Chapter Seven

 

Marcel Pagnol’s Provence: Marseille

 

“Damned Picturesque Place”

 

Dickens’ Little Dorrit opens with a hypnotic vision:

 

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly glaring and staring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

 

The foul water in the harbour does not stir, “the ships blistered at their moorings.” Even when the August sun does not blaze like “one great flaming jewel of fire”, Marseille is often characterized in extreme terms.

History, besides, has visited extreme happenings on the city: its capture and pillage in 1423 by Aragonese forces, for example, or the plague of 1720 and the later outbreaks of cholera and smallpox, or the rapid growth, in the nineteenth century, of what the popular poet Victor Gelu rejected as “noxious foundries, unhealthy factories, sordid alleys with wretched huts full of hooligans.” There was much bloodshed during the Revolution, when, Mr Meagles observes in Little Dorrit, Marseille sent “the most insurrectionary tune into the world that ever was composed”: Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s “Battlesong for the Army of the Rhine” became known as “La Marseillaise” once it was taken up by revolutionary Marseillais soldiers on their way to help defend Paris in the summer of 1792. The city “couldn’t exist”, claims Meagles, good- humoured, but bored of being in quarantine there, “without allonging and marshonging to something or other—victory or death, or blazes, or something.” (Allons... marchons, the battle-song enjoins.) In seemingly more stable times there was gang warfare, gun-running to Spain in its various periods of civil war, and drug-related violence. The Corsican and other mafias became powerful.

 

 

Gradually there grew the myth of a Marseille violent and sordid beyond any observable reality. Individual incidents appeared to confirm the myth: it seemed typical, to outsiders, that the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister in 1934 should have occurred in Marseille—in the most famous street, the Canebière. The 1930s gangster, brothel-owner and Fascist supporter Paul Carbone, “Emperor of Marseille”, became as well-known a character as his Chicago equivalents. (He was eventually blown up by the Resistance in 1944.) Eugène Saccomare’s account of the activities of Carbone and his assistant François Spirito in Gangsters de Marseille inspired Jacques Deray’s film Borsalino (1970), with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Earlier dramatically criminal versions of Marseille appeared in such films as Justin de Marseille (1935) and Mémoire d’un flic (1955) and many followed, most famously William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and John Frankenheimer’s The French Connection II (1975). The Fabio Montale crime novels written by Jean-Claude Izzo in the 1990s were also set in the area.

Robert Guédiguian’s film La Ville est tranquille (2000) looks more seriously and compassionately at a modern Marseille—side by side with the warm stone of the city’s landmarks and the blue sea beyond—riddled with gun-crime, prostitution, drugs, racism, and the aftermath of unemployment. The picture is less uniformly depressing than it might be because Guédiguian concentrates so strongly on individuals—a large cast of them, whose difficult lives meet or simply overlap, but especially Michèle (Ariane Ascaride), who works at night in a fish market. She is soon driven to much more desperate measures in the attempt to cope with, then to pay for, her daughter’s drug habit and to look after her baby granddaughter. There are few solutions for the characters’ problems. Great human potential is being lost through social deprivation, addiction, and racist violence; what can happen when the potential is realized is shown when, in the film’s partly optimistic ending, a grand piano, bought with donations, arrives for a brilliant Georgian boy- musician. He, an outsider who would not be accepted as “French” by many people, plays in the street and draws together a whole wondering group of neighbours and passers-by, their differences and pain, exclusion or exclusiveness, for a moment forgotten. (For many people it is football which transcends all the difficulties. “OM”—Olympique de Marseille— is the biggest and one of the most successful clubs in France, famous for the passion of its fans. Players and supporters come from many different ethnic backgrounds.)

Marseille, like many big cities, has had big problems. But partly because it has been as famous for humour as for violence, outsiders have not always taken the place seriously. Within France in particular, Marseille has often been viewed through a Parisian lorgnette. The historian Richard Cobb has explored this prejudice in Promenades (1980):

 

In the 1930s and, I think, quite recently, Marseille has been good for a laugh, at least with Parisians; indeed, one might even say this was part of the city’s export industry, along with soap and cooking oil, via Marcel Pagnol and his creations—Marius, Fanny and César... I am sometimes tempted to think that the joke was actually on the Parisians: the inhabitants of Marseille especially thriving under the convenient disguise of levity, loquacity, and mendacity, ‘talking big’, exaggerating, telling what the locals call la galéjade—the tall story.

 

An awareness of corruption and inefficiency in the city were “also a comfortable way of discrediting... a place that, throughout its immensely rich history, had shown itself again and again quite capable of prospering in the absence of Paris and without Paris.” Taken on its own terms rather than those of the capital, Cobb’s “cascading, steep-terraced, ochre- coloured” city has much to recommend it. In fact, as Frances Spalding reports Colonel Teed, resident of Cassis in the 1920s, as being wont to say, “Damned picturesque place, Marseilles. When you get the hang of it.”

 

Massalia: “Turning Towards The Greeks”

 

The Musée d’Histoire de Marseille displays a poster for the celebration, in 1899, of the presumed twenty-fifth centenary of the foundation of the city. A girl in exotic costume, with robe, sash, and an extraordinary headdress with coiled yellow attachments like large rosettes, is offering a drinking-vessel to a responsive, clean-shaven young man who wears a fillet around his neat black hair. In the background men with huge, droopy blond moustaches look much less happy. An older man puts his hand thoughtfully to his great white Druid’s beard; he looks a little puzzled, a little wary, but appears also to divine that the contact between the young people may be all to the good, may be what the gods desire.

The foundation myth which the poster alludes to runs as follows: it so happened that Nann or Nannos, king of a Celtic tribe called the Segobrigii, was preparing for his daughter’s marriage when he was visited by some Greeks from Phocaea (now Foça in Turkey). According to the custom of his people, says the Gallic historian Pompeius Trogus, he would give his Gyptis to a husband who would be chosen during the feast. Hospitably, he invited the visitors to attend. All Gyptis’ suitors were there. “And when her father commanded her to offer the water to the man she had chosen to be her husband, ignoring all the others and turning towards the Greeks she offered the water to Protis” [one of the leaders of the Phocaean party]. Nannos gave him the land on which to found the town which, established around 600 BC, became the Greeks’ Massalia and the Romans’ Massilia.

With or without such picturesque help, the Phocaeans, looking for new commercial bases, were attracted by the site: a deep calanque or creek made an ideal harbour (the “Vieux-Port”), and the rocky promontory was easy to defend. Massalia gave the colonists privileged access to western Mediterranean trade-routes. (They defeated their most dangerous rivals, the Carthaginians, in sea-battles of the sixth and fifth centuries BC.) The Rhône took them deep into the interior of Gaul. The Massaliotes traded principally in tin, amber, oil and wine; they are supposed to have introduced the olive and the vine to Provence. They established their own colonies at what would later become Nice and Antibes. Financial and military success, and continuing connection with the wider Greek world, were signalled by the dedication of the Massalian treasury at Delphi in about 530 BC. And the voyages of the explorers Euthymenes and Pytheas in the fourth century BC suggest an interest even in the little known world beyond the Mediterranean: Euthymenes is said to have investigated the west coast of Africa as far as Senegal and Pytheas to have reached Britain and found beyond it “Thule”—Iceland or Norway.

