by Grant Allen
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.
The fortress that overhangs the Old Port at our feet itself deserves a few passing words of polite notice; for it is the Fort St. Nicolas, the one link in his great despotic chain by which Louis Quatorze bound recalcitrant Marseilles to the throne of the Tuileries. The town — like all great commercial towns — had always clung hard to its ancient liberties. Ever rebellious when kings oppressed, it was a stronghold of the Fronde; and when Louis at last made his entry perforce into the malcontent city, it was through a breach he had effected in the heavy ramparts. The king stood upon this commanding spot, just above the harbor, and, gazing landward, asked the citizens round him how men called those little square boxes which he saw dotted about over the sunlit hillsides. “We call them bastides, sire,” answered a courtly Marseillais. “Every citizen of our town has one.” “Moi aussi, je veux avoir ma bastide à Marseille,” cried the thea
trical monarch, and straightway gave orders for building the Fort St. Nicolas: so runs the tale that passes for history. But as the fort stands in the very best possible position, commanding the port, and could only have been arranged for after consultation with the engineers of the period — it was Vauban who planned it — I fear we must set down Louis’s bon mot as one of those royal epigrams which has been carefully prepared and led up to beforehand.
In every town, however, it is a favorite theory of mine that the best of all sights is the town itself: and nowhere on earth is this truism truer than here at Marseilles. After one has climbed Notre Dame, and explored the Prado and smiled at the Château d’Eau and stood beneath the frowning towers of St. Victor, one returns once more with real pleasure and interest to the crowded Cannebière and sees the full tide of human life flow eagerly on down that picturesque boulevard. That, after all, is the main picture that Marseilles always leaves photographed on the visitor’s memory. How eager, how keen, how vivacious is the talk; how fiery the eyes; how emphatic the gesture! With what teeming energy, with what feverish haste, the great city pours forth its hurrying thousands! With what endless spirit they move up and down in endless march upon its clattering pavements! Circulez, messieurs, circulez: and they do just circulate! From the Quai de la Fraternité to the Allées de Meilhan, what mirth and merriment, what life and movement! In every café, what warm southern faces! At every shop-door, what quick-witted, sharp-tongued, bartering humanity! I have many times stopped at Marseilles, on my way hither and thither round this terraqueous globe, farther south or east; but I never stop there without feeling once more the charm and interest of its strenuous personality. There is something of Greek quickness and Greek intelligence left even now about the old Phocæan colony. A Marseillais crowd has to this very day something of the sharp Hellenic wit; and I believe the rollicking humor of Aristophanes would be more readily seized by the public of the Alcazar than by any other popular audience in modern Europe.
“Bon chien chasse de race,” and every Marseillais is a born Greek and a born littérateur. Is it not partly to this old Greek blood, then, that we may set down the long list of distinguished men who have drawn their first breath in the Phocæan city? From the days of the Troubadours, Raymond des Tours and Barral des Baux, Folquet, and Rostang, and De Salles, and Bérenger, through the days of D’Urfé, and Mascaron, and Barbaroux, and De Pastoret, to the days of Méry, and Barthélemy, and Taxile Delord, and Joseph Autran, Marseilles has always been rich in talent. It is enough to say that her list of great men begins with Petronius Arbiter, and ends with Thiers, to show how long and diversely she has been represented in her foremost citizens. Surely, then, it is not mere fancy to suppose that in all this the true Hellenic blood has counted for something! Surely it is not too much to believe that with the Greek profile and the Greek complexion the inhabitants have still preserved to this day some modest measure of the quick Greek intellect, the bright Greek fancy, and the plastic and artistic Greek creative faculty! I love to think it, for Marseilles is dear to me; especially when I land there after a sound sea-tossing.
Unlike many of the old Mediterranean towns, too, Marseilles has not only a past but also a future. She lives and will live. In the middle of the past century, indeed, it might almost have seemed to a careless observer as if the Mediterranean were “played out.” And so in part, no doubt, it really is; the tracks of commerce and of international intercourse have shifted to wider seas and vaster waterways. We shall never again find that inland basin ringed round by a girdle of the great merchant cities that do the carrying trade and finance of the world. Our area has widened, so that New York, Rio, San Francisco, Yokohama, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay, and Melbourne have taken the place of Syracuse, Alexandria, Tyre, and Carthage, of Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Constantinople. But in spite of this cramping change, this degradation of the Mediterranean from the center of the world into a mere auxiliary or side-avenue of the Atlantic, a certain number of Mediterranean ports have lived on uninterruptedly by force of position from one epoch into the other. Venice has had its faint revival of recent years; Trieste has had its rise; Barcelona, Algiers, Smyrna, Odessa, have grown into great harbors for cosmopolitan traffic. Of this new and rejuvenescent Mediterranean, girt round by the fresh young nationalities of Italy and the Orient, and itself no longer an inland sea, but linked by the Suez Canal with the Indian Ocean and so turned into the main highway of the nations between East and West, Marseilles is still the key and the capital. That proud position the Phocæan city is not likely to lose. And as the world is wider now than ever, the new Marseilles is perforce a greater and a wealthier town than even the old one in its proudest days. Where tribute came once from the North African, Levantine, and Italian coasts alone, it comes now from every shore of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with Australia and the Pacific Isles thrown in as an afterthought. Regions Cæsar never knew enrich the good Greeks of the Quai de la Fraternité: brown, black, and yellow men whom his legions never saw send tea and silk, cotton, corn, and tobacco to the crowded warehouses of the Cannebière and the Rue de la République.
