One of the many tantalizing things about Marseille is that most people who describe it, whether or not they know much about either the place or the languages they are supposedly using, write the same things. For centuries this has been so, and a typically modern opinion could have been given in 1550 as well as 1977.

Not long ago I read one, mercifully unsigned, in a San Francisco paper. It was full of logistical errors, faulty syntax, misspelled French words, but it hewed true to the familiar line that Marseille is doing its best to live up to a legendary reputation as world capital for “dope, whores, and street violence.” It then went on to discuss, often erroneously, the essential ingredients of a true bouillabaisse! The familiar pitch had been made, and idle readers dreaming of a great seaport dedicated to heroin, prostitution, and rioting could easily skip the clumsy details of marketing for fresh fish….

“Feature articles” like this one make it seem probable that many big newspapers, especially in English-reading countries, keep a few such mild shockers on hand in a back drawer, in case a few columns need filling on a rainy Sunday. Apparently people like to glance one more time at the same old words: evil, filthy, dangerous.

Sometimes such journalese is almost worth reading for its precociously obsolete views of a society too easy to forget. In 1929, for instance, shortly before the Wall Street Crash, a popular travel writer named Basil Woon published A Guide to the Gay World of France: From Deauville to Monte Carlo (Horace Liveright, New York). (By now even his use of word “gay” is quaintly naïve enough for a small chuckle….)

Of course Mr. Woon was most interested in the Cote d’Azur, in those far days teeming and staggering with rich English and even richer Americans, but while he could not actively recommend staying in Marseille, he did remain true to his journalistic background with an expectedly titillating mention of it:

If you are interested in how the other side of the world lives, a trip through old Marseilles—by daylight—cannot fail to thrill, but it is not wise to venture into this district at night unless dressed like a stevedore and well armed. Thieves, cutthroats, and other undesirables throng the narrow alleys, and sisters of scarlet sit in the doorways of their places of business, catching you by the sleeve as you pass by. The dregs of the world are here, unsifted. It is Port Said, Shanghai, Barcelona, and Sidney combined. Now that San Francisco has reformed, Marseilles is the world’s wickedest port.

(Mr. Woon’s last sentence, written some fifty years ago, is more provocative today than it was then, to anyone interested in the shifting politics of the West Coast of America….)

While I either accept or deplore what other people report about the French town, and even feel that I understand why they are obliged to use the words they do (Give the public what it wants, etc., etc….), I myself have a different definition of the place, which is as indefinable as Marseille itself: Insolite.

There seems to be no proper twin for this word in English; one simply has to sense or feel what it means. Larousse says that it is somewhat like “contrary to what is usual and normal.” Dictionaries such as the Shorter Oxford and Webster’s Third International try words like apart, unique, unusual. This is not enough, though…not quite right. Inwardly I know that it means mysterious, unknowable, and in plain fact, indefinable.

And that is Marseille: indefinable, and therefore insolite. And the strange word is as good as any to explain why the place haunts me and draws me, with its phoenixlike vitality, its implacably realistic beauty and brutality. The formula is plain: Marseille = insolite, therefore insolite = Marseille.

This semantical conclusion on my part may sound quibbling, but it seems to help me try to explain what connection there could possibly, logically, be between the town and me…why I have returned there for so long: a night, ten nights, many weeks or months.

Of course it is necessary to recognize that there is a special karma about Marseille, a karmic force that is mostly translated as wicked, to be avoided by all clean and righteous people. Travellers have long been advised to shun it like the pesthole it has occasionally been, or at best to stay there as short a time as possible before their next ship sets sail.

A true karmic force is supposed to build up its strength through centuries of both evil and good, in order to prevent its transmigration into another and lesser form, and this may well explain why Marseille has always risen anew from the ashes of history. There seems to be no possible way to stamp it out. Julius Caesar tried to, and for a time felt almost sure that he had succeeded. Calamities caused by man’s folly and the gods’ wrath, from the plagues ending in 1720 to the invasions ending in the 1940s, have piled it with rotting bodies and blasted rubble, and the place has blanched and staggered, and then risen again. It has survived every kind of weapon known to European warfare, from the ax and arrow to sophisticated derivatives of old Chinese gunpowder, and it is hard not to surmise that if a nuclear blast finally leveled the place, some short dark-browed men and women might eventually emerge from a few deep places, to breed in the salt marshes that would gradually have revivified the dead waters around the Old Port….

