The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

If you are lucky enough to enter Marseilles for the first time by the Old Port, you find yourself at once in the very thick of all that is most characteristic and vivid and local in the busy city. That little oblong basin, shut in on its outer side by projecting hills, was indeed the making of the great town. Of course the Old Port is now utterly insufficient for the modern wants of a first-class harbor; yet it still survives, not only as a historical relic but as a living reality, thronged even to-day with the crowded ships of all nations. On the quay you may see the entire varied Mediterranean world in congress assembled. Here Greeks from Athens and Levantines from Smyrna jostle cheek by jowl with Italians from Genoa and Arabs or Moors from Tangier or Tunis. All costumes and all manners are admissible. The crowd is always excited, and always animated. A babel of tongues greets your ears as you land, in which the true Marseillais dialect of the Provençal holds the chief place – a graceful language, wherein the predominant Latin element has not even yet wholly got rid of certain underlying traces of Hellenic origin. Bright color, din, life, movement: in a moment the traveller from a northern climate recognizes the patent fact that he has reached a new world – that vivid, impetuous, eager southern world, which has its center to-day on the Provençal seaboard.

Go a yard or two farther into the crowded Cannebière, and the difference between this and the chilly North will at each step be forced even more strikingly upon you. That famous thoroughfare is firmly believed by every good son of old Marseilles to be, in the familiar local phrase, “la plus belle rue de l’univers.” My own acquaintance with the precincts of the universe being somewhat limited (I have never travelled myself, indeed, beyond the narrow bounds of our own solar system), I should be loth to endorse too literally and unreservedly this sweeping commendation of the Marseillais mind; but as regards our modest little planet at least, I certainly know no other street within my own experience (save Broadway, New York) that has quite so much life and variety in it as the Cannebière. It is not long, to be sure, but it is broad and airy, and from morning till night its spacious trottoirs are continually crowded by such a surging throng of cosmopolitan humanity as you will hardly find elsewhere on this side of Alexandria. For cosmopolitanism is the true key-note of Marseilles, and the Cannebière is a road that leads in one direction straight to Paris, but opens in the other direction full upon Algiers and Italy, upon Egypt and India.

What a picture it offers, too, of human life, that noisy Cannebière! By day or by night it is equally attractive. On it centers all that is alive in Marseilles – big hotels, glittering cafés, luxurious shops, scurrying drays, high-stepping carriage-horses, and fashionably-dressed humanity; an endless crowd, many of them hatless and bonnetless in true southern fashion, parade without ceasing its ringing pavements. At the end of all, the Old Port closes the view with its serried masts, and tells you the wherefore of this mixed society. The Cannebière, in short, is the Rue de Rivoli of the Mediterranean, the main thoroughfare of all those teeming shores of oil and wine, where culture still lingers by its ancient cradle.

Close to the Quai, and at the entrance of the Cannebière, stands the central point of business in new Marseilles, the Bourse, where the filial piety of the modern Phocæans has done ample homage to the sacred memory of their ancient Hellenic ancestors. For in the place of honor on the façade of that great palace of commerce the chief post has been given, as was due, to the statues of the old Massaliote admirals, Pytheas and Euthymenes. It is this constant consciousness of historical continuity that adds so much interest to Mediterranean towns. One feels as one stands before those two stone figures in the crowded Cannebière, that after all humanity is one, and that the Phocæans themselves are still, in the persons of their sons, among us.

The Cannebière runs nearly east and west, and is of no great length, under its own name at least; but under the transparent alias of the Rue de Noailles it continues on in a straight line till it widens out at last into the Allées de Meilhan, the favorite haunt of all the gossips and quidnuncs of Marseilles. The Allées de Meilhan, indeed, form the beau idéal of the formal and fashionable French promenade. Broad avenues of plane trees cast a mellow shade over its well-kept walks, and the neatest of nurses in marvelous caps and long silk streamers dandle the laciest and fluffiest of babies, in exquisite costumes, with ostentatious care, upon their bountiful laps. The stone seats on either side buzz with the latest news of the town; the Zouave flirts serenely with the bonnetless shop-girls; the sergeant-de-ville stalks proudly down the midst, and barely deigns to notice such human weaknesses. These Allées are the favorite haunt of all idle Marseilles, below the rank of “carriage company,” and it is probable that Satan finds as much mischief still for its hands to do here as in any other part of that easy-going city.

