A Book of the Riviera/Chapter 3
La Rade, Marseilles
CHAPTER III
MARSEILLES
AS has been already stated, Massilia, or Marseilles, was originally a Phœnician trading station. Then it was occupied by the Phocœans from Asia Minor. It came about in this fashion.
In the year B.C. 599 a few Phocœan vessels, under the guidance of an adventurer called Eumenes, arrived in the bay of Marseilles. The first care of the new arrivals was to place themselves under the protection of the Ligurians, and they sent an ambassador, a young Greek named Protis, with presents to the native chief, Nann, at Aries. By a happy coincidence Protis arrived on the day upon which Nann had assembled the warriors of his tribe, and had brought forth his daughter, Gyptis, to choose a husband among them. The arrival of the young Greek was a veritable coup de théâtre. He took his place at the banquet. His Greek beauty, his graceful form and polished manners, so different from the ruggedness and uncouthness of the Ligurians, impressed the damsel, and going up to him, she presented him with the goblet of wine, which was the symbol of betrothal. Protis put it to his lips, and the alliance was concluded.
The legend is doubtless mythical, but it shows us, disguised under the form of a tale, what actually took place, that the Ionian settlers did contract marriages with the natives. But the real great migration took place in B.C. 542, fifty-seven years later.
Harpagus, the general of Cyrus, was ravaging Asia Minor, and he invested Phocœa. As the lonians in the town found that they could hold out no longer, their general, Dionysos, thus addressed them:
"Our affairs are in a critical state, and we have to decide at once whether we are to remain free, or to bow our necks in servitude, and be treated as runaway slaves. Now, if you be willing to undergo some hardships, you will be able to secure your freedom."
Then he advised that they should lade their vessels with all their movable goods, put on them their wives and children, and leave their native land.
Soon after this Harpagus saw a long line of vessels, their sails swelled with the wind, and the water glancing from their oars, issue from the port and pass away over the blue sea towards the western sun. All the inhabitants had abandoned the town. Dionysos had heard a good report of the Ligurian coast, and thither he steered, and was welcomed by his countrymen who had settled there half a century before.
But the Ligurians did not relish this great migration, and they resolved on massacring the new arrivals, and of taking advantage of the celebration of the Floral Games for carrying out their plan. Accordingly they sent in their weapons through the gates of Marseilles, heaped over with flowers and boughs, and a party of Ligurians presented themselves unarmed, as flocking in to witness the festival. But other Ligurian girls beside Gyptis had fallen in love with and had contracted marriages with the Greeks, and one of these betrayed the plot. Accordingly the Phocœans closed their gates, and drawing the weapons from under the wreaths of flowers, slaughtered the Ligurians with their own arms.
From Marseilles the Greeks spread along the coast and founded numerous other towns, and, penetrating inland, made of Aries a Greek city.
In the civil war that broke out between Cæsar and Pompey, Marseilles, unhappily for her, threw in her lot with the latter. Cæsar, at the head of his legions, appeared before the gates, and found them closed against him. It was essential for Caesar to obtain possession of the town and port, and he invested it. Beyond the walls was a sacred wood in which mysterious rites were performed, and which was held in the highest veneration by the Massiliots. Cæsar ordered that it should be hewn down; but his soldiers shrank from profaning it. Then snatching up an axe, he exclaimed, "Fear not, I take the crime upon myself!" and smote at an oak. Emboldened by his words and action, the soldiers now felled the trees, and out of them Cæsar fashioned twelve galleys and various machines for the siege.
Obliged to hurry into Spain, he left some of his best troops under his lieutenants C. Trebonius and D. Brutus to continue operations against Marseilles; the former was in command of the land forces, and Brutus was admiral of the improvised fleet. The people of Marseilles were now reinforced by Domitius, one of Pompey's most trusted generals, and they managed to scrape together a fleet of seventeen galleys.
This fleet received orders to. attack that of Brutus, and it shot out of the harbour. Brutus awaited it, drawn up in crescent form. His ships were cumbrous, and not manned by such dextrous navigators as the Greeks. But he had furnished himself with grappling irons, and when the Greek vessels came on, he flung out his harpoons, caught them, and brought the enemy to the side of his vessels, so that the fight became one of hand to hand as on platforms, and the advantage of the nautical skill of the Massiliots was neutralised. They lost nine galleys, and the remnant with difficulty escaped back into port.