Meanwhile, Marseille lives, with a unique strength that plainly scares less virile breeds. Its people are proud of being “apart,” and critics mock them for trying to sound even more Italianate than they are, trying to play roles for the tourists: fishermen ape Marcel Pagnol’s Marius robustly; every fishwife is her own Honorine. The Pinball Boys are thinner and more viperous there than anywhere in Europe, they assume as true Marseillais, and the tarts are tarter and the old hags older and more haggish than anywhere in the world….

Behind this almost infantile enjoyment of playing their parts on a superb stage with changing backdrops that are certainly insolite, and a full orchestration of every sound effect from the ringings of great bells to the whine of the tramontane and the vicious howl of the mistral, held together by sirens from ambulances and ships, and the pinpricks of complaining seagulls…behind this endlessly entertaining and absorbing melodrama, a secret life-source provides its inner nourishment to the citizens.

There is a strong religious blood flowing in that corporate body. Catholics and other Christians, Communists, Freethinkers, Arabs, Gypsies, all admit to an acceptance of powers beyond their questionings, whether or not they admit to being “believers.” The gigantic bell Marie-Joséphine, at the top of Notre Dame de la Garde, rings for every soul that has ever lived there, no matter how much a race-bound parishioner of St. Victor might deny the right of a Moslem in the Panier across the Old Port to understand its reassuring voice.

Naturally, in a place as old and insolite as Marseille, there is a strong dependence on forces that are loosely called occult, or mystical, or perhaps demonic. There are many fortunetellers, usually thriving in their chosen ways of neighborhood help or prestigious social acclaim. The best known of the Tarot cards were adapted to a special ritual that evolved there, and are called by the town’s name. Cabalistic signs are often in or on graffiti, political or otherwise, and it is plain that the right people will see and understand them. Why not? After all, the churches build their altars over early Christian sepulchers laid in turn upon the stones of temples built to Artemis and Adonis, who in turn…

There is a good description of the withdrawn side of the noisy, rough-talking Marseillais in one of Simenon’s books about Inspector Maigret. It was written about another French town, but it is Marseille to me:

…a stone jungle, where you can disappear for months; where often you do not hear of a crime until weeks after it has been committed; where thousands of human beings…live on the fringes of the Law, in a world where they can find as many accomplices and hideouts as they need, and where the police put out their bait now and then and pull in a fish they were waiting for, all the while depending more for such luck on a telephone call from a jealous girl or an informer….

This quasi-occult mutism is what has helped defeat the invaders of Marseille, I think. Certainly it baffled the last militant “occupants” in the 1940s. Many different stories are told about how and why a large part of the ancient Greco-Roman bank of the Old Port was destroyed by the Germans, but the basic reason for this move was probably that they simply could not keep track of what was going on in the deep warrens that went up from the Quai du Port past Les Accoules toward La Vieille Charité and the Place des Moulins. What was worse, they could not tell from the flat black eyes, the blank unmoved faces of occupants of this filthy old neighborhood, the pimps and bawds and small-time gangsters who went there as a natural refuge when their other ways of life were interrupted by war, which of them were working with what appointed or subterranean leaders, and even which of them might be town fathers in false beards rather than black marketeers dealing indirectly with the invaders.

The answer was to get rid of the whole infamous district, and it was easy to have the German-appointed city council approve a plan to blow up the mess from underground. It was done neatly, with complete evacuation of the helpless residents and full warning to the numberless unknown invisibles who were using the old tunnels for their special version of the Liberation. (Some other destruction during that dubious time was less circumspect, of course, and a few foul tricks were blamed on the invaders when an orphanage, or a clinic, say, was without notice shattered from above and not below ground….)

