Читать книгу The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age - Paine Albert Bigelow - Страница 3

A little book says: "Thanks to a unique system of tramways, Marseilles may be visited rapidly and without fatigue." They do not know the word "trolley" in Europe, and "tramway" is not a French word, but the French have adopted it, even with its "w," a letter not in their alphabet. The Marseilles trams did seem to run everywhere, and they were cheap. Ten centimes (two cents) was the fare for each "zone" or division, and a division long enough for the average passenger. Being sight-seers, we generally paid more than once, but even so the aggregate was modest enough. The circular trip around the Corniche, or shore, road has four of these divisions, with a special rate for the trip, which is very long and very beautiful.

We took the Corniche trip toward evening for the sake of the sunset. The tram starts at the rue de Rome and winds through the city first, across shaded courts, along streets of varying widths (some of them so old and ever so foreign, but always clean), past beautiful public buildings always with deep open spaces or broad streets in front of them, for the French do not hide their fine public architectures and monuments, but plant them as a landscape gardener plants his trellises and trees. Then all at once we were at the shore – the Mediterranean no longer blue, but crimson and gold with evening, the sun still drifting, as it seemed, among the harbor islands – the towers of Château d'If outlined on the sky. On one side the sea, breaking against the rocks and beaches, washing into little sheltered bays – on the other the abrupt or terraced cliff, with fair villas set in gardens of palm and mimosa and the rose trees of the south. Here and there among the villas were palace-like hotels, with wide balconies that overlooked the sea, and down along the shore were tea houses and restaurants where one could sit at little tables on pretty terraces just above the water's edge.

So we left the tram at the end of a zone and made our way down to one of those places, and sat in a little garden and had fish, freshly caught, and a cutlet, and some ripe grapes, and such things; and we watched the sun set, and stayed until the dark came and the Corniche shore turned into a necklace of twinkling lights. Then the tram carried us still farther, and back into the city at last, by way of the Prado, a broad residential avenue, with trees rising dark on either side.

At the end of a week in Marseilles we had learned a number of things – made some observations – drawn some conclusions. It is a very old city – old when the Greeks settled there twenty-five hundred years ago – but it has been ravaged and rebuilt too often through the ages for any of its original antiquity to remain. Some of the buildings have stood five or six hundred years, perhaps, and are quaint and interesting, with their queer roofs and moldering walls which have known siege and battle and have seen men in gaudy trappings and armor go clanking by, stopping to let their horses drink at the scarred fountains where to-day women wash their vegetables and their clothing. We were glad to have looked on those ancient relics, for they, too, would soon be gone. The spirit of great building and progress is abroad in Marseilles – the old clusters of houses will come down – the hoary fountains worn smooth by the hands of women and the noses of thirsty beasts will be replaced by new ones – fine and beautiful, for the French build always for art, let the race for commercial supremacy be ever so swift. Fifty or one hundred years from now it will be as hard to find one of these landmarks as it is to-day relics of the Greek and Roman times, and of the latter we found none at all. Tradition has it that Lazarus and his family came to Marseilles after his resuscitation, but the house he occupied is not shown. Indeed, there is probably not a thing above ground that Lucian the Greek saw when he lived here in the second century.

The harbor he sailed into remains. Its borders have changed, but it is the same inclosed port that sheltered those early galleys and triremes of commerce and of war. We looked down upon it from our balcony, and sometimes in the dim morning, or in the first dusk of evening when its sails were idle and its docks deserted, it seemed still to have something of the past about it, something that was not quite reality. Certain of its craft were old in fashion and quaint in form, and if even one trireme had lain at anchor there, or had come drifting in, we might easily have fancied this to be the port that somewhere is said to harbor the missing ships.

It is a busy place by day. Its quays are full of trucks and trams and teams, and a great traffic going on. Lucian would hardly recognize any of it at all. The noise would appall him, the smoking steamers would terrify him, the transbordeur– an aërial bridge suspended between two Eiffel towers, with a hanging car that travels back and forth like a cash railway – would set him praying to the gods. Possibly the fishwives, sorting out sea food and bait under little awnings, might strike him as more or less familiar. At least he would recognize their occupation. They were strung along the east quay, and I had never dreamed that the sea contained so many strange things to eat as they carried in stock. They had oysters and clams, and several varieties of mussels, and some things that looked like tide-worn lumps of terra cotta, and other things that resembled nothing else under heaven, so that words have not been invented to describe them.

Then they had oursins. I don't know whether an oursin is a bivalve or not. It does not look like one. The word "oursin" means hedgehog, but this oursin looked a great deal more like an old, black, sea-soaked chestnut bur – that is, before they opened it. When the oursin is split open —

But I cannot describe an opened oursin and preserve the proprieties. It is too – physiological. And the Marseillais eat those things – eat them raw! Narcissa and I, who had rather more limb and wind than the others, wandered along the quay a good deal, and often stood spellbound watching this performance. Once we saw two women having some of them for early breakfast with a bottle of wine – fancy!

By the way, we finally discovered the restaurants in Marseilles. At first we thought that the Marseillais never ate in public, but only drank. This was premature. There are restaurant districts. The rue Colbert is one of them. The quay is another, and of the restaurants in that precinct there is one that no traveler should miss. It is Pascal's, established a hundred years ago, and descended from father to son to the present moment. Pascal's is famous for its fish, and especially for its bouillabaisse. If I were to be in Marseilles only a brief time, I might be willing to miss the Palais Longchamps or a cathedral or two, but not Pascal's and bouillabaisse. It is a glorified fish chowder. I will say no more than that, for I should only dull its bloom. I started to write a poem on it. It began:

Oh, bouillabaisse, I sing thy praise.