At right angles to the main central artery thus constituted by the Cannebière, the Rue de Noailles, and the Allées de Meilhan runs the second chief stream of Marseillais life, down a channel which begins as the Rue d’Aix and the Cours Belzunce, and ends, after various intermediate disguises, as the Rue de Rome and the Prado. Just where it crosses the current of the Cannebière, this polyonymous street rejoices in the title of the Cours St. Louis. Close by is the place where the flower-women sit perched up quaintly in their funny little pulpits, whence they hand down great bunches of fresh dewy violets or pinky-white rosebuds, with persuasive eloquence to the obdurate passer-by. This flower-market is one of the sights of Marseilles, and I know no other anywhere – not even at Nice – so picturesque or so old-world. It keeps up something of the true Provençal flavor, and reminds one that here, in this Greek colony, we are still in the midst of the land of roses and of Good King René, the land of troubadours, and gold and flowers, and that it is the land of sun and summer sunshine.

As the Rue de Rome emerges from the town and gains the suburb, it clothes itself in overhanging shade of plane-trees, and becomes known forthwith as the Prado – that famous Prado, more sacred to the loves and joys of the Marseillais than the Champs Elysées are to the born Parisian. For the Prado is the afternoon-drive of Marseilles, the Rotten Row of local equestrianism, the rallying-place and lounge of all that is fashionable in the Phocæan city as the Allées de Meilhan are of all that is bourgeois or frankly popular. Of course the Prado does not differ much from all other promenades of its sort in France: the upper-crust of the world has grown painfully tame and monotonous everywhere within the last twenty-five years: all flavor and savor of national costume or national manners has died out of it in the lump, and left us only in provincial centers the insipid graces of London and Paris, badly imitated. Still, the Prado is undoubtedly lively; a broad avenue bordered with magnificent villas of the meretricious Haussmannesque order of architecture; and it possesses a certain great advantage over every other similar promenade I know of in the world – it ends at last in one of the most beautiful and picturesque sea-drives in all Europe.

This sea-drive has been christened by the Marseillais, with pardonable pride, the Chemin de la Corniche, in humble imitation of that other great Corniche road which winds its tortuous way by long, slow gradients over the ramping heights of the Turbia between Nice and Mentone. And a “ledge road” it is in good earnest, carved like a shelf out of the solid limestone. When I first knew Marseilles there was no Corniche: the Prado, a long flat drive through a marshy plain, ended then abruptly on the sea-front; and the hardy pedestrian who wished to return to town by way of the cliffs had to clamber along a doubtful and rocky path, always difficult, often dangerous, and much obstructed by the attentions of the prowling douanier, ever ready to arrest him as a suspected smuggler. Nowadays, however, all that is changed. The French engineers – always famous for their roads – have hewn a broad and handsome carriage-drive out of the rugged rock, here hanging on a shelf sheer above the sea; there supported from below by heavy buttresses of excellent masonwork; and have given the Marseillais one of the most exquisite promenades to be found anywhere on the seaboard of the Continent. It somewhat resembles the new highway from Villefranche to Monte Carlo; but the islands with which the sea is here studded recall rather Cannes or the neighborhood of Sorrento. The seaward views are everywhere delicious; and when sunset lights up the bare white rocks with pink and purple, no richer coloring against the emerald green bay, can possibly be imagined in art or nature. It is as good as Torquay; and how can cosmopolitan say better?

On the Corniche, too, is the proper place nowadays to eat that famous old Marseillais dish, immortalized by Thackeray, and known as bouillabaisse. The Réserve de Roubion in particular prides itself on the manufacture of this strictly national Provençal dainty, which proves, however, a little too rich and a little too mixed in its company for the fastidious taste of most English gourmets. Greater exclusiveness and a more delicate eclecticism in matters of cookery please our countrymen better than such catholic comprehensiveness. I once asked a white-capped Provençal chef what were the precise ingredients of his boasted bouillabaisse; and the good man opened his palms expansively before him as he answered with a shrug, “Que voulez-vous? Fish to start with; and then – a handful of anything that happens to be lying about loose in the kitchen.”

