Читать книгу Rambles on the Riviera - M. F. Mansfield - Страница 9

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WE arrived at Martigues in the early morning hours affected by automobilists, having spent the night a dozen miles or so away in the château of a friend. Our host made an early start on a shooting expedition, already planned before we put in an appearance, so we took the road at the witching hour of five A. M., and descended upon the Hôtel Chabas at Martigues before the servants were up. Some one had overslept.

However, we gave the great door of the stable a gentle shake; it opened slowly, but silently, and we drove the automobile noisily inside. Two horses stampeded, a dog barked, a cock crowed, and sleepy-headed old Pierre appeared, saying that they had no room, forgetful that another day was born, and that he had allowed two fat commercial travellers, who were to have left by the early train, to over-sleep.

Église de la Madeleine, Martigues

As there was likely to be room shortly, we convinced Pierre (whose name was really Pietro, he being an Italian) of the propriety of making us some coffee, and then had leisure to realize that at last we were at Martigues—“La Venise Provençale.”

Martigues is a paradise for artists. So far as its canals and quays go, it is Venice without the pomp and glory of great palaces; and the life of its fishermen and women is quite as picturesque as that of the Giudecca itself.

Wonderful indeed are the sunsets of a May evening, on Martigues’s Canal and Quai des Bourdigues, or from the ungainly bridge which crosses to the Ferrières quarter, with the sky-scraping masts of the tartanes across the face of the sinking sun like prison bars.

Great ungainly tubs are the boats of the fisherfolk of Martigues (all except the tartanes, which are graceful white-winged birds). The motor-boat has not come to take the picturesqueness away from the slow-moving bêtes, which are more like the dory of the Gloucester fishermen, without its buoyancy, than anything else afloat.

Before the town, though two or three kilometres away, is the Mediterranean, and back of it the Étang de Berre, known locally as “La Petite Mer de Berre.”

Here is a little corner of France not yet overrun by tourists, and perhaps it never will be. Hardly out of sight from the beaten track of tourist travel to the south of France, and within twenty odd miles of Marseilles, it is a veritable “darkest Africa” to most travellers. To be sure, French and American artists know it well, or at least know the lovely little triplet town of Martigues, through the pictures of Ziem and Galliardini and some others; but the seekers after the diversions of the “Côte d’Azur” know it not, and there are no tea-rooms and no “bière anglaise” in the bars or cafés of the whole circuit of towns and villages which surround this little inland sea.

The aspect of this little-known section of Provence is not wholly as soft and agreeable as, in his mind’s eye, one pictures the country adjacent to the Mediterranean to be. The hills and the shores of the “Petite Mer” are sombre and severe in outline, but not sad or ugly by any means, for there is an almost tropical glamour over all, though the olive and fig trees, umbrella-pines and gnarled, dwarf cypresses, with juts and crops of bare gray stone rising up through the thin soil, are quite in contrast with the palms and aloes of the Riviera proper.

At the entrance to the “Petite Mer,” or, to give it its official name, the Étang de Berre, is a little port which bears the vague name of Port de Bouc.

Port de Bouc itself is on the great Golfe de Fos, where the sun sets in a blaze of colour for quite three hundred days in the year, and in a manner unapproached elsewhere outside of Turner’s landscapes. Perhaps it is for this reason that the town has become a sort of watering-place for the people of Nîmes, Arles, and Avignon. There is nothing of the conventional resort about it, however, and the inhabitants of it, and the neighbouring town of Fos, are mostly engaged in making bricks, paper, and salt, refining petrol, and drying the codfish which are landed at its wharves by great “trois-mâts,” which have come in from the banks of Terre Neuve during the early winter months. There is a great ship-building establishment here which at times gives employment to as many as a thousand men, and accordingly Port de Bouc and Fos-sur-Mer, though their names are hardly known outside of their own neighbourhoods, form something of a metropolis to-day, as they did when the latter was a fortified cité romaine.

