais des Arts, one wing of this monument, encloses the usual French provincial picture-gallery, with the stereotyped Rubens, and the regulation Caraccio. It has its Raffael, its Giulio Romano, and its Andrea del Sarto. It even diverges, not without success, into the paths of Dutch and Flemish painting. But it is specially rich, of course, in Provençal works, and its Pugets in particular are both numerous and striking. There is a good Murillo and a square-faced Holbein, and many yards of modern French battles and nudities, alternating for the most part from the sensuous to the sanguinary. But the gem of the collection is a most characteristic and interesting Perugino, as beautiful as anything from the master’s hand to be found in the galleries of Florence. Altogether, the interior makes one forgive the façade and the Château d’Eau. One good Perugino covers, like charity, a multitude of sins of the Marseillais architects.

Strange to say, old as Marseilles is, it contains to-day hardly any buildings of remote antiquity. One would be tempted to suppose beforehand that a town with so ancient and so continuous a history would teem with Græco-Roman and mediæval remains. As Phocæan colony, imperial town, mediæval republic, or Provençal city, it has so long been great, famous, and prosperous that one might not unnaturally expect in its streets to meet with endless memorials of its early grandeur. Nothing could be farther from the actual fact. While Nîmes, a mere second-rate provincial municipality, and Arles, a local Roman capital, have preserved rich mementoes of the imperial days—temples, arches, aqueducts, amphitheaters—Marseilles, their mother city, so much older, so much richer, so much greater, so much more famous, has not a single Roman building; scarcely even a second-rate mediæval chapel. Its ancient cathedral has been long since pulled down; of its oldest church but a spire now remains, built into a vulgar modern pseudo-Gothic Calvary. St. Victor alone, near the Fort St. Nicolas, is the one really fine piece of mediæval architecture still left in the town after so many ages.

St. Victor itself remains to us now as the last relic of a very ancient and important monastery, founded by St. Cassian in the fifth century, and destroyed by the Saracens—those incessant scourges of the Provençal coast—during one of their frequent plundering incursions. In 1040 it was rebuilt, only to be once more razed to the ground, till, in 1350, Pope Urban V., who himself had been abbot of this very monastery restored it from the base, with those high, square towers, which now, in their worn and battered solidity, give it rather the air of a castellated fortress than of a Christian temple. Doubtless the strong-handed Pope, warned by experience, intended his church to stand a siege, if necessary, on the next visit to Marseilles of the Paynim enemy. The interior, too, is not unworthy of notice. It contains the catacombs where, according to the naïve Provençal faith, Lazarus passed the last days of his second life; and it boasts an antique black image of the Virgin, attributed by a veracious local legend to the skilful fingers of St. Luke the Evangelist. Modern criticism ruthlessly relegates the work to a nameless but considerably later Byzantine sculptor.

By far the most interesting ecclesiastical edifice in Marseilles, however, even in its present charred and shattered condition, is the ancient pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, the antique High Place of primitive Phœnician and Ligurian worship. How long a shrine for some local cult has existed on the spot it would be hard to say, but, at least, we may put it at two dozen centuries. All along the Mediterranean coast, in fact, one feels oneself everywhere thus closely in almost continuous contact with the earliest religious beliefs of the people. The paths that lead to these very antique sacred sites, crowning the wind-swept hills that overlook the valley, are uniformly worn deep by naked footsteps into the solid rock—a living record of countless generations of fervent worshipers. Christianity itself is not nearly old enough to account for all those profoundly-cut steps in the schistose slate or hard white limestone of the Provençal hills. The sanctity of the High Places is more ancient by far than Saint or Madonna. Before ever a Christian chapel crested these heights they were crested by forgotten Pagan temples; and before the days of Aphrodite or Pallas, in turn, they were crested by the shrines of some long since dead-and-buried Gaulish or Ligurian goddess. Religions change, creeds disappear, but sacred sites remain as holy as ever; and here where priests now chant their loud hymns before the high altar, some nameless bloody rites took place, we may be sure, long ages since, before the lonely shrine of some Celtic Hesus or some hideous and deformed Phœnician Moloch.

It is a steep climb even now from the Old Port or the Anse des Catalans to the Colline Notre Dame; several different paths ascend to the summit, all alike of remote antiquity, and all ending at last in fatiguing steps. Along the main road, hemmed in on either side by poor southern hovels, wondrous old witches of true Provençal ugliness drive a brisk trade in rosaries, and chaplets, and blessed medals. These wares are for the pilgrim; but to suit all tastes, the same itinerant chapwomen offer to the more worldly-minded tourist of the Cookian type appropriate gewgaws, in the shape of photographs, images, and cheap trinkets. At the summit stand the charred and blackened ruins of Notre Dame de la Garde. Of late years, indeed, that immemorial shrine has fallen on evil times and evil days in many matters. To begin with, the needs of modern defence compelled the Government some years since to erect on the height a fort, which encloses in its midst the ancient chapel. Even military necessities, however, had to yield in part to the persistent religious sentiment of the community; and though fortifications girt it round on every side, the sacred site of Our Lady remained unpolluted in the center of the great defensive works of the fortress. Passing through the gates of those massive bastions a strongly-guarded path still guided the faithful sailor-folk of Marseilles to the revered shrine of their ancestral Madonna. Nay, more; the antique chapel of the thirteenth century was superseded by a gorgeous Byzantine building, from designs by Espérandieu, all glittering with gold, and precious stones, and jewels. On the topmost belfry stood a gigantic gilded statue of Our Lady. Dome and apse were of cunning workmanship—white Carrara marble and African rosso antico draped the interior with parti-colored splendor. Corsican granite and Esterel porphyry supported the massive beams of the transepts; frescoes covered every inch of the walls: the pavement was mosaic, the high altar was inlaid with costly Florentine stonework. Every Marseilles fisherman rejoiced in heart that though the men of battle had usurped the sanctuary, their Madonna was now housed by the sons of the Faithful in even greater magnificence and glory than ever.

But in 1884 a fire broke out in the shrine itself, which wrecked almost irreparably the sumptuous edifice. The statue of the Virgin still crowns the façade, to be sure, and the chapel still shows up bravely from a modest distance; but within, all the glory has faded away, and the interior of the church is no longer accessible. Nevertheless, the visitor who stands upon the platform in front of the doorway and gazes down upon the splendid panoramic view that stretches before him in the vale beneath, will hardly complain of having had his stiff pull uphill for nothing. Except the view of Montreal and the St. Lawrence River from Mont Royal Mountain, I hardly know a town view in the world to equal that from Notre Dame de la Garde, for beauty and variety, on a clear spring morning.

Close at our feet lies the city itself, filling up the whole wide valley with its mass, and spreading out long arms of faubourg, or roadway, up the lateral openings. Beyond rise the great white limestone hills, dotted about like mushrooms, with their glittering bastides. In front lies the sea—the blue Mediterranean—with that treacherous smile which has so often deceived us all the day before we trusted ourselves too rashly, with ill-deserved confidence, upon its heaving bosom. Near the shore the waves chafe the islets and the Château d’If; then come the Old Port and the busy bassins; and, beyond them all, the Chain of Estaques, rising grim and gray in serrated outline against the western horizon. A beautiful prospect though barren and treeless, for nowhere in the world are mountains barer than those great white guardians of the Provençal seaboard.