The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins Part 3

which was eclipsed in importance, however, by Tarragona, the Roman capital. In 409 A. D. it was taken by the Goths, and under their domination increased in size and influence, coining its own money stamped with the legend "Barcinona." On the destruction of Tarragona by the Moors Barcelona capitulated, was treated with clemency, and again became a metropolis. After many vicissitudes it was ruled in the ninth century by a Christian chief of its own, whose descendants till the twelfth governed it under the t.i.tle of Counts of Barcelona, later a.s.suming that of Kings of Aragon, to which kingdom the province was annexed. During the Middle Ages Barcelona played a foremost part in the history of commerce. In the words of Ford, "Like Carthage of old, it was the lord and terror of the Mediterranean. It divided with Italy the enriching commerce of the East.

It was then a city of commerce, conquest, and courtiers, of taste, learning, and luxury--the Athens of the troubadour."

Its celebrated commercial code, framed in the thirteenth century, obtained acceptance throughout Europe. Here one of the first printing-presses in Spain was set up, and here Columbus was received by Ferdinand and Isabella after his discovery of a new world. A hundred years later a s.h.i.+p was launched from the port, made to move by means of steam. The story of Barcelona is henceforth but a catalogue of tyrannies and treacheries, against which the brave, albeit turbulent, city struggled single-handed.

In 1711 it was bombarded and partly ruined by Philip V.; a few years later, after a magnanimous defense, it was stormed by Berwick, on behalf of Louis XIV., and given up to pillage, outrage, fire, and sword.

Napoleon's fraudulent seizure of Barcelona is one of the most shameful pages of his shameful history. The first city--the key of Spain, as he called it--only to be taken in fair war by eighty thousand men, was basely entrapped, and remained in the hands of the French till the Treaty of Paris in 1814. From that time Barcelona has only enjoyed fitful intervals of repose. In 1827 a popular rising took place in favor of Don Carlos. In 1834 Queen Christina was opposed, and in 1840 public opinion declared for Espartero. In 1856 and 1874 insurrections occurred, not without bloodshed.

Barcelona is a great gathering-place of merchants from all parts of Europe. In its handsome hotels is heard a very Babel of tongues. The princ.i.p.al manufactures consist of woolen stuffs--said to be inferior to English in quality--silk, lace, firearms, hats, hardware, pianos; the last, as has been already stated, of excellent quality, and low in price.

Porcelain, crystal, furniture, and inlaid work, must be included in this list, also ironwork and stone blocks.

Beautifully situated on the Mediterranean between the mouths of two rivers,--the Llobregat and the Besos--and possessing one of the finest climates in the world, Barcelona is doubtless destined ere long to rival Algiers as a health resort. Three lines of railway now connect it directly with Paris, from which it is separated by twenty-eight hours' journey. The traveller may leave Barcelona at five o'clock in the morning and reach Lyons at midnight with only a change of carriages on the frontier. The route _via_ Bordeaux is equally expeditious; that by way of Clermont-Ferrand less so, but more picturesque. Hotels in the capital of Catalonia leave nothing to desire on the score of management, hygiene, comfort, and prices strictly regulated by tariff. The only drawback to be complained of is the total absence of the feminine element--not a woman to be seen on the premises. Good family hotels, provided with lady clerks and chambermaids, is a decided desideratum. The traveller wis.h.i.+ng to attain a knowledge of the Spanish language, and see something of Spanish life and manners, may betake himself to one of the numerous boarding-houses.

Barcelona is very rich in philanthropic and charitable inst.i.tutions.

Foremost of these is its Hospital of Santa Cruz, numbering six hundred beds. It is under the conjoint management of sisters and brothers of charity and lay nurses of both s.e.xes. An asylum for the insane forms part of the building, with annexes for the convalescent. The Hospital del Sagrado Corazon, founded by public subscription in 1870 for surgical cases, also speaks volumes for the munificence of the citizens. The only pa.s.sport required of the patient is poverty. One interesting feature about this hospital is that the committee of management consists of ladies. The nursing staff is formed of French Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. Besides these must be named the orphanage for upwards of two thousand children of both s.e.xes--Casa de Caridad de la Provincia de Barcelona--asylums for abandoned infants, for the orphaned children of seamen, maternity hospitals, creches, etc. There is also a school for the blind and deaf mutes, the first of the kind established in Spain. Here the blind of both s.e.xes receive a thorough musical training, and deaf mutes are taught according to the system known as lip-speech. All teaching is gratuitous.