Soon after the dirty tunnels and gutters above the Quai du Port were mined and hopefully wiped out, they were once more in full swing, of course: rats and moles know how to dig again. A lot of the diggers were summarily lined up and shot, but that did not seem to impress the strange breed called Marseillais for so many centuries. Some thirty-five years later, the whole quarter is threatened with a new demolition, to make way for high-rise housing projects, but the people who live there, as elsewhere in the big town, remain impassive and tough and sardonic…that is to say, insolite.

—

This cannot be a guidebook, the kind that tells how, with a chart to be got free from the driver of the tour, to follow a green line from A to G and then switch to either the red or the yellow lines to Z, depending on how weary or hungry one may feel. I am not meant to tell anyone where to go in Marseille, nor even why I myself went where I did there, and saw and smelled and felt as I did. All I can do in this explanation about my being there is to write something about the town itself, through my own senses.

I first spent a night there in late 1929, and since then I have returned even oftener than seems reasonable. Beginning in 1940, there were wars, both worldwide and intramural, and then I managed to regain my old rhythm. Each time I went back, I felt younger: a chronological miracle, certainly!

One reason I now try to explain all this is that when I cannot return, for physical or perhaps financial reasons, I will stay so enriched and heartened by what I have known there that I should be the envy of every crowned head of several worlds. I boast, and rightly. Nobody who has lived as deeply for as long as I have in Marseille-Insolite can be anything but blessed.

There is an almost impossible lot of things to see there, and for one reason or another I know many of them, and have been part of them with people I loved (another proud boast!). If I started to tell why I wished everybody in the world could do the same, it would make a whole book, a personal guide tour, and that is not what I am meant to write, according to my secret directives. I would say words like Longchamps, Borély, Cantini, Les Accoules, St. Victor, St. Nicolas, La Place des Moulins, La Vieille Charité, Notre Dame de la Garde, La Rue de Rome…and it would be for every unexpected reason known to human beings, from the smell of a sick lion in a zoo behind Longchamps to an obviously necrophilic guardian of the tombs in Borély to the cut of an exquisite tweed skirt in a Paris boutique on the Rome. Each reason I gave for wanting some people to know why I’ve been there would make the guide a long hymn, hopefully shot through with practical asides about how far Borély is from town, and how steep the walk is up through the Panier to the Vieille Charité, and how much to tip the elderly patient men at places like the Musée des Docks Romains…and yes, why did I not mention it before? Other places, other sounds: they tumble in my head like pebbles under a waterfall, and all I know is that I must try to understand why I myself go back to this strange beautiful town.

If I could be in only one part of it, I would go directly to the Old Port, and stay there. I know that a lot of people consider it hopelessly touristic or noisy or vulgar. I feel at ease there, perhaps more so than in any other populous place I have ever known. Most of the reasons for this escape me or were never even guessed, but the fact remains that if I could within the next three minutes go by teleportation to the Quai des Belges on the Vieux Port, I would know exactly what to do and say and eat, and would feel as welcome as any shadow. It is very nice to feel like this.

The Vieux Port has a narrow entrance, past the Pharo Palace that Napoleon III built for his Empress, so that from almost any part of its three quays it looks landlocked. Every Marseillais, though, and almost every stranger there, knows that out through the tumultuous inlet and past the jetties of the new port of La Joliette lie several little bleak harsh islands, one of them crowned with the tomblike Château d’If that Dumas peopled with his noble ghosts.

Coming back from the Château, sometimes a very rough trip indeed, the Rive Neuve is on one’s right, with the Abbey of St. Victor and then La Garde towering over it, and on the waterfront the façade of the Criée, the public auction house for fish. It looks something like a fragment of the Gare de Lyon in Paris, tall and with grimed glassy walls. It is said to be doomed, now that so much transportation is done by trucks and rail from all over Europe, with their mounting traffic problems, but I first heard this as an imminent fact some ten years ago, and it still hums and screams from late night until predawn, and then is as quiet as a church, except for the men who hose down the walls and trestle tables and floors for the next night’s biddings. There are usually a few trawlers docked alongside to unload big catches or wait for cleanups.