Near the end of the Prado, at its junction with the Corniche, modern Marseilles rejoices also in its park or Public Garden. Though laid out on a flat and uninteresting plain, with none of the natural advantages of the Bois de Boulogne or of the beautiful Central Park at New York, these pretty grounds are nevertheless interesting to the northern visitor, who makes his first acquaintance with the Mediterranean here, by their curious and novel southern vegetation. The rich types of the south are everywhere apparent. Clumps of bamboo in feathery clusters overhang the ornamental waters; cypresses and araucarias shade the gravel walks; the eucalyptus showers down its fluffy flowers upon the grass below; the quaint Salisburia covers the ground in autumn with its pretty and curious maidenhair-shaped foliage. Yuccas and cactuses flourish vigorously in the open air, and even fan-palms manage to thrive the year round in cosy corners. It is an introduction to the glories of Rivieran vegetation, and a faint echo of the magnificent tones of the North African flora.

As we wind in and out on our way back to Marseilles by the Corniche road, with the water ever dashing white from the blue against the solid crags, whose corners we turn at every tiny headland, the most conspicuous object in the nearer view is the Château d’If, with the neighboring islets of Pomègues and Ratonneau. Who knows not the Château d’If, by name at least, has wasted his boyhood. The castle is not indeed of any great antiquity – it was built by order of François I – nor can it lay much claim to picturesqueness of outline or beauty of architecture; but in historical and romantic associations it is peculiarly rich, and its situation is bold, interesting, and striking. It was here that Mirabeau was imprisoned under a lettre de cachet obtained by his father, the friend of man; and it was here, to pass from history to romance, that Monte-Cristo went through those marvelous and somewhat incredible adventures which will keep a hundred generations of school-boys in breathless suspense long after Walter Scott is dead and forgotten.

But though the Prado and the Corniche are alive with carriages on sunny afternoons, it is on the quays themselves, and around the docks and basins, that the true vivacious Marseillais life must be seen in all its full flow and eagerness. The quick southern temperament, the bronzed faces, the open-air existence, the hurry and bustle of a great seaport town, display themselves there to the best advantage. And the ports of Marseilles are many and varied: their name is legion, and their shipping manifold. As long ago as 1850, the old square port, the Phocæan harbor, was felt to have become wholly insufficient for the needs of modern commerce in Marseilles. From that day to this, the accommodation for vessels has gone on increasing with that incredible rapidity which marks the great boom of modern times. Never, surely, since the spacious days of great Elizabeth, has the world so rapidly widened its borders as in these latter days in which we are all living. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean have joined the Atlantic. In 1853 the Port de la Joliette was added, therefore, to the Old Harbor, and people thought Marseilles had met all the utmost demands of its growing commerce. But the Bassin du Lazaret and the Bassin d’Arenc were added shortly after; and then, in 1856, came the further need for yet another port, the Bassin National. In 1872 the Bassin de la Gare Maritime was finally executed; and now the Marseillais are crying out again that the ships know not where to turn in the harbor. Everywhere the world seems to cosmopolitanize itself and to extend its limits: the day of small things has passed away for ever; the day of vast ports, huge concerns, gigantic undertakings is full upon us.

Curiously enough, however, in spite of all this rapid and immense development, it is still to a great extent the Greek merchants who hold in their hands – even in our own time – the entire commerce and wealth of the old Phocæan city. A large Hellenic colony of recent importation still inhabits and exploits Marseilles. Among the richly-dressed crowd of southern ladies that throngs the Prado on a sunny afternoon in full season, no small proportion of the proudest and best equipped who loll back in their carriages were born at Athens or in the Ionic Archipelago. For even to this day, these modern Greeks hang together wonderfully with old Greek persistence. Their creed keeps them apart from the Catholic French, in whose midst they live, and trade, and thrive; for, of course, they are all members of the “Orthodox” Church, and they retain their orthodoxy in spite of the ocean of Latin Christianity which girds them round with its flood on every side. The Greek community, in fact, dwells apart, marries apart, worships apart, and thinks apart. The way the marriages, in particular, are most frequently managed, differs to a very curious extent from our notions of matrimonial proprieties. The system – as duly explained to me one day under the shady plane-trees of the Allées de Meilhan, in very choice modern Greek, by a Hellenic merchant of Marseilles, who himself had been “arranged for” in this very manner – is both simple and mercantile to the highest degree yet practised in any civilized country. It is “marriage by purchase” pure and simple; only here, instead of the husband buying the wife, it is the wife who practically buys the husband.