Barcelona possesses thirty-eight churches, without counting the chapels attached to convents, and a vast number of conventual houses. Several evangelical services are held on Sundays both in the city and in the suburb of Barceloneta. The Protestant communities of Spain, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and other countries, have here their representative and organization. Sunday-schools and night-schools for adults are held in connection with these churches. The Protestant body seems active. We find here a branch depot of the Religious Tract Society; various religious magazines, many of them translations from the English and German, are published. Among these are the "Revista Christiana,"

intended for the more thoughtful cla.s.s of readers; "La Luz," organ of the Reformed Church of Spain; and several ill.u.s.trated periodicals for children. Will Protestantism ever take deep root in the home of the Inquisition? Time will show.

That very advanced political opinions should be held here need hardly surprise us. We find the following Democratic clubs in existence: The Historic Republican Club ("Centro Republicano Historico"), the Possibilist Republican Club ("Circulo Republicano Possibilista"), the Democratic Progressist Club, the Federal Republican Club, and many others. When next a great popular movement takes place in Spain--and already the event looms in the distance--without doubt the first impulse will be given at Barcelona.

Electric lighting was early introduced here, a company being founded so long back as 1880, and having branches in the capital, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao, and other towns. The importance of Barcelona as a center of commerce is attested by the extraordinary number of banks. At every turn the stranger comes upon a bank. "Compared to the mighty hives of English industry and skill, here everything is petty," wrote Ford, fifty years ago. Very different would be his verdict could he revisit the Manchester and Liverpool of Catalonia in our own day.

One curious feature of social life in Spain is the extraordinary number of religious fete days and public holidays. No Bank Holiday Act is needed, as in the neighboring country of France. Here is a list of days during which business is for the most part suspended in this recreation-loving city: Twelfth-cake Day is the great festival of the little ones--carnival is kept up, if with less of former splendor, nevertheless with much spirit; on Ash Wednesday rich and poor betake themselves to the country; Holy Thursday and Good Friday are celebrated with great pomp in the churches; on Easter Eve takes place a procession of shepherds in the park; Easter Monday is a day given up to rural festivity; the 19th of March St. Jose's Day--is a universal fete, hardly a family in Spain without a Jose among its number. The first Sunday in May is a feast of flowers and poetic compet.i.tions; the days consecrated to St. Juan and St. Pedro are public holidays, patronized by enormous numbers of country-folks; All Saints' and All Souls' Days are given up, as we have seen, to alternate devotion and festivity. On the 20th of December is celebrated the Feast of the Nativity, the fair and the displays of the shops attracting strangers from all parts. But it is especially the days sacred to the Virgin that are celebrated by all cla.s.ses. b.a.l.l.s, banquets, processions, miracle-plays, illuminations, bull-fights, horse-races, scholastic fetes, industrial exhibitions, civic ceremonial, besides solemn services, occupy old and young, rich and poor. Feasting is the order of the day, and the confectioners' windows are wonderful to behold.

Although many local customs are dying out, we may still see some of the curious street sights described by Ford fifty years ago, and the Mariolatry he deplored is still as active as ever. The goodly show of dainties in the shops, however, belie his somewhat acrimonious description of a Spanish reception. "Those who receive," he wrote, "provide very little refreshment unless they wish to be covered with glory; s.p.a.ce, light, and a little bad music, are sufficient to amuse these merry, easily-pleased souls, and satisfy their frugal bodies. To those who, by hospitality and entertainment, can only understand eating and drinking--food for man and beast--such hungry proceedings will be more honored in the breach than in the observance; but these matters depend much on lat.i.tude and longitude." Be this as it may, either the climate of Barcelona has changed, or international communication has revolutionized Spanish digestion. Thirty years ago, when travelling in Spain, it was no unusual sight to see a spare, aristocratic hidalgo enter a restaurant, and, with much form and ceremony, breakfast off a tiny omelette. Nowadays we find plenty of Spanish guests at public ordinaries doing ample justice to a plentiful board. English visitors in a Spanish house will not only get good music, in addition to s.p.a.ce and light, but abundant hospitality of material sort.