The besieged, though defeated, were not disheartened. They sent to friendly cities for aid, they seized on merchant vessels and converted them into men of war, and Pompey, who knew the importance of Marseilles, sent Nasidius with sixteen triremes to the aid of the invested town.
Again their fleet sallied forth. This time they were more wary, and backed when they saw the harpoons shot forth, so that the grappling irons fell innocuously into the sea. Finding all his efforts to come to close quarters with the enemy unavailing, Brutus signalled to his vessels to draw up in hollow square, prows outward.
Nasidius, who was in command of the Massiliot fleet, had he used his judgment, should have waited till a rough sea had opened the joints of the opposed ranks, and broken the formation. Instead of doing this, he endeavoured by ramming the sides to break the square, with the result that he damaged his own vessels, which were the lightest and least well protected at the bows, far more than he did the enemy. Seeing that his plan was unsuccessful, he was the first to turn his galley about and fly. Five of the Massiliot vessels were sunk, four were taken, and those that returned to the port were seriously damaged.
On land the besieged had been more successful; they had repelled all attempts of Trebonius to storm the place. When he mined, they countermined, or let water into his galleries, and drowned those working in them. When he rolled up his huge wooden towers against the walls, the besieged rushed forth and set them on fire.
But now a worse enemy than Cæsar's army appeared against them the plague. Reduced to the utmost extremity, the Massiliots saw that their only hope was in the clemency of the conqueror. Nasidius had fled. Now Domitius departed; but not till he saw that surrender was inevitable. Cæsar had arrived in the camp of the besiegers. Marseilles opened her gates, and Cæsar treated the city with great magnanimity. But, ruined by the expenses of the long siege, without a fleet, its commerce gone, depopulated by war and disease, long years were required for the effacement of the traces of so many misfortunes.
Now I must go back through many centuries to speak of a most remarkable man, "the Humboldt of Antiquity," who was a native of Marseilles, and who was the first to reveal to the world the existence of the Isle of Britain. His name was Pythias, and he lived four centuries before the birth of Christ. The Greeks had vague and doubtful traditions of the existence, far away in the North, of a land where the swans sang, and where lived a people "at the back of the north wind," in perpetual sunshine, and worshipped the sun, offering to it hecatombs of wild asses, and whence came the most precious of metals—tin, without which no bronze could be fabricated. The way to this mysterious land was known only to the Carthaginians, and was kept as a profound secret from the Phocœan Greeks, who had occupied their colony at Marseilles, and were engrossing their commerce. The Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, and of Carthage, had secured a monopoly of the mineral trade. Spain was the Mexico of the antique world. It was fabled that the Tagus rolled over sands of gold, and the Guadiana over a floor of silver. The Phœnician sailors, it was reported, replaced their anchors of iron with masses of silver; and that the Iberians employed gold for mangers, and silver for their vats of beer; that the pebbles of their moors were pure tin, and that the Iberian girls "streamed" the rivers in wicker cradles, washing out tin and gold, lead and silver. But as more was known of Spain, it was ascertained that these legends were true only in a limited degree; tin and silver and lead were there, but not to the amount fabled. Therefore it was concluded that the treasure land was farther to the north. Not by any means, by no bribery, by no persuasion, not by torture, could the secret be wrung from the Phœnicians whence they procured the inestimable treasure of tin. Only it was known that much of it came from the North, and by a trade route through Gaul to the Rhone; but also, and mainly, by means of vessels of the Phoenicians passing through the Straits into the unknown ocean beyond.
Accordingly, the merchants of Marseilles resolved on sending an expedition in quest of this mysterious Hyperborean land, and they engaged the services of Pythias, an eminent mathematician of the city, who had already made himself famous by his measurement of the declination of the ecliptic, and by the calculation of the latitude of Marseilles. At the same time the merchants despatched another expedition to explore the African coast, under the direction of one Euthymes, another scientist of their city. Unhappily, the record of the voyage of this latter is lost; but the diary of Pythias, very carefully kept, has been preserved in part, quoted by early geographers who trusted him, and by Strabo, who poured scorn on his discoveries because they controverted his preconceived theories.