A trader or ship-owner of Marseilles, let us say, has two sons, partners in his concern, who he desires to marry. It is important, however, that the wives he selects for them should not clash with the orthodoxy of the Hellenic community. Our merchant, therefore, anxious to do the best in both worlds at once, writes to his correspondents of the great Greek houses in Smyrna, Constantinople, Beyrout, and Alexandria; nay, perhaps even in London, Manchester, New York, and Rio, stating his desire to settle his sons in life, and the amount of dot they would respectively require from the ladies upon whom they decided to bestow their name and affections. The correspondents reply by return of post, recommending to the favorable attention of the happy swains certain Greek young ladies in the town of their adoption, whose dot and whose orthodoxy can be equally guaranteed as beyond suspicion. Photographs and lawyers’ letters are promptly exchanged; settlements are drawn up to the mutual satisfaction of both the high contracting parties; and when all the business portion of the transaction has been thoroughly sifted, the young ladies are consigned, with the figs and dates, as per bill of lading, to the port of entry, where their lords await them, and are duly married, on the morning of their arrival, at the Greek church in the Rue de la Grande Armée, by the reverend archimandrite. The Greeks are an eminently commercial people, and they find this idyllic mode of conducting a courtship not only preserves the purity of the orthodox faith and the Hellenic blood, but also saves an immense amount of time which might otherwise be wasted on the composition of useless love-letters.

It was not so, however, in the earlier Greek days. Then, the colonists of Marseilles and its dependent towns must have intermarried freely with the native Gaulish and Ligurian population of all the tributary Provençal seaboard. The true antique Hellenic stock – the Aryan Achæans of the classical period – were undoubtedly a fair, a light-haired race, with a far more marked proportion of the blond type than now survives among their mixed and degenerate modern descendants. In Greece proper, a large intermixture of Albanian and Sclavonic blood, which the old Athenians would have stigmatized as barbarian or Scythian, has darkened the complexion and blackened the hair of a vast majority of the existing population. But in Marseilles, curiously enough, and in the surrounding country, the genuine old light Greek type has left its mark to this day upon the physique of the inhabitants. In the ethnographical map of France, prepared by two distinguished French savants, the other Mediterranean departments are all, without exception, marked as “dark” or “very dark,” while the department of the Bouches du Rhône is marked as “white,” having, in fact, as large a proportion of fair complexions, blond hair, and light eyes as the eastern semi-German provinces, or as Normandy and Flanders. This curious survival of a very ancient type in spite of subsequent deluges, must be regarded as a notable instance of the way in which the popular stratum everywhere outlasts all changes of conquest and dynasty, of governing class and ruling family.

Just think, indeed, how many changes and revolutions in this respect that fiery Marseilles has gone through since the early days of her Hellenic independence! First came that fatal but perhaps indispensable error of inviting the Roman aid against her Ligurian enemies, which gave the Romans their earliest foothold in Southern Gaul. Then followed the foundation of Aquæ Sextiæ or Aix, the first Roman colony in what was soon to be the favorite province of the new conquerors. After that, in the great civil war, the Greeks of Marseilles were unlucky enough to espouse the losing cause; and, in the great day of Cæsar’s triumph, their town was reduced accordingly to the inferior position of a mere Roman dependency. Merged for a while in the all-absorbing empire, Marseilles fell at last before Visigoths and Burgundians in the stormy days of that vast upheaval, during which it is impossible for even the minutest historian to follow in detail the long list of endless conquests and re-conquests, while the wandering tribes ebbed and flowed on one another in wild surging waves of refluent confusion. Ostrogoth and Frank, Saracen and Christian, fought one after another for possession of the mighty city. In the process her Greek and Roman civilization was wholly swept away and not a trace now remains of those glorious basilicas, temples, and arches, which must once, no doubt, have adorned the metropolis of Grecian Gaul far more abundantly than they still adorn mere provincial centers like Arles and Nîmes, Vienne, and Orange. But at the end of it all, when Marseilles emerges once more into the light of day as an integral part of the Kingdom of Provence, it still retains its essentially Greek population, fairer and handsomer than the surrounding dark Ligurian stock; it still boasts its clear-cut Greek beauty of profile, its Hellenic sharpness of wit and quickness of perception. And how interesting in this relation to note, too, that Marseilles kept up, till a comparatively late period in the Middle Ages, her active connection with the Byzantine Empire; and that her chief magistrate was long nominated – in name at least, if not in actual fact – by the shadowy representative of the Cæsars at Constantinople.