VI. NICE
The Queen of the Riviera — The Port of Limpia — Castle Hill — Promenade des Anglais — The Carnival and Battle of Flowers — Place Masséna, the center of business — Beauty of the suburbs — The road to Monte Carlo — The quaintly picturesque town of Villefranche — Aspects of Nice and its environs.
Who loves not Nice, knows it not. Who knows it, loves it. I admit it is windy, dusty, gusty. I allow it is meretricious, fashionable, vulgar. I grant its Carnival is a noisy orgy, its Promenade a meeting place for all the wealthiest idlers of Europe or America, and its clubs more desperate than Monte Carlo itself in their excessive devotion to games of hazard. And yet, with all its faults, I love it still. Yes, deliberately love it; for nothing that man has done or may ever do to mar its native beauty can possibly deface that beauty itself as God made it. Nay, more, just because it is Nice, we can readily pardon it these obvious faults and minor blemishes. The Queen of the Riviera, with all her coquettish little airs and graces, pleases none the less, like some proud and haughty girl in court costume, partly by reason of that very finery of silks and feathers which we half-heartedly deprecate. If she were not herself, she would be other than she is. Nice is Nice, and that is enough for us.
Was ever town more graciously set, indeed, in more gracious surroundings? Was ever pearl girt round with purer emeralds? On every side a vast semicircle of mountains hems it in, among which the bald and naked summit of the Mont Cau d’Aspremont towers highest and most conspicuous above its darkling compeers. In front the blue Mediterranean, that treacherous Mediterranean all guile and loveliness, smiles with myriad dimples to the clear-cut horizon. Eastward, the rocky promontories of the Mont Boron and the Cap Ferrat jut boldly out into the sea with their fringe of white dashing breakers. Westward, the longer and lower spit of the point of Antibes bounds the distant view, with the famous pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garoupe just dimly visible on its highest knoll against the serrated ridge of the glorious Esterel in the background. In the midst of all nestles Nice itself, the central gem in that coronet of mountains. There are warmer and more sheltered nooks on the Riviera, I will allow: there can be none more beautiful. Mentone may surpass it in the charm of its mountain paths and innumerable excursions; Cannes in the rich variety of its nearer walks and drives; but for mingled glories of land and sea, art and nature, antiquity and novelty, picturesqueness and magnificence, Nice still stands without a single rival on all that enchanted coast that stretches its long array of cities and bays between Marseilles and Genoa. There are those, I know, who run down Nice as commonplace and vulgarized. But then they can never have strayed one inch, I feel sure, from the palm-shaded trottoir of the Promenade des Anglais. If you want Italian mediævalism, go to the Old Town; if you want quaint marine life, go to the good Greek port of Limpia; if you want a grand view of sea and land and snow mountains in the distance, go to t
he Castle Hill; if you want the most magnificent panorama in the whole of Europe, go to the summit of the Corniche Road. No, no; these brawlers disturb our pure worship. We have only one Nice, let us make the most of it.
It is so easy to acquire a character for superiority by affecting to criticize what others admire. It is so easy to pronounce a place vulgar and uninteresting by taking care to see only the most vulgar and uninteresting parts of it. But the old Rivieran who knows his Nice well, and loves it dearly, is troubled rather by the opposite difficulty. Where there is so much to look at and so much to describe, where to begin? what to omit? how much to glide over? how much to insist upon? Language fails him to give a conception of this complex and polychromatic city in a few short pages to anyone who knows it by name alone as the cosmopolitan winter capital of fashionable seekers after health and pleasure. It is that, indeed, but it is so much more that one can never tell it.
For there are at least three distinct Nices, Greek, Italian, French; each of them beautiful in its own way, and each of them interesting for its own special features. To the extreme east, huddled in between the Mont Boron and the Castle Hill, lies the seafaring Greek town, the most primitive and original Nice of all; the home of the fisher-folk and the petty coasting sailors; the Nicæa of the old undaunted Phocæan colonists; the Nizza di Mare of modern Italians; the mediæval city; the birthplace of Garibaldi. Divided from this earliest Nice by the scarped rock on whose summit stood the château of the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century Italian town (the Old Town as tourists nowadays usually call it, the central town of the three) occupies the space between the Castle Hill and the half dry bed of the Paillon torrent. Finally, west of the Paillon, again, the modern fashionable pleasure resort extends its long line of villas, hotels, and palaces in front of the sea to the little stream of the Magnan on the road to Cannes, and stretches back in endless boulevards and avenues and gardens to the smiling heights of Cimiez and Carabacel. Every one of these three towns, “in three different ages born,” has its own special history and its own points of interest. Every one of them teems with natural beauty, with picturesque elements, and with varieties of life, hard indeed to discover elsewhere.