But Narcissa said that the rhyme was bad, and I gave it up. Besides, I remembered that Thackeray had written a poem on the same subject.

One must go early to get a seat at Pascal's. There are rooms and rooms, and waiters hurrying about, and you must give your order, or point at the bill of fare, without much delay. Sea food is the thing, and it comes hot and delicious, and at the end you can have melon – from paradise, I suppose, for it is pure nectar – a kind of liquid cantaloupe such as I have seen nowhere else in this world.2 You have wine if you want it, at a franc a bottle, and when you are through you have spent about half a dollar for everything and feel that life is a song and the future made of peace. There came moments after we found Pascal's when, like the lotus eaters, we felt moved to say: "We will roam no more. This at last is the port where dreams come true."

Our motor clearance required a full ten days, but we did not regret the time. We made some further trips by tram, and one by water – to Château d'If, on the little ferry that runs every hour or so to that historic island fortress. To many persons Château d'If is a semi-mythical island prison from which, in Dumas' novel, Edmond Dantes escapes to become the Count of Monte Cristo, with fabulous wealth and an avenging sword. But it is real enough; a prison fortress which crowns a barren rock, twenty minutes from the harbor entrance, in plain view from the Corniche road. François I laid its corner stone in 1524 and construction continued during the next seventy years. It is a place of grim, stubby towers, with an inner court opening to the cells – two ranges of them, one above the other. The furniture of the court is a stone stairway and a well.

Château d'If is about as solid and enduring as the rock it stands on, and it is not the kind of place one would expect to go away from alive, if he were invited there for permanent residence. There appears to be no record of any escapes except that of Edmond Dantes, which is in a novel. When prisoners left that island it was by consent of the authorities. I am not saying that Dumas invented his story. In fact, I insist on believing it. I am only saying that it was a remarkable exception to the general habit of the guests in Château d'If. Of course it happened, for we saw cell B where Dantes was confined, a rayless place; also cell A adjoining, where the Abbé Faria was, and even the hole between, through which the Abbé counseled Dantes and confided the secret of the treasure that would make Dantes the master of the world. All of the cells have tablets at their entrances bearing the names of their most notable occupants, and that of Edmond Dantes is prominently displayed. It was good enough evidence for us.

Those cells are on the lower level, and are merely black, damp holes, without windows, and with no floors except the unleveled surface of the rock. Prisoners were expected to die there and they generally did it with little delay. One Bernadot, a rich Marseilles merchant, starved himself, and so found release at the end of the twelfth day; but another, a sailor named Jean Paul, survived in that horrible darkness for thirty-one years. His crime was striking his commander. Many of the offenses were even more trifling; the mere utterance of a word offensive to some one in power was enough to secure lodging in Château d'If. It was even dangerous to have a pretty daughter or wife that a person of influence coveted. Château d'If had an open door for husbands and fathers not inclined to be reasonable in such matters.

The second-story prisons are larger and lighter, but hardly less interesting. In No. 5 Count Mirabeau lodged for nearly a year, by suggestion of his father, who did not approve of his son's wild ways and thought Château d'If would tame him. But Mirabeau put in his time writing an essay on despotism and planning revolution. Later, one of the neighboring apartments, No. 7, a large one, became the seat of the tribunal révolutionnaire which condemned there sixty-six to the guillotine.

Many notables were sent to Château d'If on the charge of disloyalty to the sovereign. In one of the larger cells two brothers were imprisoned for having shared the exile of one Chevalier Glendèves who was obliged to flee from France because he refused to go down on his knees to Louis XIV. Royalty itself has enjoyed the hospitality of Château d'If. Louis Philippe of Orléans occupied the same large apartment later, which is really quite a grand one for a prison, with a fireplace and space to move about. Another commodious room on this floor was for a time the home of the mysterious Man of the Iron Mask.

These are but a few – one can only touch on the more interesting names. "Dead after ten years of captivity "; "Dead after sixteen years of captivity"; such memoranda close many of the records. Some of the prisoners were released at last, racked with disease and enfeebled in mind. Some went forth to the block, perhaps willingly enough. It is not a place in which one wishes to linger. You walk a little way into the blackest of the dungeons, stumbling over the rocks of the damp, unleveled floor, and hurry out. You hesitate a moment in the larger, lighter cells and try to picture a king there, and the Iron Mask; you try to imagine the weird figure of Mirabeau raging and writing, and then, a step away, the grim tribunal sorting from the nobility of France material for the guillotine. It is the kind of thing you cannot make seem real. You can see a picture, but it is always away somewhere – never quite there, in the very place.

Outside it was sunny, the sea blue, the cliffs high and sharp, with water always breaking and foaming at their feet. The Joy insisted on being shown the exact place where Dantes was flung over, but I was afraid to try to find it. I was afraid that there would be no place where he could be flung into the water without hitting the sharp rocks below, and that would end the story before he got the treasure. I said it was probably on the other side of the island, and besides it was getting late. We sailed home in the evening light, this time into the ancient harbor, and landed about where Lucian used to land, I should think, such a long time ago.

It was our last night in Marseilles. We had been there a full ten days, altogether, and time had not hung upon our hands. We would still have lingered, but there was no longer an excuse. Even the car could not furnish one. Released from its prison, refreshed with a few liters of gasoline —essence, they call it – and awakened with a gentle hitch or two of the crank, it began its sweet old murmur, just as if it had not been across some thousands of miles of tossing water. Then, the clutch released, it slipped noiselessly out of the docks, through the narrow streets, to a garage, where it acquired its new numbers and a bath, and maybe a French lesson or two, so that to-morrow it might carry us farther into France.