May we not attribute to this continuous persistence of the Greek element in the life of Marseilles something of that curious local and self-satisfied feeling which northern Frenchmen so often deride in the born Marseillais? With the Greeks, the sense of civic individuality and civic separateness was always strong. Their Polis was to them their whole world – the center of everything. They were Athenians, Spartans, Thebans first; Greeks or even Bœotians and Lacedæmonians in the second place only. And the Marseillais bourgeois, following the traditions of his Phocæan ancestry, is still in a certain sense the most thoroughly provincial, the most uncentralized and anti-Parisian of modern French citizens. He believes in Marseilles even more devoutly than the average boulevardier believes in Paris. To him the Cannebière is the High Street of the world, and the Cours St. Louis the hub of the universe. How pleased with himself and all his surroundings he is, too! “At Marseilles, we do so-and-so,” is a frequent phrase which seems to him to settle off-hand all questions of etiquette, of procedure, or of the fitness of things generally. “Massilia locuta est; causa finita est.” That anything can be done better anywhere than it is done in the Cannebière or the Old Port is an idea that never even so much as occurs to his smart and quick but somewhat geographically limited intelligence. One of the best and cleverest of Mars’s clever Marseillais caricatures exhibits a good bourgeois from the Cours Pierre Puget, in his Sunday best, abroad on his travels along the Genoese Riviera. On the shore at San Remo, the happy, easy-going, conceited fellow, brimming over to the eyes with the happy-go-lucky Cockney joy of the South, sees a couple of pretty Italian fisher-girls mending their nets, and addresses them gaily in his own soft dialect: “Hé bien, més pitchounettes, vous êtes tellement croussetillantes que, sans ézaggérer, bagasse! ze vous croyais de Marseille!” To take anyone elsewhere for a born fellow-citizen was the highest compliment his good Marseillais soul could possibly hit upon.

Nevertheless, the Marseillais are not proud. They generously allow the rest of the world to come and admire them. They throw their doors open to East and West; they invite Jew and Greek alike to flow in unchecked, and help them make their own fortunes. They know very well that if Marseilles, as they all firmly believe, is the finest town in the round world, it is the trade with the Levant that made and keeps it so. And they take good care to lay themselves out for entertaining all and sundry as they come, in the handsomest hotels in Southern Europe. The mere through passenger traffic with India alone would serve to make Marseilles nowadays a commercial town of the first importance.

Marseilles, however, has had to pay a heavy price, more than once, for her open intercourse with the Eastern world, the native home of cholera and all other epidemics. From a very early time, the city by the Rhône has been the favorite haunt of the Plague and like oriental visitants; and more than one of its appalling epidemics has gained for itself a memorable place in history. To say the truth, old Marseilles laid itself out almost deliberately for the righteous scourge of zymotic disease. The vieille ville, that trackless labyrinth of foul and noisome alleys, tortuous, deeply worn, ill-paved, ill-ventilated, has been partly cleared away by the works of the Rue de la République now driven through its midst; but enough still remains of its Dædalean maze to show the adventurous traveller who penetrates its dark and drainless dens how dirty the strenuous Provençal can be when he bends his mind to it. There the true-blooded Marseillais of the old rock and of the Greek profile still lingers in his native insanitary condition; there the only scavenger is that “broom of Provence,” the swooping mistral– the fierce Alpine wind which, blowing fresh down with sweeping violence from the frozen mountains, alone can change the air and cleanse the gutters of that filthy and malodorous mediæval city. Everywhere else the mistral is a curse: in Marseilles it is accepted with mitigated gratitude as an excellent substitute for main drainage.

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.

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 theatrical 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 the 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.

The usual guide-book way to attack Nice is, of course, the topsy-turvey one, to begin at the Haussmannised white façades of the Promenade des Anglais and work backwards gradually through the Old Town to the Port of Limpia and the original nucleus that surrounds its quays. I will venture, however, to disregard this time-honored but grossly unhistorical practice, and allow the reader and myself, for once in our lives, to “begin at the beginning.” The Port of Limpia, then, is, of course, the natural starting point and prime original of the very oldest Nice. Hither, in the fifth century before the Christian era, the bold Phocæan settlers of Marseilles sent out a little colony, which landed in the tiny land-locked harbor and called the spot Nicæa (that is to say, the town of victory) in gratitude for their success against its rude Ligurian owners. For twenty-two centuries it has retained that name almost unchanged, now perhaps, the only memento still remaining of its Greek origin. During its flourishing days as a Hellenic city Nicæa ranked among the chief commercial entrepôts of the Ligurian coast; but when “the Province” fell at last into the hands of the Romans, and the dictator Cæsar favored rather the pretensions of Cemenelum or Cimiez on the hill-top in the rear, the town that clustered round the harbor of Limpia became for a time merely the port of its more successful inland rival. Cimiez still possesses its fine ruined Roman amphitheater and baths, besides relics of temples and some other remains of the imperial period; but the “Quartier du Port,” the ancient town of Nice itself, is almost destitute of any architectural signs of its antique greatness.