The region round about has many of the characteristics of the Crau, a land half-terrestrial and half-aquatic, formed by the alluvial deposits of the mighty Rhône and the torrential rivers of its watershed.

At Venice one finds superb marble palaces, and a history of sovereigns and prelates, and much art and architecture of an excellence and grandeur which perhaps exceeds that at any other popular tourist point. Martigues resembles Venice only as regards its water-surrounded situation, its canal-like streets and the general air of Mediterranean picturesqueness of the life of its fisherfolk and seafarers.

Martigues has an advantage over the “Queen of the Adriatic” in that none of its canals are slimy or evil-smelling, and because there is an utter absence of theatrical effect and, what is more to the point, an almost unappreciable number of tourists.

House of M. Ziem, Martigues

It is true that Galliardini and Ziem have made the fame of Martigues as an “artists’ sketching-ground,” and as such its reputation has been wide-spread. Artists of all nationalities come and go in twos and threes throughout the year, but it has not yet been overrun at any time by tourists. None except the Marseillais seem to have made it a resort, and they only come out on bicycles or en auto to eat “bouillabaisse” of a special variety which has made Martigues famous.

Ziem seems to have been one of the pioneers of the new school, high-coloured paintings which are now so greatly the vogue. This is not saying that for that reason they are any the less truthful representations of the things they are supposed to present; probably they are not; but if some one would explain why M. Ziem laid out an artificial pond in the gardens of his house at Martigues, put up Venetian lantern-poles, and anchored a gondola therein, and in another corner built a mosque, or whatever it may be,—a thing of minarets and towers and Moorish arches,—it would allay some suspicions which the writer has regarding “the artist’s way of working.”

It does not necessarily mean that Ziem did not go to Africa for his Arab or Moorish compositions, or to Venice for his Venetian boatmen and his palace backgrounds. Probably he merely used the properties as accessories in an open-air studio, which is certainly as legitimate as “working-up” one’s pictures in a sky-lighted atelier up five flights of stairs; and the chances are this is just where Ziem’s brilliant colouring comes from.

Martigues in its manners and customs is undoubtedly one of the most curious of all the coast towns of France. It is truly a gay little city, or rather it is three of them, known as Les Martigues, though the sum total of their inhabitants does not exceed six thousand souls all told.

Martigues at first glance appears to be mostly peopled by sailors and fishermen, and there is little of the super-civilization of a great metropolis to be seen, except that “all the world and his wife” dines at the fashionable hour of eight, and before, and after, and at all times, patronizes the Café de Commerce to an extent which is the wonder of the stranger and the great profit of the patron.

Martigues

No café in any small town in France is so crowded at the hour of the “apéritif,” and all the frequenters of Martigues’s most popular establishment have their own special bottle of whatever of the varnishy drinks they prefer from among those which go to make up the list of the Frenchman’s “apéritifs.” It is most remarkable that the cafés of Martigues should be so well patronized, and they are no mere longshore cabarets, either, but have walls of plate glass, and as many varieties of absinthe as you will find in a boulevard resort in Paris.

The Provençal historians state that Les Martigues did not exist as such until the middle of the thirteenth century, and that up to that time it consisted merely of a few families of fisherfolk living in huts upon the ruins of a former settlement, which may have been Roman, or perhaps Greek. This first settlement was on the Ile St. Geniez, which now forms the official quarter of the triple town.

Martigues is all but indescribable, its three quartiers are so widely diversified in interest and each so characteristic in the life which goes on within its confines,—Jonquières, with its shady Cours and narrow cobblestoned streets; the Ile, surrounded by its canals and fishing-boats, and Ferrières, a more or less fastidious faubourg backed up against the hillside, crowned by an old Capucin convent.