The city itself was governed by a constitution which was held up as an example by several ancient writers. The city-state was ruled by an assembly of 600 timoukhoi or “honour-holders”, headed by an executive committee of fifteen men, three of whom alternated as holders of supreme power. Strabo’s Geography concludes that this is “the best ordered” of all aristocracies. It merited some brief approving comments from Aristotle in his Politics. Individual laws, too, were admired by the connoisseurs: women, who as usual played no part in running the state, were forbidden to drink wine and could be killed by their husbands if they did; mimes and acrobats were banned because the young might be corrupted by them; euthanasia (by hemlock) was available to anyone who could give good enough reasons to the 600—you might have known bad luck and feared it would go on for ever, or you might have known good fortune and want to depart before it could change. Another way to die was as the scapegoat who would take on the sins of the city: having been fed on ritually correct dishes for a year, he was led through the streets, attired in sacrificial robes, to his death. As he passed by, citizens shouted curses at him. We do not know whether the victim was a convicted criminal (perhaps unlikely if he was to be a pleasing sacrifice), drawn by lot, or a religiously or masochistically minded volunteer.

Perhaps Massalia placated the gods. More importantly for their survival, it placated, or did good business with, Rome. A loose alliance against the Carthaginians existed long before Massaliote ships helped the Romans against Hannibal in the third century BC; the favour was returned when, in the mid-120s BC, the city could no longer hold out alone against attacks by the Saluvii. A Roman army destroyed Entremont, and southern France—”the Province”, “Provence”—soon came under Roman control. Massalia retained a fair degree of autonomy and the advantages of closer Roman protection. Only in 49 BC did the usually canny city fathers miscalculate. They backed Pompey against Caesar in the Civil War. The siege went on for six months until food shortages, disease and naval defeat forced the city to surrender. Humbled at last after 550 years, the Massaliotes were forced to hand over their ships, their weapons, and the contents of their treasury. They were also deprived of much of their territory. But Caesar spared the city itself: “more,” he says, “on account of the name and antiquity of their state than for anything they had deserved of him.”

Massalia’s disgrace was to the advantage of Arles—Roman Arelate— which became politically dominant. But Massalia remained a considerable commercial centre. And it also kept its “name and antiquity”, its reputation for that Greek culture which mattered so much to educated Romans. Strabo says that there were Romans who came here, instead of Athens, to study. Tacitus implies that this was a sensible choice, since this is “a place where Greek refinement and provincial puritanism are happily blended.” Tacitus’ father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola, subsequently governor of Britain, came to live and study here “from his very early years”. Agricola used to tell Tacitus that he had been “tempted to drink deeper of philosophy than was allowable for a Roman and a future senator” but that his wise mother “damped the fire of his passion.” Presumably the “provincial puritanism” also played its part.

 

Vestiges: The Musée d’Histoire De Marseille, Musée Des Docks Romains And Centre De La Vieille Charité

 

A passage in Blaise Cendrars’ L’Homme foudroyé (1945) celebrates the fact that Marseille “today is the only one of the ancient capitals which doesn’t crush us with monuments of its past.” Generally the city remains mysterious, “difficult to decode... Everything has gone back underground, everything is secret.” But some Greek and Roman remains have now, in fact, re-emerged. There was great excitement when part of the ancient city-wall was found in 1913, but most of the discoveries were made only after the building of the Bourse shopping-centre began in

1967. The resulting “Jardin des Vestiges”, reached through the History Museum, includes part of the docks (the harbour extended much further inland than now), the foundations of towers, a fifth-century BC well, part of a Roman road running through the east gate of the city, and a first-century AD tank for fresh water. Rather more excitingly—the “vestiges” can seem rather forlorn—the remains of a Roman trading ship were found and are displayed, with a replica, in the museum.

The History Museum has much else on ancient Marseille, but a more immediate impression of daily life is available at the Musée des Docks Romains. This has been built around the excavation of a group of large dolia—ceramic containers in which oil or wine was stored, called pithoi in Greek. They were sunk into the ground in order to keep them airtight and the temperature even. Each container had a capacity of about 2,000 litres. A few are complete or put back together, but most look like the abandoned halves of egg-shells. Skilfully lit, the browns and slightly pinkish grey of the containers and their surroundings are as aesthetically pleasing as archaeologically informative. They look more like the aftermath of an explosion than something “Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

Further antiquities, from Egyptian to Amerindian, can be seen at the Centre de la Vieille Charité, a grandly restored late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poorhouse, with domed Baroque chapel, by Pierre Puget. The north and east wings house museums of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Mediterranean antiquities and of African, Oceanic and Amerindian arts. The collection includes material from the Celto- Ligurian settlement at Roquepertuse, most famously its reddish limestone portico with niches ready to receive human heads. The cult of the severed head, for which there is also archaeological evidence at Entremont and Glanum, is mentioned in Diodorus Siculus’ History; the Gauls, he says, nail up their enemies’ heads or, in the case of important enemies, embalm the heads in cedar-oil and show them off to visitors. (Such customs are also attested in much later Irish and Welsh sources.) It is an aspect of the culture which people still find it difficult to comprehend or assimilate— like the Romans, who probably sacked Roquepertuse in about 123 BC. It is conceivable that the heads displayed were sometimes those of tribal worthies rather than enemies. More clearly, there must have been an intention to control, display or propitiate the head—home, to the Celts, of the soul, the identity—or the forces it embodied or symbolized.

A number of sculptures are associated with the portico. There are two cross-legged figures of gods, heroes or princes, one with lozenge- patterned robe, the other with torc and arm-band. These statues have, as Ian Finlay suggests (Celtic Art: an Introduction, 1973), “a rigid, hieratic quality reminiscent of Egypt.” And there is a two-headed “Janus” where, for Ruth and Vincent Megaw (Celtic Art, 1989), “the conventional rendering attains a curious distinction, almost the inscrutable beauty of a Gandhara Buddha, if without the compassion.”

 

Passing Through

 

Marseille was a point of arrival and departure for Barbarian invaders and those fleeing them, for merchants, crusaders and the Foreign Legion, poets and colonial officials going to Africa or the east, tourists going to Italy, and migrant workers from Corsica, Genoa, the French colonies and Greece. The calendars of events in the Almanach historique, biographique et littéraire de la Provence for the late 1850s and early 1860s list the almost routine arrivals of princes and Grand Duchesses as well as a battalion back from China, ten Arab horses (a gift to Napoleon III from the new Bey of Tunis) and a black crocodile from Senegal, nearly two metres long and bound for the Zoological Garden. Biographies of nineteenth-century poets and novelists often feature Marseille as a brief stage in the journey, a halt imposed by illness or poverty or the need to organize one’s affairs. George Sand and Frédéric Chopin arrived after a thirty-six-hour voyage which ended their difficult stay in Mallorca. Chopin was too ill—they stayed a month on doctor’s orders—to take much notice of Marseille. Sand was writing too hard, in need of cash, to do more than dismiss the place as a town of “merchants and shopkeepers, where the life of the mind is completely unknown.”

Arthur Rimbaud fell ill on arrival from Livorno in 1875, lived in Marseille in poverty for a while in 1877 and was admitted to the Hôpital de la Conception in May 1891 on his return to France from his years in Africa. He was suffering from bone cancer and had a leg amputated before leaving hospital in July. A month later he returned to the city and the hospital, still hoping to embark once more for Ethiopia, but died on 10 November aged thirty-seven. A day earlier he had dictated, in delirium, a letter organizing an imaginary ivory caravan and a last sailing on the imaginary but poetic-sounding “Aphinar” line.