The Rive Neuve is patchy and beautiful, architecturally, with some fine blocks of buildings that went up at the town end of the Port after the galleys stopped being built in the middle of the eighteenth century, a surprisingly short time ago. There is a dwindling number of good restaurants either on or just off the Quai, and the little fishhouses tacked onto the massive old blocks are tacky indeed to look at, and mostly evanescent. Portside there are private moorings for pleasure boats and larger yachts, a couple of clubs, generous moorings for small professional fishing boats. The feeling is lively, expert, no-nonsense, with several little cafés and chandleries and so on across the Quai.

Auto traffic is heavy and fast there, because of the cars that tear through the tunnel under the mouth of the Old Port from inland. Until the late 1940s, that end of the Port was hurdled by a strange thin loop of steel, referred to locally by several names, the most respectful being the “shore-to-shore hustler.” Once Simenon wrote of it as a “gigantesque metal carcass, cutting across the horizon, on which one can make out, from a distance, tiny human beings.” Raoul Dufy said it even better, with paint.

It seems odd to me that I never noticed the obtrusive “pont transbordeur,” until it was gone when I went back after the Occupation, in about 1951. It had always been there when I was, but since I had never seen the horizon any way but barred, I accepted it without question as part of the magic. It was no more gigantesque than any other man-made edifice: Notre Dame de la Garde, ugly but inspiring; St. Victor, ugly but reassuring; the aerial bridge, ugly but practical. Then when I returned to Marseille with my two small girls, I stood in a window in the old Hotel Beauvau on the Quai des Belges and felt a shock that made me gasp: the bridge was gone! The sky was free! Our eyes could look out over the boats, past the Pharo, which from the harbor always seemed more like a hospital than a palace, and then bend down as surely as any seagull’s onto the tumble of rough water into La Joliette and our own Port! Perhaps it was the way a young sheep feels after its first shearing, very lightsome and cool suddenly.

The Quai des Belges is the shortest of the Port’s three shores, at the head, the land end, of the little harbor. Like all centers of life past and present, it is concentrated, so that it has fine-to-sad restaurants and brasseries and commerce and mad traffic and a church and a bus terminal cramped onto the land side, with a subway station to open shortly, and then on the Port side docks for all the excursion boats to the Château d’If, and so on, with careful room for the fishermen to chug in six or seven mornings a week to set up their rickety tables in the casual market that strings out along the wide sidewalk.

For a long time in my Marseille life, the Quai des Belges had a sloping place where boats could be drawn up onto the pavement. When the wind was wild, water came onto the street, over the big plaque that tells how the Phoceans landed there. Then in perhaps the early sixties, some time after the pont transbordeur was taken down, the sloping pebbly pavement was made level with the rest of the Quai, and the edge went sharply down into the water so that it was uniformly convenient for the fishermen to put in with their catches for their wives to sell. Who dragged his craft up on shore, anymore, for a rest or some quick repairs? What fine ladies waited there to be rowed into mid-Port and then handed up to their sailing vessels?

One time, before the old beaching place was changed, I watched a small grey vessel of the American Navy swing delicately down the middle of the harbor, ease itself sideways within a few feet of the slope, and unload…disgorge…explode…what seemed like hundreds of sailors. I stood upstairs in my window, on that Christmas Eve, and it looked as if the young men flew onto the wet sloping pavement from their deck, without even touching the little boat alongside that was meant as a bridge. They gathered in knots on the windy Quai, and then melted fast in three directions, but mostly up the Can o’ Beer.

Later a few strings of Christmas lights went on, looking pretty, but the next day there was almost no sign of life on the grim little vessel, and before the second dawn she slipped out of the harbor, presumably with her full crew. She was the last overtly military vessel I ever saw in the Vieux Port, although I suspect derring-do of international proportions in a few superpowerful-elegant-sleek-rich yachts I have watched there. (The whole district is more James Bond than Henry Kissinger!)

Around the north corner of the Quai des Belges, past the old church that is sinking slowly into the mouth of the Lacydon River (poetic justice, some infidels say!), the church that still shelters a few of the last of Marseille’s infamous army of public beggars, there is the long ancient unequivocal stretch of wide street and wider portside pavement called the Quai du Port. Boats stretch from the Quai des Belges out to the Harbor Master’s Quarters just before the Fort St. Jean and the entrance to the harbor. Near town they are small plain craft with oars, outboard motors and no masts, often scruffy, but looking as familiar as housecats. Until a few years ago, retired fishermen used to wait there to snag visitors, and take them jerking and bouncing on “tours” of La Joliette.