The Spain of which Ford wrote so humorously, and, it must be admitted, often so maliciously, is undergoing slow, but sure, transformation. Many national characteristics remain--the pa.s.sion for the brutal bull-fight still disgraces a polished people, the women still spend the greater portion of their lives in church, religious intolerance at the beginning of the twentieth century must be laid to the charge of a slowly progressive nation. On the other hand, and nowhere is the fact more patent than at Barcelona, the great intellectual and social revolution, described by contemporary Spanish novelists, is bringing the peninsula in closer sympathy with her neighbors. Many young Spaniards, _for_ instance, are now educated in England, English is freely spoken at Malaga, and its literature is no longer unknown to Spanish readers. These facts indicate coming change. The exclusiveness which has. .h.i.therto barred the progress of this richly-dowed and attractive country is on the wane. Who shall say? We may ere long see dark-eyed students from Barcelona at Girton College, and a Spanish society for the protection of animals prohibiting the torture of bulls and horses for the public pleasure.

Already--all honor to her name--a Spanish woman novelist, the gifted Caballero, has made pathetic appeals to her country-folks for a gentler treatment of animals in general. For the most part, it must be sadly confessed, in vain!

In spite of its foremost position, in intellectual and commercial pre-eminence, Barcelona has produced no famous men. Her n.o.blest monument is raised to an alien; Lopez, a munificent citizen, honored by a statue, was born at Santander. Prim, although a Catalan, did not first see the light in the capital. By some strange concatenation of events, this n.o.ble city owes her fame rather to the collective genius and spirit of her children than to any one. A magnanimous stepmother, she has adopted those identified with her splendor to whom she did not herself give birth.

Balzac wittily remarks that the dinner is the barometer of the family purse in Paris. One perceives whether Parisians are flouris.h.i.+ng or no by a glance at the daily board. Clothes afford a nice indication of temperature all the world over. We have only to notice what people wear, and we can construct a weather-chart for ourselves. Although the late autumn was, on the whole, favorable, I left fires, furs, and overcoats in Paris. At Lyons, a city afflicted with a climate the proper epithet of which is "muggy," ladies had not yet discarded their summer clothes, and were only just beginning to refurbish felt hats and fur-lined pelisses.

At Montpellier the weather was April-like--mild, blowy, showery; waterproofs, goloshes, and umbrellas were the order of the day. On reaching Barcelona I found a blazing sun, windows thrown wide open, and everybody wearing the lightest garments. Such facts do duty for a thermometer.

Boasting, as it does of one of the finest climates in the world, natural position of rare beauty, a genial, cosmopolitan, and strikingly handsome population, and lastly, accessibility, Barcelona should undoubtedly be a health resort hardly second to Algiers. Why it is not, I will undertake to explain.

In the first place, there is something that invalids and valetudinarians require more imperatively than a perfect climate. They cannot do without the ministrations of women. To the suffering, the depressed, the nervous, feminine influence is ofttimes of more soothing--nay, healing--power than any medical prescription.

Let none take the flattering unction to their souls--as well look for a woman in a Bashaw's army, or on a man-of-war, as in the palatial, well-appointed, otherwise irreproachable hotels of Barcelona! They boast of marble floors, baths that would not have dissatisfied a Roman epicure, salons luxurious as those of a West-end club, newspapers in a score of languages, a phalanx of gentlemanly waiters, a varied ordinary, delicious wines, but not a daughter of Eve, old or young, handsome or ugly--if, indeed, there exists an ugly woman in Barcelona--to be caught sight of anywhere! No charming landlady, as in French hotels, taking friendliest interest in her guests, no housemaids, willing and nimble as the Marys and Janes we have left at home, not even a rough, kindly, garrulous charwoman scrubbing the floors. The fas.h.i.+onable hotel here is a vast barrack conducted on strictly impersonal principles. Visitors obtain their money's worth, and pay their bills. There the transaction between innkeeper and traveller ends.

Good family hotels or "pensions," in which invalids would find a home-like element, are sadly needed in this engaging, highly-favored city. The next desideratum is a fast train from Port Bou--the first Spanish town on the frontier. An express on the Spanish line would shorten the journey to Lyons by several hours. New carriages are needed as much as new iron roads. Many an English third-cla.s.s is cleaner and more comfortable than the so-called "first" here. It must be added that the officials are all politeness and attention, and that beyond slowness and shabbiness the traveller has nothing to complain of. Exquisite urbanity is still a characteristic of the Barcelonese as it was in the age of Cervantes. One exception will be mentioned farther on.