Marseille itself, the beginning and end of adventures like Rimbaud’s, could seem fairly exotic to northerners. Gustave Flaubert had rarely ventured out of Normandy when, at the age of eighteen, he toured Corsica with a colleague of his father. On the journey there and back he also saw the south of France for the first time; he admired Marseille as “a pretty town” with great houses like palaces and long streets full of Midi sun and air where one senses “je ne sais quoi d’oriental”; “one walks and breathes at one’s ease.” Ancient Persia and medieval Alexandria must have been like this: “a babel of all the nations, where one sees blond hair... black beards... blue eyes, black looks... the turned-down collars of the English, the turban and wide trousers of the Turks. You hear a hundred unknown languages spoken,” including “those which are spoken in snowy countries and those which are sighed in southern climes.” And here, insists the young man temporarily away from his sometimes suffocating relationship with his parents, people are enjoying themselves so much that it would chagrin the virtuous. “People are taking in pleasure through every pore, in every form, as much as they can; sailors—Jews, Armenians, Greeks... crowding into the cabarets, laughing with the girls, turning over jugs of wine, singing, dancing, love- making at their ease.”

Flaubert had private reasons for delighting in Marseille. (Dickens, who did not, shared his delight in the nationalities and varying headgear, the “great beards, and no beards”, of the port, but also registered “vile smells” in the harbour and “crowds of fierce-looking people, of the lower sort, blocking up the way.”) In February 1860 Flaubert told the Goncourt brothers about his encounters with Eulalie Foucaud. He had found himself in “a little hotel in Marseille”, the Goncourts report: Hôtel de Richelieu, which was run by three women who had recently returned from South America. In their full-length silk dressing-gowns they were “very temptingly exotic” for the “young Norman”. One day when he came back from swimming, he told the fascinated brothers, he was beckoned into a bedroom by one of the three, “a woman of thirty- five, magnifique”. Ecstatic sex followed. Later there were tears, letters for a while after he left, “then nothing more”. Several times when he went back to Marseille he looked for Eulalie but found no trace. On his last visit, when he was on his way to Tunis to research his Carthaginian novel Salammbô in April 1858, he discovered that the ground floor of Hôtel de Richelieu had become a toyshop. Upstairs was a barber’s, where he had himself shaved. He recognized the wallpaper. By this time he was deeply versed in the exoticism which nourished—or, some feel, killed— Salammbô; and in its inevitable disappointments, whether for an inexperienced young man or for Emma Bovary.

There has always been business for prostitutes, like those Flaubert saw with the sailors, in a port. James Boswell visited Mademoiselle Susette on his return from Corsica in December 1765. She had been recommended by a fellow-Scot in Genoa; Boswell had “determined”, on reaching the age of twenty-five nearly two months earlier, “never again to risk my constitution with women,” but was easily persuaded that this specimen was “honest, safe, and disinterested.” Their encounter seems to have been little to his taste: he confides in his Journal, with a mixture of arrogance, honesty and self-castigation, that “she was so little that I had an idea as if she was a child, and had not much inclination for her. I recalled my charming Signora at Siena, and was disgusted at all women but her, and angry at myself for being in the arms of another. Susette chatted neatly and diverted me. I sacrificed to the graces. I think I did no harm.”

The much more innocent Paul Pennyfeather, hapless hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, wonders why the driver who takes him to the old town warns him to hold on to his hat. Soon “a young lady snatched his hat from his head; he caught a glimpse of her bare leg in a lighted doorway; then she appeared at a window, beckoning him to come in and retrieve it.” He hesitates briefly before fleeing, “forsaking, in a moment of panic, both his black hat and his self-possession.”

 

Royal Arrivals

 

In November 1600 Maria de’ Medici, the twenty-seven-year-old niece of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, stepped ashore in Marseille from her lavishly appointed galley. She had already married King Henri IV by proxy in the Duomo in Florence and was now welcomed, amid cannon salvoes, trumpeting and bowing, as the Queen known in France as Marie de Médicis. She was met by the Cardinals of France and the Consuls of Marseille in their scarlet robes. The senior Consul presented her with weighty golden keys to the city and fireworks were launched from ships and shore.

But a “most distressing incident” somewhat marred the welcome— as tends to happen, Maria’s accompanying aunt the Grand Duchess observed, “in all the affairs of this world.” The Knights of Malta had agreed that their ships, escorting the Tuscan ones, would take precedence—the position on the right—during the voyage from Livorno, but would cede it to the Tuscans when they neared their destination. In the event, however, the Knights made sure they maintained their position and this implied snub to the Grand Duke caused grave offence among the Italians. Things would have been distinctly easier if Henri IV had, as planned, been there to greet his bride and impose his authority. But he had been unavoidably detained by the need to finish his siege of Montmélian, an important stage in his war with Savoy; “Only the law of duty,” he wrote to her, “can compel the law of love.” But the delay in meeting the Beloved also gave him longer, it has been pointed out, to savour his liaison with Henriette d’ Entragues. To his wife he sent “a hundred thousand kisses”, to Henriette “a million”.

On shore over the next ten days there were other problems. Accommodation for the 500 Tuscans was poor, provisions so inadequate that they had to be supplied from their ships. Some townspeople were unwelcoming, mindful perhaps of recent history: Tuscan soldiers had held the Château d’If and neighbouring islands against the Governor of Provence in the closing stages of the Wars of Religion, withdrawing only in 1598. There were some scuffles, and the Tuscan minister Belisario Vinta wrote to the Grand Duke that he found the Marseillais to be travaglioso [troublesome], fastidioso, imperioso, e difficile. Vinta’s irritation was increased by the fact that he felt obliged to hand over Maria’s dowry (350,000 gold crowns, much needed by Henri after years of civil and other wars) with due ceremony to the King himself. He was therefore forced, when most of his compatriots had set off for home—to their and their hosts’ mutual relief—to go on with the Queen on her laborious winter journey to Lyon.

Twenty-two years later Peter Paul Rubens was commissioned by Marie, by this time the unhappy Queen Dowager, to paint the series of scenes from her life now in the Louvre. Whereas in reality she had dressed with simple elegance, Ronald Millen has pointed out that in the bravura “Disembarkation at Marseille” Rubens loaded her with “gold and pearl-embroidered cloth, encrusted the bodice and sleeves with precious stones, hung a heavy jewelled chain from her shoulders” and crowned her with a pearl and ruby diadem. Hefty nereids in the foreground help to draw the boat to shore—specimens of Rubens’ usual predilection for ample flesh. (One witness had noticed with approval Marie’s fort bon embonpoint, but she does not look particularly plump in the picture.) Instead of the actual cardinals and consuls, personifications of Provence and Marseille greet her. It all looks aptly celebratory, but there may be some hints that the difficulties and chagrins of the first days in France have not been forgotten—indeed have been carefully stored by the woman who has so often been at loggerheads with her adopted countrypeople, not least with her son King Louis XIII. The absence of the consuls and cardinals may be a deliberate slight, and Millen suggests that the Knight of Malta on the boat with the Queen may be intended to look arrogant rather than merely proud. The Knights’ discourtesy may still have rankled.

Marie’s grandson Louis XIV made sure that there was no discourtesy when he entered the city in 1660. Independent-minded or fastidioso as ever, many Marseillais had been agitating against the centralized rule increasingly being imposed on them. In January royal troops occupied the city. To make their point more clearly, they breached the old defensive walls. Through the breach, as conqueror rather than smiling royal visitor, Louis made his solemn entry on 7 March. Having arrived, he summarily revised the city administration. He abolished the title “consul”, with its proud republican associations. Chief magistrates or “échevins” would henceforth be royal appointees, and other traditional liberties were lost. The King, more efficient than his grandfather, moved on towards the Spanish border to collect his new queen, but an unambiguous sign of his authority remained in the Fort St.-Nicolas, built in the mid-1660s to dominate the entrance to the Vieux-Port. The medieval tower opposite had already, in 1644, been expanded as the Fort St.-Jean. Both were intended more to police the town than to resist invaders from the sea.