These self-styled tours were never the same, never dull. There were two or three little boats with awnings, I remember. They cost more, but were reassuring to visiting friends when we went over the bumps between the Vieux Port and the breakwater of the new port. One time in La Joliette we were putt-putting along under the prows of gigantic ships loading for Africa and Indo-China, and suddenly looked up into a beautiful Spanish or Italian vessel and its elegant Captain’s Quarters, with mullioned windows and rich brocade curtains! It was a facsimile of one of Christopher Columbus’s little toys, that had been made for movies and international fairs, and was being taken under motor power to Naples or Barcelona or some such coincidental port. The clean brutal outlines of a diesel freighter to Djakarta were almost a relief.

Farther along the Quai du Port, and especially in front of the little Town Hall that was saved from explosion by mutual agreement with the Invaders in 1943, there are dreamily beautiful yachts of every club and country. They come in and out. Usually they are in fine condition, at least to the eye, and now and then a lithe crewman polishes brass, but in general they are empty when we loiterers glance or stare at them. One time a “tall ship” with three masts, all painted a dull coal black, lay alongside the Town Hall for several weeks, and nobody seemed to know why, or what it was. It flew the French flag. And once in 1976 the ugliest hull I ever saw lay there, not attracting much notice.

It had faky anchors painted here and there near its prow, and was plainly some sort of mockery of everything beautiful about an ocean-going vessel, with almost no superstructure and yet without a single porthole that could be seen. It too was a flat ugly black, and was lettered minutely, Club Méditerranée. I knew about that so-called social corporation, of course, and asked a couple of Quai-watchers if it was going to be turned into a party ship. There was no answer, more than a shrug. It seemed strange, to look over from the Beauvau, too, and see that uncouth thing in front of the dainty little Town Hall.

Within a day or so, of course, when I was back in Aix and reading local interpretations of Marseille news instead of being there to garner the real truth of such matters (!), I learned that the ship was already famous, and would compete for the Atlantic International Cup on a solo volage. It would be piloted mostly by electronics, and by a single Marseillais, alone in that dreadful carcass. I felt sick and fascinated and strangely embarrassed at my own unawareness, and I followed the log of the Club Med the whole way, and felt triumphant when it joined the “tall ships” in the great bicentennial parade on the Hudson River, July 4, 1976. I felt proud.

On the harbor water, which is somewhat cleaner as one goes along the Quai seaward, are docked the trawlers, the chalutiers, the vessels needing a deep draft for their enormous nets and, in port, their full hulls. They come into port to discharge their big fish across the harbor at the Criée, and then dock at the Quai du Port to keep their papers in order with the Harbor Master, and perhaps rest a few hours or days for the sakes of their crews. Drydocks mean going up the coast, although the smaller crafts have their own simple lifts along the Quai.

Most of the organizations of Vieux boat owners, professional and social, are housed portside on the ancient shore, and they are called Nautical Societies or Syndicates or Friendly Rowing Clubs or Lacydonian Brotherhoods or suchlike. They have simple clubhouses, firmly fenced off from the wide walk where people stroll and where nets are mended. Usually on weekends young couples chip at a small dangling hull, or paint seriously while the family dog or baby watches from the cobbles. Now and then a Sunday crowd on the Quai looks amiably over the fence as a group of amateur fishermen grill their catch of sardines and cool their fingers on plentiful bottles. The whole thing smells good: fish, wine, smoke from the burning driftwood; fresh paint from the next Société des Canotiers to the east; westward a whiff of tar from a modest drydock. On weekdays professionals take over the Quai, and watchers are fewer as men work hard on their boats or nets, and the air can be very salty.

Landside there are somber arcades almost hysterically lighted by countless thin deep espresso joints, and a few excellent restaurants that in fine weather flood their tables as far as possible out across the sidewalks toward the traffic, which is not quite as lethal as on the Rive Neuve. There seems no need for music, although now and then in summer a flameblower or a tumbler will pick up a few coins from the more sated diners.