Nevertheless, the quaint little seafaring village that clusters round the harbor, entirely cut off as it is by the ramping crags of the Castle Hill from its later representative, the Italianized Nice of the last century, may fairly claim to be the true Nice of history, the only spot that bore that name till the days of the Bourbons. Its annals are far too long and far too eventful to be narrated here in full. Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Franks disputed for it in turn, as the border fortress between Gaul and Italy; and that familiar round white bastion on the eastern face of the Castle Hill, now known to visitors as the Tour Bellanda, and included (such is fate!) as a modern belvedere in the grounds of the comfortable Pension Suisse, was originally erected in the fifth century after Christ to protect the town from the attacks of these insatiable invaders. But Nice had its consolations, too, in these evil days, for when the Lombards at last reduced the hill fortress of Cimiez, the Roman town, its survivors took refuge from their conquerors in the city by the port, which thus became once more, by the fall of its rival, unquestioned mistress of the surrounding littoral.

The after story of Nice is confused and confusing. Now a vassal of the Frankish kings; now again a member of the Genoese league; now engaged in a desperate conflict with the piratical Saracens; and now constituted into a little independent republic on the Italian model; Nizza struggled on against an adverse fate as a fighting-ground of the races, till it fell finally into the hands of the Counts of Savoy, to whom it owes whatever little still remains of the mediæval castle. Continually changing hands between France and the kingdom of Sardinia in later days, it was ultimately made over to Napoleon III. by the Treaty of Villafranca, and is now completely and entirely Gallicized. The native dialect, however, remains even to the present day an intermediate form between Provençal and Italian, and is freely spoken (with more force than elegance) in the Old Town and around the enlarged modern basins of the Port of Limpia. Indeed, for frankness of expression and perfect absence of any false delicacy, the ladies of the real old Greek Nice surpass even their London compeers at Billingsgate.

One of the most beautiful and unique features of Nice at the present day is the Castle Hill a mass of solid rearing rock, not unlike its namesake at Edinburgh in position, intervening between the Port and the eighteenth century town, to which latter I will in future allude as the Italian city. It is a wonderful place, that Castle Hill – wonderful alike by nature, art, and history, and I fear I must also add at the same time “uglification.” In earlier days it bore on its summit or slopes the château fort of the Counts of Provence with the old cathedral and archbishop’s palace (now wholly destroyed), and the famous deep well, long ranked among the wonders of the world in the way of engineering. But military necessity knows no law; the cathedral gave place in the fifteenth century to the bastions of the Duke of Savoy’s new-fangled castle; the castle itself in turn was mainly battered down in 1706 by the Duke of Berwick; and of all its antiquities none now remain save the Tour Bellanda, in its degraded condition of belvedere, and the scanty ground-plan of the mediæval buildings.

Nevertheless, the Castle Hill is still one of the loveliest and greenest spots in Nice. A good carriage road ascends it to the top by leafy gradients, and leads to an open platform on the summit, now converted into charming gardens, rich with palms and aloes and cactuses and bright southern flowers. On one side, alas! a painfully artificial cataract, fed from the overflow of the waterworks, falls in stiff cascades among hand-built rockwork; but even that impertinent addition to the handicraft of nature can hardly offend the visitor for long among such glorious surroundings. For the view from the summit is one of the grandest in all France. The eye ranges right and left over a mingled panorama of sea and mountains, scarcely to be equaled anywhere round the lovely Mediterranean, save on the Ligurian coast and the neighborhood of Sorrento. Southward lies the blue expanse of water itself, bounded only in very clear and cloudless weather by the distant peaks of Corsica on the doubtful horizon. Westward, the coast-line includes the promontory of Antibes, basking low on the sea, the Iles Lérins near Cannes, the mouth of the Var, and the dim-jagged ridge of the purple Esterel. Eastward, the bluff headland of the Mont Boron, grim and brown, blocks the view towards Italy. Close below the spectator’s feet the three distinct towns of Nice gather round the Port and the two banks of the Paillon, spreading their garden suburbs, draped in roses and lemon groves, high up the spurs of the neighboring mountains. But northward a tumultuous sea of Alps rises billow-like to the sky, the nearer peaks frowning bare and rocky, while the more distant domes gleam white with virgin snow. It is a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten. One glances around entranced, and murmurs to oneself slowly, “It is good to be here.” Below, the carriages are rolling like black specks along the crowded Promenade, and the band is playing gaily in the Public Garden; but up there you look across to the eternal hills, and feel yourself face to face for one moment with the Eternities behind them.