 

Plague

 

Ports attract trade, royal visits, invaders, prostitutes—and disease. There were many outbreaks of plague and later of cholera. The last major plague, of 1720, was remembered longest. In 1805 Anne Plumptre, the English translator of an account of the epidemic by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Bertrand, found people in Marseille who were still acutely aware of its “ravages and desolation” in spite of the more recent horrors of the Revolution. Modern interest was stimulated by a popular documentary study first published in 1968, Marseille ville morte, by Charles Carrière and his collaborators; partly under its influence several novelists turned their attention to the plague, including Raymond Jean in L’Or et la soie (Gold and Silk, 1983).

The plague came on the merchant ship Le Grand Saint-Antoine, which returned from the Middle East on 25 May 1720. Several crew- members died on the way or soon after their arrival. Because quarantine was not strictly enough applied, infection soon spread ashore, whether from the people aboard or the cargo. Only much later did it become clear that the city’s chief magistrate, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, wanted the ship unloaded as soon as possible so that its load of cotton, which he owned, could be ready for the fair at Beaucaire in July. Matters were made worse by the civic authorities’ reluctance to accept the seriousness of the outbreak. The magistrates alleged that the doctors were diagnosing plague simply in order to frighten people into sickness and so to make money from them.

But as the casualties mounted—fifty a day and then, at the height of the outbreak in July and August, a hundred—it became all too obvious that plague it was. By the time it subsided in the autumn about 50,000 Marseillais, about half the population, had died. There were the usual terrible scenes of rotting corpses, of people left to die because even relations dared not help them, of doomed attempts to impose a cordon sanitaire on the city. (Plague killed 37 per cent of the population of Provence between 1720 and 1722.) Chevalier Nicolas Roze raised a force of 150 convicts and soldiers to remove and bury the dead. Only three of this force, apparently, survived. The needs of the dying and the living were addressed by the Bishop of Marseille, Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce. While many of his clergy had fled or died, he went about distributing alms, encouraging the physicians, attending daily meetings at the Town Hall, leading prayers—the plague was, of course, widely interpreted as a manifestation of divine wrath. (Belsunce was sufficiently a man of his time and church to blame it especially on heresy.) Dr. Bertrand reports that most of Belsunce’s household perished and the street outside his palace was so blocked with corpses that he had to move elsewhere. He went round with the only canon of the cathedral who had not fled, and with his almoners. “The generous pastor had soon the affliction to see the zealous canon... expire by his side; but for himself, he remained to the last unassailed by the dreadful foe.” In the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille, beneath a radiant memorial painting of the bishop, a display of surgical instruments for dealing with plague gives some sense of the grim realities. There are probes, scissors, lancets, forceps. The long forceps or tongs used to give communion to plague victims must have been particularly familiar to Belsunce and his staff.

Early accounts stressed the individual heroism of Belsunce as one way of coping with the horrors of plague, one way of imposing order as the bishop had attempted to do as Marseille threatened to descend into anarchy. Later the emphasis often shifted to the more erringly human attitude of the city magistrates at the beginning of the summer. The origins of the plague, says Raymond Jean, “were attributed to fate, providence, the wrath of God. In reality they were of a completely human nature.” Meanwhile the immediate bringer of disease, the Grand Saint-Antoine, was burnt as a sensible precaution. Its remains were found by divers off the Ile de Jarre, south of Marseille, in 1978.

 

Pagnol’s Vieux-Port

 

Paul Pennyfeather, during his brief trip to Marseille in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, enters the old town along a “cobbled alley” where “the houses overhung perilously on each side, gaily alight from cellar to garret; between them swung lanterns; a shallow gutter ran down the centre of the path. The scene could scarcely have been more sinister had it been built at Hollywood itself for some orgiastic incident in the Reign of Terror.”

Cinema was indeed soon making the most of old Marseille, but more often for its colour, noise and camaraderie than for its sinister associations. Marcel Pagnol’s films of the 1930s fixed the life of the Vieux-Port—or at least his dramatic version of it—in the French imagination. Pagnol himself grew up in a very different part of the city. In 1900, when he was five, his father was appointed to a teaching post in central Marseille. From then on the family lived in various streets in the quiet Quartier de la Plaine. Pagnol attended the prestigious Lycée Thiers, named after a former pupil, Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), historian and first President of the Third Republic. (Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, was another notable student.) Pagnol later filmed his Christmas story Merlusse (1935) in the school’s large main building: a seemingly unfriendly teacher manages to rise to the needs of children left behind for the holidays.

The grimier, louder, warmer Marseille of the Vieux-Port, where people speak their loves and usually temporary hates more openly than at the lycée or in the Quartier de la Plaine, had impinged little on the young Pagnol. “The charm of the little streets choked up with rubbish,” he remembers in his 1962 preface to Marius, “had always escaped me.” But four years away in Paris revealed the charm of deep shops with coils of rope in corners, folded sails, and “big brass lanterns hanging from the ceiling”, of the small shaded bars along the quais, and the fraîches Marseillaises, like Fanny in Marius, at their shellfish stalls. And so, says Pagnol, he wrote the original play Marius. The opening stage directions set the scene firmly in the Vieux-Port: a little bar (the Bar de la Marine), its pavement tables, the back of Fanny’s shellfish-stall, packing-cases bound for Bangkok and Sydney, barrels, a huge heap of nuts, and masts bobbing in the distance. Everywhere there is hammering and the clanking of cranes until, as the action begins, the ear-splitting midday siren at the docks sounds. (He feared that it would be all too Marseillais for Paris audiences, but the play ran for 800 performances after its first night in Paris in 1929. The popular film version by Alexander Korda for Paramount (1931) used Pagnol’s adaptation. Pagnol then formed his own company, Les Films Marcel-Pagnol, which made the sequels Fanny (1932) and César (1936).)

Marius is a young man who works, not very efficiently, in the bar owned by his father, César, the “grande brute sympathique” created on stage, and later played on screen, by the great southern actor Raimu. Fanny wants Marius to marry her; he is reluctant, he explains in Act Two, because of his longing to go to sea. When he was about seventeen “there, in front of the bar, a great sailing-ship moored... It was a three- master, carrying wood from the West Indies—wood that’s black on the outside and golden on the inside, which smelled of camphor and pepper.” He chatted with the crew when they came to the bar; “they talked about their country, they gave me some of their rum—very smooth, very spicy.” And as he watched the three-master sail away he was completely hooked. He knows that their exotic destinations could not live up to his imaginings, but he needs “elsewhere”. Fanny understands this, and wants him even so.

Life centres on the bar, where there is a long card-playing scene between César, master sail-maker Panisse, customs officer Brun, and Escartefigue, “captain” of the “ferryboat” (they pronounce it “fériboîte”; a modern equivalent still runs) which carries foot-passengers from one side of the harbour to the other twenty-four times a day. Escartefigue and his driver take their jobs very seriously, to the incredulity of Marius, the would-be ocean sailor. In the second sequel, César, Panisse dies but the other three, not without tears, set out the cards at his empty place and play the game through. “Elsewhere”, exciting for the young man, is suspect to his elders; César never misses a chance to insult the evidently long-established Brun for the lyonnaiseries characteristic of someone who originated from Lyon, and he points out that the Eiffel Tower is, “where width is concerned, half the size” of the transporter bridge or Pont Transbordeur in the Vieux-Port. (Erected in 1905, the bridge was partly blown up by the Germans in 1944 and the rest demolished in 1945.)