As one moves back toward the Quai des Belges along the port, the gastronomy swings from pasta to bouillabaisse, and from Chianti to white house-wine, and the restaurants are more filled with tourists and with locals on a little weekend spree than they are with vacationing decorators and actors from “up North.” It is pleasant, a good way to eat and talk, and behind, the pinball machines throb on, and the tiny espresso cups sit half-empty everywhere in the long bright bars.

And then behind the arcades and the pinball joints rise the graceful hills, where the Greeks and then the Romans built temples and theatres on the sites of older altars. Now the clock tower of Les Accoules rises sturdily, if off-time, as it did for other purposes in the thirteenth century, and leads up to the old Place des Moulins through streets that are cleaner than they have sometimes been, but still suspect to tidy travellers and even some City Fathers, who would like to get rid of them for high-rise condominiums.

And at the land’s-end of the Port, high and straight behind the Quai des Belges to the west, new but lightsomely majestic, rises Longchamps, which cannot be suspected except from hilltops or out at sea. It is an astonishing public building, one that could never have been erected in France except in the mid-nineteenth century, when Napoleon Ill’s taste was rampant. It spouts water in controlled extravagance from great carved mouths, down many churning basins toward the thirsty town, and on out along the course of the ancient Lacydon toward the open sea. It sweeps the Vieux Port cleaner than it has been since men started to pollute it some two thousand years ago, and then clogged it foully when they built over the mouth of the old river. Around this majestic waterworks that spews its blessings from the wicked river of the Durance, first curbed in 1838, is built a garishly wonderful palace that houses natural and manmade history, and that hides a relatively tiny little botanical garden and zoo. It is all almost nightmarish at close range, like being lost in a fetal Disneyland, but from afar, Longchamps is beautiful.

It is one of the reasons I want to say why I must return to its town. When I have tried to tell natives that I need to write about it, they are courteous in their own sardonic way. They do not mock too openly, but they manage to imply flatly that I am presumptuous: “Ah? You think that after a few visits here you can explain this place? Good luck!” Once a man who was repairing a typewriter for me lost some of his remoteness and said almost angrily that he was astounded at the effrontery of people who felt they could understand a subject or a race or a cult in a few minutes. I told him I felt humble about it, but undaunted, and we talked about how a model can sit in a room with ten painters and have ten different pictures of herself result. “Yes, your picture will not be mine,” he said. I said, “I don’t want to explain Marseille. I want to try to tell what it does about explaining myself,” and we parted amicably, and not for the last time. Now and then taxi drivers have asked me why I stayed in Marseille, and I have told them that I did not want to leave until I had to, and they have either said I was a misguided sentimentalist or have indicated plainly that I should shut up.

The whole implication has been that nobody can understand anything about Marseille except the Massiliotes, as they used to be called. It is almost like the mystique of being a Gypsy. Either you are or you are damned, condemned, blasphemed, as not.

This is doubtless true, and in ways too mysterious to probe. But there is no reason why I cannot write about how I, an obvious Anglo-Saxon of American citizenship and birth, must accept the realization that I feel at ease in Marseille. Just as I can shrug off or laugh at the conditioned reactions of many of “us” to the place and its seething movement of people, all held in focus by the phoenix-race bred there since pre-Ségobridgian times, so I can enjoy an occasional soft voice, a reassuring pat on the shoulder. I felt pleased to have a wise old citizen of the town write directly to me in his Evocations du Vieux Marseille: “It is like no other town on earth.” That is what I need to have him say, because I can never know as well as he does what we both still know.

And it is nice to read, in a letter Mme. de Sévigné wrote to her daughter in 1672,

I am ecstatic about the peculiar beauty of this town. Yesterday, the weather was heavenly, and the place where I looked over the sea, the fortresses, the mountains, and the city is astonishing…I must apologize to Aix, but Marseille is lovelier and livelier than it, in proportion to Paris itself! There are at least a hundred thousand people here; and I cannot even try to count how many of them are beauties: the whole atmosphere makes me somewhat untrustworthy!