Pythias published his diary in two books, entitled The Circuit of the World and Commentaries concerning the Ocean. From the fragments that remain we can trace his course. Leaving Marseilles, he coasted round Spain to Brittany; from Brittany he struck Kent, and visited other parts of Britain; then from the Thames he travelled to the mouths of the Rhine, passed round Jutland, entered the Baltic, and went to the mouth of the Vistula; thence out of the Baltic and up the coast of Norway to the Arctic Circle; thence he struck west, and reached the Shetlands and the North of Scotland, and coasted round the British Isles till again he reached Armorica; and so to the estuary of the Garonne, whence he journeyed by land to Marseilles.
Pythias remained for some time in Britain, the country to which, as he said, he paid more attention than to any other which he visited in the course of his travels; and he claimed to have investigated all the accessible parts of the Island, and to have traced the eastern side throughout. He arrived in Kent early in the summer, and remained there until harvest time, and he again returned after his voyage to the Arctic Circle. He says that there was plenty of wheat grown in the fields of Britain, but that it was thrashed out in barns, and not on unroofed floors as in the sunny climate of Marseilles. He says that a drink to which the Britons were partial was composed of wheat and honey—in a word, metheglin. It is greatly to be regretted that of this interesting and honestly written diary only scraps remain.[1]
The old city of Phœnicians and Phocœans occupied that portion of the present town lying between the sea and the ancient port, and the walls cut across from the Anse de la Joliette, mounted the Butte des Carmes and descended to the head of the Vieux-port. The Butte des Moulins was the Acropolis, and on it stood temples of the gods of Carthage and Greece. The sea-face was formerly very different from what it is now. Cæsar speaks of Marseilles being washed by the sea on three sides. The sea has eaten away a very large portion of the peninsula. The cathedral, La Major, was not formerly on the quay; till the end of the eighteenth century its principal portal faced the sea. At the close of that century, so much of the town having been washed away, and so sapped was the rock on that side, that a doorway had to be opened on the landside. An old chapel existing in 1202 stood at a point now 250 feet from the land. Recent works, the formation of a succession of basins, have arrested this degradation of the coast, and have regained some of the lost land.
Marseilles lies in an amphitheatre, but this is only realised when the city is approached from the sea. To those arriving by rail it appears to be a town scattered over a series of hills, very irregular and of a very confused plan. All that portion of the town that lies south of the Vieux-port, about the Palais de Justice to where the hill rises, was formerly morass; the houses here have no cellars, and are built, like Amsterdam, on piles. Above the Bassin de Carinage rises the Church of S. Victor, built in the eleventh and extended in the thirteenth century. The towers and ramparts were erected by William de Grimoard in 1350. He had been prior of the monastery of S. Victor, and afterwards became pope under the name of Urban V. All this portion of rising ground to the south of the old harbour seems to have been the refuge of the first Christians. Excavations made in extending the basin laid bare vestiges of catacombs of a very early period, earlier, in fact, in some cases than the Christian era. In the fourth century the monk Cassian founded a monastery above these catacombs. It was destroyed by the Saracens and rebuilt, and became a vastly wealthy foundation. The monastery on one side of the port, and the cathedral with its appurtenances on the other, were not under the jurisdiction of the municipal authorities of Marseilles; but each had its own town of dependencies under separate government.
What remains of this famous abbey bears an aspect of a citadel rather than of a church. It is an extraordinary jumble of parts, and from without looks as if it were wholly planless.
When, and through whom, Christianity was planted in Marseilles, is unknown; for the tradition of the apostleship there of Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead, must be dismissed as idle fable. The traditional tale is as follows, but there is no earlier authority for it than a legend of the twelfth century, and this is mere religious romance.
When persecution broke out in Jerusalem, Martha, Mary Magdalen, a Bishop Maximin, and a Deacon Parmenas, and Lazarus, took a boat and sailed merrily over the sea till they came to Provence. Maximin settled at Aix. Mary Magdalen retired to the cave La Sainte Beaume, and Martha killed a dragon at Tarascon, and established herself in its lair. Lazarus remained at Marseilles, and became its first bishop.
The first bishop of Marseilles known to history is Orestius, A.D. 314; and not a particle of evidence worth a rush exists to substantiate the story of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, having ever come to Provence.