In the finely melodramatic ending of the first play, Marius has one last chance to join a ship’s crew sailing for Rangoon and beyond. He has by now agreed to marry Fanny, but she realizes that he must go and suggests that they marry only after his three-year voyage. César is coming; she tells Marius to get out through the window and herself delays César by keeping him talking, giving the impression that everything is arranged for the marriage. Finally she faints as “the harbour sirens sound one after another in honour of the great sailing-ship as it goes out.”

The respectful salute to the sailing-ship may remind us that the days of such romantic craft were already numbered and hint that Marius’ dream is not really susceptible of fulfilment. Things are not to turn out as planned. Fanny and the audience learn, in the second piece, that she is pregnant by Marius and has no option but to accept Panisse’s offer of marriage. Marius will spend much of his career not on the high seas but as a mechanic in Toulon. But by the end of César he has met his and Fanny’s son Césariot, who thought he was Panisse’s son until after the latter’s death, and begun to recover his relationship both with Fanny and with his mostly unchanged, but now more reasonable, father.

 

The Holocaust And The Destruction Of The Vieux-Port

 

In 1941 the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss departed from Marseille, after many difficulties, on a boat bound for Martinique. The passengers were seen off by ranks of helmeted, machine-gun-wielding gardes mobiles; they went, he recalled in Tristes Tropiques (1955), like convicts. All 350 of them, mostly fellow Jews, foreigners, or suspected anarchists, were crammed into a small steamship with two cabins. A friend somehow got Lévi-Strauss into one of them. Other passengers piled into the hold, where bunks had been rigged up. These unfortunates included André Breton, whose friendship with Lévi-Strauss began with an exchange of letters, during the long and uncomfortable voyage, on “the relations between aesthetic beauty and absolute originality.”

Breton and his family had been helped to leave France by the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose remit was to rescue artists and intellectuals. Heinrich Mann (novelist, brother of Thomas) and the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt were also among those helped by this organization. Various other agencies gave more general assistance to people trying to leave, mainly in 1940-2. But thousands were less lucky; and many Jews who were long established in Marseille did not even try to leave, under the sadly mistaken impression that only more recent arrivals would be attacked.

Persecution began in earnest when the Germans took control of Vichy France in 1942. Memoirs and modern research have made it very clear that the Vichy authorities in the city were of considerable assistance to the Germans in their campaign against the Jews and other “undesirables”. Jews were detained and deported in increasing numbers; 20,000 people were sent to an internment camp at Fréjus. Hitler ordered the destruction of the Vieux-Port, perceived as a den of Jews, Resistance, deserters, and prostitutes; Karl Oberg, head of the French Gestapo, declared that “Marseille is the cancer of Europe. And Europe cannot live until Marseille is purified.” “Cleaning” would, accordingly, commence. In February 1943 the French police evacuated the inhabitants and arrested many of them. Two hundred Jews were rounded up, together with 600 others, mostly young men. (Only a hundred of this group, deported to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, survived the war.) German soldiers then dynamited nearly two hundred buildings in the Vieux-Port. With their usual concern for culture over people, the aggressors preserved a few historic buildings: the Town Hall with its Baroque façade, the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Cabre, the Maison Diamantée— named for its diamond-point stonework—which now houses the Musée du Vieux Marseille. Persecution continued until the liberation of Marseille in August 1944. The story of the Jews of Marseille and of the destruction of the old town is told in words and often harrowing pictures at the Mémorial des Camps de la Mort, a small museum just outside the walls of the Fort St.-Jean in Quai de la Tourette.

 

Galleys And Prisons; The Château d’If

 

John Evelyn, like many other travellers, was fascinated and a little shocked to come upon the galley-slaves of Marseille. After “the captain of the Galley Royal” had entertained him and his companions to the accompaniment of “both loud and soft music” played “very rarely” by his oarsmen,

 

he showed us how he commanded their motions with a nod and his whistle, making them row out. This spectacle was to me new and strange, to see so many hundreds of miserably naked persons, having their heads shaven close and having only high red bonnets, a pair of coarse canvas drawers, their whole backs and legs naked, doubly chained about their middle and legs, in couples, and made fast to their seats, and all commanded in a trice by an imperious and cruel seaman... Their rising forward and falling back at their oar is a miserable spectacle, and the noise of their chains with the roaring of the beaten waters has something of strange and fearful to one unaccustomed to it.

 

Most witnesses took a measure of comfort in the fact that, as Evelyn puts it, “there was hardly one” of the rowers “but had some occupation by which, as leisure and calms permitted, they got some little money, insomuch as some of them have, after many years of cruel servitude, been able to purchase their liberty.” Apparently some even had wives in the port and some were not criminals or captives but volunteers (desperate for work, presumably). But most were persecuted Protestants, captured Turks, smugglers, or minor fraudsters.

The city possessed its share of more conventional places of confinement. In Pictures from Italy Dickens describes, for example, “the common madhouse, a low, contracted, miserable building” whose chattering inmates “were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if they were baited by a pack of dogs.” In the first chapter of Little Dorrit light penetrates a cell in the Marseille prison to somewhat different, if no less despairing effect: “it came languishing down a square funnel that blinded a window in the staircase wall, through which the sky was never seen—nor anything else.” In the cell the villainous Rigaud, who plays out the “game” of being a “gentleman” with the help of much “swagger and challenge”, manifests his sense of superiority to the “sunburnt, quick, lithe, little” Genoese John Baptist Cavalletto while waiting to hear whether he is to be released or to face an appointment with the “national razor”.

 

The Château d’If: the “black, steep rock”, and fortress like some “superfluity of flint”, of Edmond Dantès’ long imprisonment in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo.

 

At times Edmond Dantès, the hero of Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte- Cristo (1844-6), would rather have kept such an appointment than suffer as he does during his imprisonment in the offshore Château d’If. Fourteen years elapse between his dawning realization that he is being taken out, in the dark, to that notorious “black, steep rock” crowned by the fortress like some “superfluity of flint”, and his arduous eventual escape. The fortress was built by François I in 1524-8 and served as a prison, especially for people deemed a danger to the state, for much of its history. Dantès is a young Marseille seaman falsely denounced as a Bonapartist agent by his personal enemies, and put away with no prospect of release as a result of a high official’s self-interest. Solitary confinement very nearly drives him insane. Even galley-slaves, he reflects, have company, breathe the air and see the sky. On nights of “despair and fury” he counts 3,000 circuits of his cell—30,000 paces, nearly ten leagues. He can be saved only by the contact finally achieved with the inmate of a neighbouring cell, the learned but supposedly mad Abbé Faria. Faria educates and inspirits him and points his way to the vast treasure concealed on the island of Monte Cristo. Both the treasure and the training will do much to enable, many hundreds of pages later, the count’s final revenge on his enemies. He visits the Château d’If, no longer a prison but a tourist attraction, and is told part of his own famous story and shown his and Faria’s cells, as many a real visitor later would be. He sees the mark worn into the wall by his shoulders, the inscription in which he prayed not to lose his memory, and the remains of the bed in which Faria died. And the count no longer doubts, as for a time he had, the justice of his vengeance.