If there are no women within the hotel walls--except, of course, stray lady tourists--heaven be praised, there are enough, and to spare, of most bewitching kind without. Piquancy is, perhaps, the foremost charm of a Spanish beauty, whether a high-born senora in her brougham, or a flower-girl at her stall. One and all seem born to turn the heads of the other s.e.x, after the fas.h.i.+on of Carmen in Merimee's story. Nor is outward attraction confined to women. The city police, cab-drivers, tramway-conductors, all possess what Schopenhauer calls the best possible letter of introduction, namely, good looks.

The number of the police surprise us. These bustling, brilliant streets, with their cosmopolitan crowds, seem the quietest, most orderly in the world. It seems hard to believe that this tranquillity and contentment should be fallacious--on the surface only. Yet such is the case, as shown by the recent outbreak of rioting and bloodshed.

"I have seen revolution after revolution," said to me a Spanish gentleman of high position, an hidalgo of the old school; "I expect to see more if my life is sufficiently prolonged. Spain has no government; each in power seeks but self-aggrandizement. Our army is full of Boulangers, each ready to usurp power for his own ends. You suggest a change of dynasty? We could not hope to be thereby the gainers. A Republic, say you? That also has proved a failure with us. Ah, you English are happy; you do not need to change abruptly the existing order of things, you effect revolutions more calmly."

I observed that perhaps national character and temperament had something to do with the matter. He replied very sadly, "You are right; we Southerners are more impetuous, of fiercer temper. Whichever way I look, I see no hope for unhappy Spain."

Such somber reflections are difficult to realize by the pa.s.sing traveller.

Yet, when we consider the tremendous force of such a city as Barcelona, its progressive tendencies, its spirit of scientific inquiry, we can but admit that an Ultramontane regency and reactionary government must be out of harmony with the tendencies of modern Spain.

There is only one occupation which seems to have a deteriorating effect upon the Spanish temper. The atmosphere of the post-office, at any rate, makes a Catalan rasping as an east wind, acrimonious as a sloe-berry. I had been advised to provide myself with a pa.s.sport before revisiting Spain, but I refused to do so on principle.

What business have we with this relic of barbarism at the beginning of the twentieth century, in times of peace among a friendly people? The taking a pa.s.sport under such circ.u.mstances seemed to me as much of an anachronism as the wearing of a scapular, or seeking the royal touch for scrofula. By pure accident, a registered letter containing bank notes was addressed to me at the Poste Restante. Never was such a storm in a teacup, such groaning of the mountain before the creeping forth of a tiny mouse! The delivery of registered letters in Spain is accompanied with as much form as a marriage contract in France. Let future travellers in expectation of such doc.u.ments provide themselves, not only with a pa.s.sport, but a copy of their baptismal register, of the marriage certificate of their parents, the family Bible--no matter its size--and any other proofs of ident.i.ty they can lay hands upon. They will find none superfluous.

V

Ma.r.s.eILLES

Its Greek founders and early history--Superb view from the sea--The Cannebiere--The Parado and Chemin de la Corniche--Chateau d'If and Monte-Cristo--Influence of the Greeks in Ma.r.s.eilles--Ravages by plague and pestilence--Treasures of the Palais des Arts--The chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde--The new Ma.r.s.eilles and its future.

About six hundred years before the birth of Christ, when the Mediterranean, ringed round with a long series of commercial colonies, was first beginning to transform itself with marvelous rapidity into "a Greek lake," a body of adventurous h.e.l.lenic mariners--young Columbuses of their day--full of life and vigor, sailed forth from Phocaea in Asia Minor, and steered their course, by devious routes, to what was then the Far West, in search of a fitting and unoccupied place in which to found a new trading city. Hard pressed by the Persians on their native sh.o.r.e, these free young Greeks--the Pilgrim Fathers of modern Ma.r.s.eilles--left behind for ever the city of their birth, and struck for liberty in some distant land, where no Cyrus or Xerxes could ever molest them. Sailing away past Greece and Sicily, and round Messina into the almost unknown Tyrrhenian Sea, the adventurous voyagers arrived at last, after various false starts in Corsica and elsewhere, at some gaunt white hills of the Gaulish coast, and cast anchor finally in a small but almost land-locked harbor, under the shelter of some barren limestone mountains. Whether they found a Phoenician colony already established on the spot or not, matters as little to history nowadays as whether their leaders' names were really Simos and Protis or quite otherwise. What does matter is the indubitable fact that Ma.s.salia, as its Greek founders called it, preserved through all its early history the impress of a truly h.e.l.lenic city; and that even to this moment much good Greek blood flows, without question, in the hot veins of all its genuine native-born citizens.