The street called Cannebière leads to the Vieux-port. Cannebière means a rope-walk, and here were situated the workshops of those who supplied the vessels with cordage and sails. When the old port was being cleaned out, an ancient galley was found at a depth of fifteen feet, built of cedar wood, with coins earlier, contemporary with, and slightly later than Julius Cæsar.
It is perhaps not to be wondered at that not a scrap of ancient Massilia should remain above ground, not a fragment of city wall, of temple, or of amphitheatre, for the valleys have been choked up to the depth of eighteen to twenty feet, and the summits of the rounded hills have been shorn off. But to obtain some idea of the past, the Archæological Museum at the extremity of the Prado should be visited. One room is devoted to the remains of pagan Massilia, another to the Christian sarcophagi discovered in the catacombs of S. Victor.
The siege of Marseilles by the army of Cæsar was by no means the only trial of that description the city had to undergo. The next most serious investment was that by the Constable de Bourbon, who had transferred his services to Charles V. and fought against his sovereign, Francis I. Pope Leo X. had stirred up the emperor and had effected a coalition of England, Austria, Milan, Venice, Florence, and Genoa, against France. Charles despatched the Constable de Bourbon against Marseilles, and he appeared before it on August 1 9th, 1524, but met with a stubborn resistance.
Furious at not being able to obtain a surrender, he ordered a general assault, and promised his soldiers to suffer them to pillage the town at their own sweet will. On September 25th the besiegers attacked the walls, managed to beat down a portion and form a breach, through which they poured exultant. But bitter was their disappointment when they discovered that the besieged had raised a second wall within, in crescent form, on the top of which was the garrison, armed with culverins, and that at the points of junction of the new wall with the old were planted cannon which, with their cross fire, could mow down all who rushed into the semilunar area. The Spanish battalions hesitated, but were urged forward by their captains, and a frightful carnage ensued. The space was heaped with dead, and the baffled Constable, with rage in his heart, running short of ammunition and provisions, was forced to raise the siege and retire, on the night of September 25th.
But that which has proved to Marseilles more fatal than sieges has been the plague, which has reappeared time after time, becoming almost endemic. The unsanitary condition of the town, the absence of wholesome water, invited its presence. The magnificent works of the canal of Marseilles now conduct to the town the waters of the Durance. This canal was constructed between 1837 an d 1848, extends a length of ninety-five miles, and is carried through tunnels and over aqueducts. The body of water thus conducted to Marseilles not only supplies the precious liquid for drinking and bathing, but also sends rills to water the gardens which would otherwise be barren. How necessary this great work was may be judged from the number of deaths at Marseilles at the outbreak of the plague in 1720, when from 40,000 to 50,000 persons succumbed.
Amidst the general despair, selfishness, and depravity that then manifested itself, the Bishop Belzunce, some of his clergy, and the governor of the town, showed noble self-possession and devotion.
"The physicians sent to Marseilles by the Government," says Méry, "on arriving found in the place over 20,000 dead and nine to ten thousand sick or dying. The frightful spectacle so affected them that they could hardly eat. In traversing the town, in places they could hardly step without
encountering heaps of corpses. The plague-stricken felt a flicker of hope on seeing doctors approach, but this soon died out. Fathers and mothers dragged their children into the streets, and abandoned them after placing a jug of water at their side. Children exhibited a revolting lack of feeling.
All generous sentiments had been paralysed by the hand of death. The mortality was so great and rapid in its march that the corpses piled up before the houses, and in the church porches, indeed everywhere, empested the air. In the heat, the bodies rapidly putrified and dissolved, falling apart in strips. All were naked; the sick were covered by a few rags.
Women half-clothed appealed for a drop of water, pointing to the fetid rill that trickled down the gutter; and as no one attended to them, they used their failing powers to crawl to it, often with their babes at their breasts, to dip their lips in the foul stream. Death was preceded by frightful spasms. The number of deaths increased to such an extent that it was not possible to bury the dead. Bewilderment took possession of men. Those of the inhabitants who had not been infected wandered about, not knowing whither to go, but avoiding one
another. Others converted their houses into fortresses, as though disposed to maintain a siege; others fled to their country villas; others went on board ship; but the plague pursued them everywhere.