 

“Black Docker”: Claude McKay And Ousmane Sembène

 

Many people in Marseille, or their ancestors, originate from the former French colonies in North and West Africa and the Caribbean. Claude McKay (1890-1948) was from Jamaica and lived in America before and after his travels in Europe in the 1920s—but felt that he had much in common with the mixture of Africans, West Indians and African Americans he met in the city. His novel Banjo (1929) explores the life and the frustrated aspirations of black seamen in the “ditch” of Marseille. Any consolation is temporary and hedonistic; white power remains apparently unassailable.

McKay worked as an occasional docker. (He did light work but noticed that usually it was the heavier and more difficult jobs that the blacks were expected to do.) Ousmane Sembène (born 1923), the Senegalese novelist and film-maker, came as a docker and stayed much longer, becoming a communist trade-union official. Docker noir (1956; translated by Ros Schwartz, 1986) is a novel about racial injustice and hypocrisy set in a Marseille where conditions are still bad for black dockers. As well as hard work, they face uncertain employment prospects, harsh treatment by employers, illness and injury:

 

The expressions on their faces reflected their inner discontent. Their skins were branded by the searing sun and dulled by the harsh weather which made deep furrows in their faces. Their hair was eaten away by bugs in the cereals. After years of this work, a man became a wreck, drained inside, nothing but an outer shell. Living in this hell, each year the docker takes another great stride towards his end. There were countless accidents. Mechanization had superseded their physical capacity, only a quarter of them toiled away maintaining the pace of the machines, replacing the output of the unemployed workers. It was the rivalry of bone against steel, a question of which was the stronger.

 

Churches And Cathedrals

 

The abbey of St.-Victor grew up around the traditional rock tomb of the saint, a Roman army officer who is supposed to have stirred up resistance to the emperor Maximian’s persecution of Christians in Marseille. In prison he converted his guards, enraged the emperor by kicking a statue of Jupiter instead of offering incense, and endured terrible tortures including crushing by the grindstone of a mill, before eventually achieving his martyr’s crown. In the eleventh century the early medieval church was adapted as the crypt or lower church; the upper church was rebuilt in the thirteenth century. The crypt and church are all that remain of the once-flourishing abbey complex.

The Romanesque former cathedral of Notre-Dame La Major also survives in reduced form: it was partly demolished to make way for the vast new Major, built between 1852 and 1893. From far out at sea, Richard Cobb notes, the new building looks “mosque-like”; it is “a place apparently of Eastern worship and rite.” Elsie Whitlock Rose, in Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France (1906), agrees that the green and white exterior, in a style “variously called French Romanesque, Byzantine, and Neo-Byzantine, is very oriental in its general effect.” The interior, too, is “entirely oriental in the luxury of ornamentation... and without that sober majesty which is an inherent characteristic of the most elaborate styles native to western Christianity.” The greys, pinks and whites here “would seem almost too delicate, too effeminate for so large a building” (it is 141 metres long) but the combination is “made rich and effective by their very mass, the gigantic sizes which the plan exacts.”

The construction of another large church, Notre-Dame de la Garde, overlapped with that of the cathedral. High on its limestone peak, the domed and towered neo-Byzantine church of 1853-74 is a distinguishing feature of Marseille, much photographed, included in many films, and traditionally venerated by sailors. The ex-votos dedicated by sailors, their families and others are the most noticeable feature of the interior: “countless votive pictures and tablets and medals and miraculously useless crutches” in the crypt; representations also of craft from rowing-boats to battleships, tanks and planes, in the “heartwarmingly, generously vulgar church” (M. F. K. Fisher, A Considerable Town, 1978). Like its smaller thirteenth-century predecessor—part of the fort which once commanded the city—Notre- Dame de la Garde is a centre of Marian pilgrimage and devotion. In 1644, however, John Evelyn felt moved to record only “In the chapel hung up divers crocodile skins.”

Madeleine de Scudéry also came here in 1644, when her brother Georges took up his appointment as governor of the fort. She mentions no crocodiles, but does describe the panoramic view. She looked down, she wrote to a friend, at the harbour and city on one side, so close that she could hear the oboes playing on twenty-five galleys; in another direction were “more than 12,000 bastides” (1,500 was Evelyn’s more conservative estimate of the number of these country houses); a third way, islands and endless sea; and a fourth, wasteland all bristling with rocks, “whose barrenness and loneliness are as horrifying as the abundance of all the other places is delightful.”

 

 

The royal minister de Brienne had expressed doubts about granting the post of governor to a poet. But the Marquise de Rambouillet, using her influence on Georges’ behalf, replied, suitably poetically, that it was no use giving such a man a command in a valley; she could imagine him high on his castle keep, “head in the clouds, looking down with disdain at everything which is beneath him.” In fact, residence at the fort was not even required of Georges, and if he felt disdainful it was mainly because it proved unexpectedly difficult to make any money out of the post. He appointed a lieutenant, who entertained the brother and sister to a feast and cannon salute on the hill. They lived down in the city, where Madeleine de Scudéry enjoyed the mild winters but suffered the “ennui” of exile; especially tedious were her women visitors, only a few of whom, she told friends in distressingly distant Paris, could speak French. She did admit, however, that there was something notable about the beautiful, young and learned Mlle Françoise Diodé. Perhaps the learning was a little ostentatiously paraded—Mlle Diodé had a habit of citing, in ordinary conversation, “Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster and other such gentlemen with whom,” Scudéry alleges, “I am not acquainted.” Nevertheless the two women were friends for a time.

In 1647 the Scudérys returned, without regret, to Paris and their familiar circle. Notre-Dame de la Garde made its way into the eighth part of her vast novel Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus as a high tower with barren rocks on one side, fertile gardens and meadows on the other. Diodé finds a place in the third volume as the beautiful, intelligent but “a little strange” Philiste.

 

Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation

 

One building in Marseille has attracted more attention than any other. Le Corbusier’s massive block of flats was built mainly between 1947 and 1949 and opened officially in 1952. Its “brutalist” architecture excited protests in the press, from architects’ organizations, from the society for “L’Esthéthique de France”. The fortunes of the project varied as ten

different governments briefly held office; seven Ministers of Reconstruction came and went. A major health body decided that people living in the building would suffer from mental problems, and for years it was known popularly as the maison du fada—”the crackpot’s house” or “the nuthouse”.

The Marseille Unité d’Habitation has always had its champions, however. For Vincent Scully (Modern Architecture: the Architecture of Democracy, 1961) it

 

stands upon its muscular legs as an image of human uprightness and dignifies all its individual units within a single embodiment of the monumental human force which makes them possible. The high space of each apartment looks out towards the mountains or the sea, and it is in relation to the mountains and the sea that the building as a whole should be seen... So perceived it is a Humanist building, as we emphatically associate ourselves with it, in the contrasting landscape, as a standing body analogous to our own.

 

And here, according to Charles Jencks’ book about Le Corbusier (1973),

 

the feeling of protection and individuality is so strong that it is comparable to standing in a cave. Yet the overall feeling is not cave-like or even monastic but more of being on a gigantic ocean liner ploughing through the choppy seas of verdure and haphazard suburban sprawl.

 

Marseille has two important galleries for indoor modern art: the Musée Cantini for pre-1960 work including Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Max Ernst and Kandinsky, and the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) for the post-1960 Jean Tinguely, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, César, Arte Povera and much else.