The city thus founded has had a long, a glorious, and an eventful history.

Ma.r.s.eilles is to-day the capital of the Mediterranean, the true commercial metropolis of that inland sea which now once more has become a single organic whole, after its long division by the Mohammedan conquest of North Africa and the Levant into two distinct and hostile portions. Naples, it is true, has a larger population; but then, a population of Neapolitan lazzaroni, mere human drones lounging about their hive and basking in the sunlight, does not count for much, except for the macaroni trade. What Venice once was, that Ma.r.s.eilles is to-day; the chief gate of Mediterranean traffic, the main mart of merchants who go down in s.h.i.+ps on the inland sea. In the Cannebiere and the Old Port, she possesses, indeed, as Edmond About once graphically phrased it, "an open door upon the Mediterranean and the whole world." The steamers and sailing vessels that line her quays bind together the entire Mediterranean coast into a single organic commercial whole. Here is the packet for Barcelona and Malaga; there, the one for Naples, Malta, and Constantinople. By this huge liner, sunning herself at La Joliette, we can go to Athens and Alexandria; by that, to Algiers, Cagliari, and Tunis. Nay, the Suez Ca.n.a.l has extended her bounds beyond the inland sea to the Indian Ocean; and the Pillars of Hercules no longer restrain her from free use of the great Atlantic water-way. You may take s.h.i.+p, if you will, from the Quai de la Fraternite for Bombay or Yokohama, for Rio or Buenos Ayres, for Santa Cruz, Teneriffe, Singapore, or Melbourne. And this wide extension of her commercial importance Ma.r.s.eilles owes, mainly no doubt, to her exceptional advantages of natural position, but largely also, I venture to think, to the h.e.l.lenic enterprise of her acute and vigorous Graeco-Gaulish population.

And what a marvelous history has she not behind her! First of all, no doubt, a small fis.h.i.+ng and trading station of prehistoric Gaulish or Ligurian villagers occupied the site where now the magnificent facade of the Bourse commemorates the names of Ma.s.salia's greatest Phocaean navigators. Then the Phoenicians supervened upon the changeful scene, and built those antique columns and forgotten shrines whose scanty remains were recently unearthed in the excavations for making the Rue de la Republique. Next came the early Phocaean colonists, reinforced a little later by the whole strength of their unconquerable townsmen, who sailed away in a body, according to the well-known legend preserved in Herodotus, when they could no longer hold out against the besieging Persian. The Greek town became as it were a sort of early Calcutta for the Gaulish trade, with its own outlying colonies at Nice, Antibes, and Hyeres, and its inland "factories" (to use the old familiar Anglo-Indian word) at Tarascon, Avignon, and many other ancient towns of the Rhone valley. Her admirals sailed on every known sea: Euthymenes explored the coasts of Africa as far as Senegal; Pytheas followed the European sh.o.r.e past Britain and Ireland to the north of the Shetlands. Till the Roman arrived upon the Gaulish coast with his dreaded short-sword, Ma.s.salia, in short, remained undisputed queen of all the western Mediterranean waters.

Before the wolf of the Capitol, however, all stars paled. Yet even under the Roman Empire Ma.s.silia (as the new conquerors called the name, with a mere change of vowel) retained her Greek speech and manners, which she hardly lost (if we may believe stray hints in later historians) till the very eve of the barbarian invasion. With the period of the Crusades, the city of Euthymenes became once more great and free, and hardly lost her independence completely up to the age of Louis XIV. It was only after the French Revolution, however, that she began really to supersede Venice as the true capital of the Mediterranean. The decline of the Turkish power, the growth of trade with Alexandria and the Levant, the final crus.h.i.+ng of the Barbary pirates, the conquest of Algeria, and, last of all, the opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l--a French work--all helped to increase her commerce and population by gigantic strides in half a dozen decades. At the present day Ma.r.s.eilles is the chief maritime town of France, and the acknowledged center of Mediterranean travel and traffic.