"In these days of calamity, the heart of man was shown in all its nakedness, and revealed all its baseness, ignoble inclinations, as well as its virtues and devotion. Those especially belonging to the lowest social beds, who live in fear of the laws, gave themselves up to frightful excesses. The galley slaves, to whom was entrusted the burial of the dead, drew the tumbrils heaped with corpses with a mocking callousness; murdering the sick so as to rob them; flinging those ill along with those dead together, indifferently, into the pits dug to receive the bodies. The civic functionaries, the employes, even priests, deserted their posts, and the monks of S. Victor enclosed themselves within their fortress. But there were others, who presented a striking contrast to these men. Priests came hurrying to the empested town from all parts to shut themselves in within this circle of death. Their zeal was stimulated by the sublime self-devotion of Belzunce, bishop of Marseilles. The fear of death never chilled his charity. He hurried through the street, seated himself by the dying, bowed over them to hear their confessions, and the plague spared him as he executed these acts of humanity."
Pope referred to this bishop in the lines:
"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,
When nature sicken'd and each gale was death?
The pestilence, which had broken out in the spring, continued to rage till September, but abated after a violent storm, and disappeared in November. At the Revolution the merchant aristocracy did not relish the movement, fearing an attack on property; but the lower classes were maddened with enthusiasm for the "rights of man," which meant the right to chop off the head of every one of whom they were envious, and of appropriating to themselves the savings of the industrious. Marseilles furnished, from the dregs of its population, the bands of assassins which marched to Paris, screaming forth Rouget de l'Isle's hymn, which thenceforth took the name of the Marseillaise; and these bands were foremost in the September massacres in Paris.
The Reign of Terror at Marseilles itself, under the infamous Fréron and Barras, saw four hundred heads fall upon the scaffold, to the shouts of the mob, "Ça ira! Plus la République coupe de têtes, plus la République s'affermit."
At Marseilles, Joseph Bonaparte, when acting there as War Commissioner, met the sisters Clary. At his very first visit he had been billeted on the soap-boiler, and now, when again in the place, he lost his heart to one of the girls. Both were destined to be queens. Julie (Marie) was born in 1777, and married Joseph in 1794. In 1797 Joseph was sent as ambassador to Rome, and he took with him his wife and her sister Eugenie Desiree; she was engaged to be married to General Duphot, who was with Joseph in Rome. On the eve of their wedding a disturbance took place in the streets of the Eternal City, caused by a rising of the revolutionary party. Duphot ran among them, whether to encourage them or dissuade them from violence is uncertain; but he was shot by the Papal soldiery in the tumult. Six months later Eugenie Desiree dried her tears in her bridal veil, when she married the saddler's son Bernadotte, who was destined to wear the crown of Sweden.
Joseph became King of Naples and then of Spain. Madame de Genlis, who knew both the young women, has a good word to say for them. Of Julie, the wife of Joseph, she says:—
"She always reminded me of the princesses of the Old Court, and she had all the bearing and carriage of the last princess of Conti. If Heaven had chosen to cause her to be born on a throne it could not have rendered her more suitable, with her graciousness, a great quality, which should characterise all princes, and which with her was perfected by being united to the most sincere piety, and hatred of all ostentation."
Of Eugenie, who became Queen of Norway and Sweden, she says:—
"I had the honour to make the acquaintance of Madame Bernadotte, sister of the Queen of Spain, who then had all the charms of a graceful figure, and the most agreeable manners. I was struck with the harmony that existed between her amiable face, her conversation, and her mind."
Addison,who sailed from Marseilles on December 12th, 1699 (Macaulay says the date should be 1700), and skirted the Ligurian coast to Genoa, was surprised and delighted to see
"the mountains cover'd with green Olive-trees, or laid out in beautiful gardens, which gave us a great Variety of pleasing Prospects, even in the Depth of Winter. The most uncultivated of them produce abundance of sweet Plants, as Wild-Thyme, Lavender, Rosemary, Balm and Myrtle."
In his "Letter from Italy" he writes:—
"See how the golden groves around me smile,
That shun the coast of Britain's stormy isle,
Or when transplanted and preserv'd with care,
Curse the cold clime, and starve in Northern air.
Here kindly warmth their mounting juice ferments,
To nobler tastes, and more exalted scents:
Ev'n the rough rocks with tender myrtle bloom,
And trodden weeds send out a rich perfume."
- ↑ See Elton’s Origins of English History. London: 1890, pp. 6-32.