 

Aubagne And La Treille

 

Marcel Pagnol was born at 16 cours Barthélemy, Aubagne, on 28 February 1895. The street is named after an earlier native of Aubagne, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, author of the classical Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788); according to Pagnol, the abbé developed some rather surprising political credentials in later centuries since locally his little-read book was remembered as an account of “Le Jeune Anarchiste”. Such a title would perhaps not have appealed to the Foreign Legion, one-time defenders of French imperial power and based in Aubagne since withdrawal from Algeria in 1962.

The town was already closely connected with Marseille in Pagnol’s childhood, but was less industrialized than now and seemed quite countrified to him. The family moved into Marseille when he was eighteen months old, but Aubagne remained, after the excitement of a tram-ride from the city, the starting-point for their holiday journeys into the hills. These hills are the main setting for Pagnol’s autobiographical writings and for his film Manon des sources (1953). Subsequently he revised the story of the film—developing material which precedes the action there—as a novel, L’Eau des collines (1963); the two parts of this, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, were in turn filmed by Claude Berri in 1986.

The Pagnols’ destination was a small cabanon or cottage near the village of La Treille, which becomes Les Bastides Blanches in the Manon sequence. (Pagnol filmed near La Treille, Berri further into the hills.) Les Bastides is a village of five or six unmade streets, “streets narrow because of the sun, tortuous because of the mistral.” The lives of the villagers revolve around work, boules, gossip, and intense suspicion of outsiders. Above Les Bastides live the Soubeyrans. César Soubeyran, known as Le Papet (Grandpa), prides himself on belonging to an old and once flourishing family and is driven both by greed and by the desire to see the family continued by his nephew, the rather witless Ugolin. The Soubeyrans’ lack of human generosity is shown mainly through their treatment of Jean Cadoret, a hugely enthusiastic and idealistic town-dweller who brings his wife and daughter to live in the country. Hoping to drive him out and buy his land cheap, they conceal the existence of the spring which could have made farming much easier for him, emphasize to the villagers that Jean comes from the hated rival settlement of Crespin, and neglect to mention that his mother, Florette, was Florette Camoins, originally of the Bastides. Jean (known less politely as le Bossu—”the Hunchback”) toils ceaselessly to make a success of his new life, clearing land, breeding rabbits, growing crops, excitedly lecturing his family and his seeming friend Ugolin from suitable self-help books. But lack of water dooms him, for all his efforts, to failure.

The Soubeyrans achieve their aim, but in the long term they have conspired against themselves. Ugolin’s nemesis is to fall in love with Jean Cadoret’s daughter, the goatherd Manon, who has instinctively disliked him since childhood. His case is not helped when Manon, ferociously loyal to her father’s memory, discovers the Soubeyrans’ guilt and others’ complicity—they knew about the spring but would not “interfere”. She determines to take revenge on the whole village, blocking the water supply to the fountain. Eventually the love of the village schoolteacher, an outsider untouched by the collective guilt, helps her to resolve the situation; the curé, however, is convinced that the return of the water results from communal prayer, repentance and procession.

Manon often plays her father’s harmonica in memory of him. This, together with the strong Provençal accents rarely indicated in the novel, is a memorable feature of the soundscape of the Claude Berri films. There the tune she plays becomes the overture to Verdi’s La forza del destino, suitably in a work so aware of fate and with such consciously mythic dimensions. When Manon dances naked to the sun she is, even the spying Ugolin can sense, “the divinity of the hills, the pinewood and the season of Spring.” Also familiar from Greek myth or tragedy is the shocking revelation, late in the novel, that means all Le Papet’s efforts have been in his own and his family’s worst interests.

 

Souvenirs D’Enfance

 

Beyond the Bastides Blanches, says the opening paragraph of Jean de Florette, only a mule-track goes up into the hills. From the track issue “a few paths, leading to the sky.” Up in the hills Manon herds her goats and Ugolin spies on her and here too, amid thyme and rosemary and kermes oak and beneath Garlaban and other peaks, takes place much of the action of Pagnol’s autobiographical trilogy Souvenirs d’enfance (1957- 60).

The trilogy, and especially the first two parts, La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère, is concerned above all with Pagnol’s father Joseph and the way in which the young Marcel perceives and relates to him and to the adult world more generally. (The adult narrator shows the youthful perceptions; Pagnol, who studied English at the University of Aix, was a Dickens enthusiast and Great Expectations is possibly one influence on this dual perspective.) Joseph belonged to a generation of French schoolteachers most of whom were resolutely anticlerical, fierce opponents of alcohol, and upholders of the Revolution—Pagnol professes himself uncertain as to quite how they ignored the violence of the “lay angels” of their “golden age of high-mindedness and brotherhood.” Sometimes, however, he can be helped to depart a little from his principles.

When Joseph decides to start hunting with his brother-in-law Jules, Marcel is worried that his hitherto apparently all-knowing father— teacher, examiner, invincible boules player—will fail humiliatingly while the confident and experienced Uncle Jules will end up “decked out with partridges and hares like a shop window.” Marcel follows them secretly and witnesses the scene in which both men fire at some partridges, Jules successfully, but a hare then escapes through Joseph’s legs because he had failed to re-load. Jules’ resulting outburst gives Pagnol one of many opportunities to enjoy the distinctive rolled “r”s of a man who originates from Narbonne: “Malheurreux! il fallait recharrger tout de suite! Dès qu’on a tirré, on rrecharrge!!!”

After this Marcel loses his way, going on bravely across stony plateaux and ravines thick with rosemary and thyme, but sustained, in spite of thorns and minimal provisions, by his memories of Robinson Crusoe and tales of the Comanche. Eventually he hears gunshot. Two large birds come down in the bushes, one hitting him on the head. He realizes, to his astonishment, that they are rare bartavelles—the much sought-after rock partridge. Perhaps Uncle Jules brought them down with his usual skill. But no: Marcel hears his uncle reprimanding Joseph for having scared them off by firing too soon when they were obviously heading his—Jules’—way. He is, to say the least, sceptical about Joseph’s belief that he “clipped” one of the bartavelles. Joseph begins to sink. But then, restoring his beloved father’s credibility at a blow, Marcel leaps up onto some rocks and yells out “He killed them! Both of them! He killed them!” Joseph receives his glory, the book its title: “And in my blood- stained little fists, from which hung four golden wings, I lifted my father’s glory to the sky, before the setting sun.”

The father proceeds to show the bartavelles to anyone he possibly can; even the curé suddenly gains his goodwill by photographing him and his trophies. Through his uncle as well as his father Marcel learns that adults are very human, and not necessarily less loveable therefore. Jules is as fervently Catholic as Joseph is convincedly atheist. Whenever an argument about religion seems likely to blow up between them, their wives, Aunt Rose and Marcel’s mother Augustine, expertly cause distractions. On one occasion Jules is profoundly shocked at a remark which suggests just how irreligious has been young Marcel’s education; as metaphorical daggers are drawn, Rose the quick-thinking peacemaker seizes a basket and a cape, shouts “Jules! The rain has nearly stopped! Quick—get us some snails!”, and rams the cape over his head before bundling him out of the door into the heavy rain. On his way out “he tried”, encumbered as he was, “to roll some rs, and we heard ‘Vrraiment ttrop ttriste et ttrop affrreux’… Ce pauvre enfant.” By the time Jules comes back with his snails the incipient argument is apparently forgotten: Joseph is playing the flute, Augustine is listening as she hems some towels, and the children are playing dominoes.