The right way for the stranger to enter Ma.r.s.eilles is, therefore, by sea, the old-established high road of her antique commerce. The Old Port and the Cannebiere are her front door, while the railway from Paris leads you in at best, as it were, through shabby corridors, by a side entry. Seen from the sea, indeed, Ma.r.s.eilles is superb. I hardly know whether the whole Mediterranean has any finer approach to a great town to display before the eyes of the artistic traveller. All round the city rises a semicircle of arid white hills, barren and bare indeed to look upon; but lighted up by the blue Provencal sky with a wonderful flood of borrowed radiance, bringing out every jutting peak and crag through the clear dry air in distinct perspective. Their sides are dotted with small square white houses, the famous _bastides_ or country boxes of the good Ma.r.s.eillais bourgeois. In front, a group of sunlit rocky isles juts out from the bay, on one of which tower the picturesque bastions of the Chateau d'If, so familiar to the reader of "Monte-Cristo." The foreground is occupied by the town itself, with its forest of masts, and the new dome of its checkered and gaudy Byzantine Cathedral, which has quite supplanted the old cathedral of St. Lazare, of which only a few traces remain. In the middle distance the famous old pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde crowns the summit of a pyramidal hill, with its picturesque ma.s.s of confused architecture. Away to right and left, those endless white hills gleam on with almost wearying brightness in the sun for miles together; but full in front, where the eye rests longest, the bustle and commotion of a great trading town teem with varied life upon the quays and landing-places.

If you are lucky enough to enter Ma.r.s.eilles 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-cla.s.s harbor; yet it still survives, not only as a historical relic but as a living reality, thronged even to-day with the crowded s.h.i.+ps of all nations. On the quay you may see the entire varied Mediterranean world in congress a.s.sembled.

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 Ma.r.s.eillais dialect of the Provencal holds the chief place--a graceful language, wherein the predominant Latin element has not even yet wholly got rid of certain underlying traces of h.e.l.lenic 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 Provencal seaboard.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Go a yard or two farther into the crowded Cannebiere, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 Ma.r.s.eillais 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 Cannebiere.

It is not long, to be sure, but it is broad and airy, and from morning till night its s.p.a.cious _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 Ma.r.s.eilles, and the Cannebiere 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 Cannebiere! By day or by night it is equally attractive. On it centers all that is alive in Ma.r.s.eilles--big hotels, glittering cafes, luxurious shops, scurrying drays, high-stepping carriage-horses, and fas.h.i.+onably-dressed humanity; an endless crowd, many of them hatless and bonnetless in true southern fas.h.i.+on, 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 Cannebiere, in short, is the Rue de Rivoli of the Mediterranean, the main thoroughfare of all those teeming sh.o.r.es of oil and wine, where culture still lingers by its ancient cradle.

Close to the Quai, and at the entrance of the Cannebiere, stands the central point of business in new Ma.r.s.eilles, the Bourse, where the filial piety of the modern Phocaeans has done ample homage to the sacred memory of their ancient h.e.l.lenic ancestors. For in the place of honor on the facade of that great palace of commerce the chief post has been given, as was due, to the statues of the old Ma.s.saliote 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 Cannebiere, that after all humanity is one, and that the Phocaeans themselves are still, in the persons of their sons, among us.

The Cannebiere 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 Allees de Meilhan, the favorite haunt of all the gossips and quidnuncs of Ma.r.s.eilles. The Allees de Meilhan, indeed, form the _beau ideal_ of the formal and fas.h.i.+onable 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 Allees are the favorite haunt of all idle Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 const.i.tuted by the Cannebiere, the Rue de Noailles, and the Allees de Meilhan runs the second chief stream of Ma.r.s.eillais 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 Cannebiere, this polyonymous street rejoices in the t.i.tle 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 pa.s.ser-by. This flower-market is one of the sights of Ma.r.s.eilles, and I know no other anywhere--not even at Nice--so picturesque or so old-world. It keeps up something of the true Provencal 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 Rene, the land of troubadours, and gold and flowers, and that it is the land of sun and summer suns.h.i.+ne.

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 Ma.r.s.eillais than the Champs Elysees are to the born Parisian. For the Prado is the afternoon-drive of Ma.r.s.eilles, the Rotten Row of local equestrianism, the rallying-place and lounge of all that is fas.h.i.+onable in the Phocaean city as the Allees 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 Ma.r.s.eillais, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 b.u.t.tresses of excellent masonwork; and have given the Ma.r.s.eillais 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.