For a matter of fifteen hundred years there has been communication between the Étang de Berre and the Mediterranean, and the Martigaux have ever been alive to keeping the channel open. Through this canal the fish which give industry and prosperity to Martigues make their way with an almost inexplicable regularity. A migration takes place from the Mediterranean to the Étang from February to July, and from July to February they pass in the opposite direction.

Their capture in deep water is difficult, and the Martigaux have ingeniously built narrow waterways ending in a cul-de-sac, through which the fish must naturally pass on their passage between the Étang and the sea. The taking of the fish under such conditions is a sort of automatic process, so efficacious and simple that it would seem as though the plan might be tried elsewhere.

The name given to the sluices or fish thoroughfares is bourdigues, and the fishermen are known as bourdigaliers, a title which is not known or recognized elsewhere.

The bourdigue fishery is a monopoly, however, and many have been the attempts to break down the “vested interests” of the proprietors. Originally these rights belonged to the Archbishop of Arles, and later to the Seigneurs de Gallifet, Princes of Martigues, when the town was made a principality by Henri IV. It has continued to be a private enterprise unto to-day, and has been sanctioned by the courts, so there appears no immediate probability of the general populace of Martigues being able to participate in it.

There is a delicate fancy evolved from the connection of Martigues’s three sister faubourgs or quartiers. In the old days each had a separate entity and government, and each had a flag of its own; that of Jonquières was blue; the Ile, white; and Ferrières, red. There was an intense rivalry between the inhabitants of the three faubourgs; a rivalry which led to the beating of each other with oars and fishing-tackle, and other boisterous horse-play whenever they met one another in the canals or on the wharves. The warring factions of the three quartiers of Martigues, however, finally came to an understanding whereby the blue, white, and red banners of Jonquières, the Ile and Ferrières were united in one general flag. The adoption of the tricolour by the French nation was thus antedated, curiously enough, by two hundred years, and the tricolour of France may be considered a Martigues institution.

In the Quartier de Ferrières are moored the tartanes and balancelles, those great white-winged, lateen-rigged craft which are the natural component of a Mediterranean scene. Those hailing from Martigues are the aristocrats of their class, usually gaudily painted and flying high at the masthead a red and yellow striped pennant distinctive of their home port.

In the fish-market of Martigues the traveller from the north will probably make his first acquaintance with the tunny-fish or thon of the Mediterranean. He is something like the tarpon of the Mexican Gulf, and is a gamy sort of a fellow, or would be if one ever got him on the end of a line, which, however, is not the manner of taking him. He is caught by the gills in great nets of cord, as thick and heavy as a clothes-line, scores and hundreds at a time, and it takes the strength of many boatloads of men to draw the nets.

The thon is the most unfishlike fish that one ever cast eyes upon. He looks like a cross between a porpoise and a mackerel in shape, and is the size of the former. It is the most beautifully modelled fish imaginable; round and plump, with smoothly fashioned head and tail, it looks as if it were expressly designed to slip rapidly through the water, which in reality it does at an astonishing rate. Its proportions are not graceful or delicately fashioned at all; they are rather clumsy; but it is perfectly smooth and scaleless, and looks, and feels too, as if it were made of hard rubber.

In short the thon is the most unemotional-looking thing in the whole fish and animal world, with no more realism to it than if it were whittled out of a log of wood and covered with stove-polish. Caught, killed, and cured (by being cut into cubes and packed in oil in little tins), the thon forms a great delicacy among the assortment of hors-d’œuvres which the Paris and Marseilles restaurant-keepers put before one.

One of the great features of Martigues is its cookery, its fish cookery in particular, for the bouillabaisse of Martigues leads the world. It is far better than that which is supplied to “stop-over” tourists at Marseilles, en route to Egypt, the East, or the Riviera.

Thackeray sang the praises of bouillabaisse most enthusiastically in his “Ballad of the Bouillabaisse,” but then he ate it at a restaurant “on a street in Paris,” and he knew not the real thing as Chabas dishes it up at Martigues’s “Grand Hôtel.”