How and whether such incidents actually happened is uncertain. Pagnol saw himself as essentially a conteur, a story-teller: he strives to reach the essence of his parents—their truth at least in relation to him—rather than to reconstruct their lives. He continues to think about both parents in Le Château de ma mère, where one of the main stories is about the family’s short-cut along a canal, to save themselves five kilometres’ hard walking. This involves trespassing on the land of several châteaux, with the help of a key given them by a canal worker, Joseph’s ex-pupil Bouzigue. At first Joseph stoutly refuses to take advantage of his offer. To accept would be particularly improper for an employee of the state. (“Oyayaïe! ... Les principes, oyayaïe!” cries the less fastidious Bouzigue.) But he is persuaded that, since he has some knowledge of building (his father was a stonecutter), he can keep an eye on the state of repair of the canal and so will be “serving the community, albeit in a slightly irregular way.”

One château owner, a friendly colonel, offers them hospitality, but at another property they are confronted by an angry, drunken guard and his dog. Joseph’s original scruples look to have been justified. With the help of Bouzigue and two colleagues, the crisis is soon resolved, but Augustine’s reactions—the nervousness she struggles to control when crossing the private land, her shock and fainting when the guard berates them—remain poignantly present to Pagnol at the end of the book; she died when he was fifteen. Years later, he says, when he became a film- maker, he was searching for a place in which to establish a “Cité du Cinéma”. Having bought a promising-sounding château without having seen it, on going there he recognized the octagonal towers, the canal, the hawthorn and wild roses of the place of his mother’s terror and his father’s humiliation. (It was the Château de Buzine, near Les Camoins; its cinematic life was brief, but Joseph Pagnol later lived and, in 1951, died there.) There by the door, beneath the white roses “and on the other side of time, for years there had been a very young, dark woman, still clasping the colonel’s red roses against her fragile heart. She heard the guard’s shout and the dog’s rough breathing. Pale, trembling, and for ever inconsolable, she did not know that she was at her son’s house.”

In Le Temps des secrets Pagnol goes on to recount his school experiences and some further hunting stories, but Le Château, with its sudden final sadness (movingly captured in Yves Robert’s film of 1990), was his favourite book. A copy was buried with him in the cemetery at La Treille in 1974.

 

Cassis: “Brilliant Yellow And Ink Black”

 

The eponymous hero of Frédéric Mistral’s Calendal (1867) hymns his native Cassis for its adventurous fishing-fleet (out catching crayfish, mullet, anchovies, John Dory and L’Auriòu damasquina—damascened mackerel); its skilled and industrious women who polish red coral and weave baskets while the men fish; and its wine sweeter than honey which briho/Coume un linde diamant (“shines like a limpid diamond”) and is scented with the rosemary, heather and myrtle of the surrounding hills.

Cassis retained its ideal status, especially for visitors from the dark, damp north. Virginia Woolf, back in England, remembered, in a letter to Roger Fry of September 1925, a place of “heat and light and colour and real sea and real sky and real food instead of the wishywashy watery brash we get here”. She had stayed at the Hôtel Cendrillon, on the waterfront, that spring. She stayed there again in 1927 but spent most of the time with her sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Clive Bell, at the Villa Corsica. “I am writing, with difficulty, on a balcony in the shade,” she told Vita Sackville-West on 5 April. “Everything is divided into brilliant yellow and ink black.” Woolf and Clive Bell write while

 

underneath, on the next balcony, Vanessa and Duncan are painting the loveliest pictures of rolls of bread, oranges, wine bottles. In the garden, which is sprinkled with saucers of daisies, red and white, and pansies, the gardener is hoeing the completely dry earth. There is also the Mediterranean—and some bare bald grey mountains.

 

Such irritations as there were in this apparently perfect place were minor. In April 1928, when Leonard and Virginia Woolf were staying at the Château de Fontcreuse and the others were installed at a house called La Bergère, Woolf wrote to her nephew, Quentin Bell, about the vociferous frogs which bark whenever Clive (Quentin’s father) is about to say something inspiring. “Thus Clive’s words are never heard, and the truth is lost—which is a great pity, but after all, why should not frogs have their will now and then?”

The eccentric English colony were only slightly more irritating than the frogs, and often just as amusing: on 6 May 1929 Woolf wrote to a friend about “leading a delicious life, with a great deal of wine, cheap cigars, conversation, and the society of curious derelict English people, who have no money, and live like lizards in crannies, sometimes keeping a few fowls or breeding spaniels.”

 

L’Estaque: “Masterful Smears And Smudges”

 

“Unfortunately what they call progress,” Paul Cézanne told his niece Paule Conil in 1902, “is only invasion by bipeds who will not stop until they have transformed everything into odious quais with gaslamps and— even worse—with electric lighting. What a time we live in!” As a result L’Estaque, the fishing-village by Marseille which he had often painted in the 1870s and 1880s, was no longer a picturesque place. It was being steadily industrialized, its population rising from 800 in 1850 to 10,000 in 1920. Change continued until it became the unrecognizably different setting for the films of the L’Estaque-born Robert Guédiguian in the 1980s and 1990s: not just painterly pines and the blue Mediterranean but unemployment, racism, crime, and industry now in decay like the closed cement-factory in Marius et Jeannette (1997). Guédiguian, however, modifies the bleakness with his sympathy for his characters and human involvement in local issues: “Demonstrations and petitions by intellectuals are no use... I must speak to my neighbour, who lives and goes shopping in the same place as me: I’m not going to tell him lies.” There are already a few factory chimneys in some of Cézanne’s

paintings, and clay-extraction has left huge holes in the shoreline in Zola’s “Naïs Micoulin”, a story of love and unexpected revenge written at L’Estaque when he stayed there in 1877. But it was still somewhere for contemplating sunsets from cliffs, as the lovers do in “Naïs”; a place where Zola could write on in peace, in spite of the wonders of the view, temperatures sometimes of 40 degrees, and bouts of illness which he felt were brought on by excessive indulgence in bouillabaisse and shellfish. It was still sufficiently out of the way for Cézanne to come here in 1870-1

to avoid both conscription and his father discovering that he was living there with Hortense Fiquet. With personal difficulties and in a country convulsed by the Franco-Prussian War and its aftermath, Cézanne painted Melting Snow at L’Estaque (now in a private collection in Switzerland), a work very different from those he would produce here only a few years later. Lawrence Gowing sees Melting Snow as presenting

 

the fearful image of a world dissolved, sliding downhill in a sickeningly precipitous diagonal between the curling pines which are themselves almost threateningly unstable and Baroque, painted with a wholly appropriate slippery wetness and a soiled non-colour unique in his work.

 

The later Cézanne views at L’Estaque are to be seen in galleries including the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, the Musée Picasso in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their significance in the development of his distinctive style is suggested by the letter he sent Camille Pissarro in July 1876:

 

I have begun two little motifs showing the sea… – It’s like a playing- card. Red roofs over the blue sea… The sun is so tremendous that it seems to me that the objects are silhouetted not only in black or white, but in blue, in red, in brown, in violet. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that this is the opposite of modelling.

 

It took most observers some time to appreciate Cézanne’s method. When the view of L’Estaque now in the Fitzwilliam was shown in New York in 1916, Frank J. Mather, Jr., writing in The Nation, showed a degree of understanding which had been rare in the painter’s lifetime: “There are, from the ordinary point of view, no surfaces, just masterful smears and smudges which fix the position and indicate the direction of the planes.” Braque, Dufy and others who painted at L’Estaque in the early twentieth century were strongly aware of Cézanne’s work here, and perhaps achieved a more intimate grasp of what he was trying to do. Braque moved on from it in Houses at L’Estaque (1908), which Matisse regarded as the original Cubist painting.