One may descend from the summit either by the ancient cemetery or by the Place Garibaldi, through bosky gardens of date-palm, fan-palm, and agave. Cool winding alleys now replace the demolished ramparts, and lovely views open out on every side as we proceed over the immediate foreground.

At the foot of the Castle Hill, a modern road, hewn in the solid rock round the base of the seaward escarpment, connects the Greek with the Italian town. The angle where it turns the corner, bears on native lips the quaint Provençal or rather Niçois name of Raüba Capeu or Rob-hat Point, from the common occurrence of sudden gusts of wind, which remove the unsuspecting Parisian headgear with effective rapidity, to the great joy of the observant gamins. Indeed, windiness is altogether the weak point of Nice, viewed as a health-resort; the town lies exposed in the open valley of the Paillon, down whose baking bed the mistral, that scourge of Provence, sweeps with violent force from the cold mountain-tops in the rear; and so it cannot for a moment compete in point of climate with Cannes, Monte Carlo, Mentone or San Remo, backed up close behind by their guardian barrier of sheltering hills. But not even the mistral can make those who love Nice love her one atom the less. Her virtues are so many that a little wholesome bluster once in a while may surely be forgiven her. And yet the dust does certainly rise in clouds at times from the Promenade des Anglais.

The Italian city, which succeeds next in order, is picturesque and old-fashioned, but is being daily transformed and Gallicized out of all knowledge by its modern French masters. It dates back mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the population became too dense for the narrow limits of the small Greek town, and began to overflow, behind the Castle Hill, on to the eastern banks of the Paillon torrent. The sea-front in this quarter, now known as the Promenade du Midi, has been modernized into a mere eastward prolongation of the Promenade des Anglais, of which “more anon;” but the remainder of the little triangular space between the Castle Hill and the river-bed still consists of funny narrow Italian lanes, dark, dense, and dingy, from whose midst rises the odd and tile-covered dome of the cathedral of St. Réparate. That was the whole of Nice as it lived and moved till the beginning of this century; the real Nice of to-day, the Nice of the tourist, the invalid, and the fashionable world, the Nice that we all visit or talk about, is a purely modern accretion of some half-dozen decades.

This wonderful modern town, with its stately sea-front, its noble quays, its dainty white villas, its magnificent hotels, and its Casino, owes its existence entirely to the vogue which the coast has acquired in our own times as a health-resort for consumptives. As long ago as Smollett’s time, the author of “Roderick Random” remarks complacently that an acquaintance, “understanding I intended to winter in the South of France, strongly recommended the climate of Nice in Provence, which indeed I had often heard extolled,” as well he might have done. But in those days visitors had to live in the narrow and dirty streets of the Italian town, whose picturesqueness itself can hardly atone for their unwholesome air and their unsavory odors. It was not till the hard winters of 1822-23-24 that a few kind-hearted English residents, anxious to find work for the starving poor, began the construction of a sea-road beyond the Paillon, which still bears the name of the Promenade des Anglais. Nice may well commemorate their deed to this day, for to them she owes as a watering-place her very existence.

The western suburb, thus pushed beyond the bed of the boundary torrent, has gradually grown in wealth and prosperity till it now represents the actual living Nice of the tourist and the winter resident. But how to describe that gay and beautiful city; that vast agglomeration of villas, pensions, hotels, and clubs; that endless array of sun-worshipers gathered together to this temple of the sun from all the four quarters of the habitable globe? The sea-front consists of the Promenade des Anglais itself, which stretches in an unbroken line of white and glittering houses, most of them tasteless, but all splendid and all opulent, from the old bank of the Paillon to its sister torrent, the Magnan, some two miles away. On one side the villas front the shore with their fantastic façades; on the other side a walk, overshadowed with date-palms and purple-flowering judas-trees, lines the steep shingle beach of the tideless sea.