Chabas is known for fifty miles around. He is not a Martigaux, but comes from Cavaillon, the home of all good cooks, or at least one may say unreservedly that all the people of Cavaillon are good cooks: “les maîtres de la cuisine Provençale” they are known to all bons-vivants.

Neither is madame a Martigaux; she is an Arlesienne (and wears the Arlesienne coiffe at all times); Arles is a town as celebrated for its fair women as is Cavaillon for its cooks.

Together M. and Madame Chabas hold a big daily reception in the cuisine of the hotel, formerly the kitchen of an old convent. M. Paul is a “handy man;” he cooks easily and naturally, and carries on a running conversation with all who drop in for a chat. Most cooks are irascible and cranky individuals, but not so M. Paul; the more, the merrier with him, and not a drop too much oil (or too little), not a taste too much of garlic, nor too much saffron in the bouillabaisse, nor too much salt or pepper on the rôti or the légumes. It’s all chance apparently with him, for like all good cooks he never measures anything, but the wonder is that he doesn’t get rattled and forget, with the mixed crew of pensionnaires and neighbours always at his elbow, warming themselves before the same fire that heats his pots and pans and furnishes the flame for the great broche on which sizzle the well-basted petits oiseaux.

Bouillabaisse is always the plat-du-jour at the “Grand Hôtel,” and it’s the most wonderfully savoury dish that one can imagine—as Chabas cooks it.

Outside a Provençal cookery-book one would hardly expect to find a recipe for bouillabaisse that one could accept with confidence, but on the other hand no writer could possibly have the temerity to write of Provence and not have his say about the wonderful fish stew known to lovers of good-living the world over. It is more or less a risky proceeding, but to omit it altogether would be equally so, so the attempt is here made.

“La bouillabaisse,” of which poets have sung, has its variations and its intermittent excellencies, and sometimes it is better than at others; but always it is a dish which gives off an aroma which is the very spirit of Provence, an unmistakable reminiscence of Martigues, where it is at its best.

When the bouillabaisse is made according to the vieilles règles, it is as exquisite a thing to eat as is to be found among all the famous dishes of famous places. One goes to Burgundy to eat escargots, to Rouen for caneton, and to Marguery’s for soles, but he puts the memory of all these things behind him and far away when he first tastes bouillabaisse in the place of its birth.

Here is the recipe in its native tongue so that there may be no mistaking it:

“Poisson de la Méditerranée fraîchement pêché, avec les huiles vierges de la Provence. Thon, dorade, mulet, rouget, rascasses, parfumés par le fenouil et de laurier, telles sont les bases de cette soupe, colorée par le safran, que toutes les ménagères de la littoral de Provence s’entendent à merveille à préparer.”

As before said, not many tourists (English or American) frequent Martigues, and those who do come all have leanings toward art. Now and then a real “carryall and guide-book traveller” drifts in, gets a whiff of the mistral, (which often blows with deadly fury across the Étang) and, thinking that it is always like that, leaves by the first train, after having bought a half-dozen picture post-cards and eaten a bowl of bouillabaisse.

The type exists elsewhere in France, in large numbers, in Normandy and Brittany for instance, but he is a rara avis at Martigues, and only comes over from his favourite tea-drinking Riviera resort (he tells you) “out of curiosity.”

Martigues is practically the gateway to all the attractions of the wonderful region lying around the Étang de Berre, and of the littoral between Marseilles and the mouths of the Rhône. It is not very accessible by rail, however, and a good hard walker could get there from Marseilles almost as quickly on foot as by train.

The ridiculous little train of double-decked, antiquated cars, and a still more antiquated locomotive, takes nearly an hour to make the journey from Pas-de-Lanciers. Some day the dreaded mistral will blow this apology for rapid transit off into the sea, and then there will come an electric line, which will make the journey from Marseilles in less than an hour, instead of the three or four that it now takes.