Marseilles: Chicago of the Latin world

PAUL MORAND

Dream of the Sea—so reads the lettering on the stern of a barge. All Marseilles dreams of the sea. but without any wish to transform the dream into a reality. Not far distant, the yacht chandlers, the varnish-and tow merchants, the brass polishers seated on heaps of sails, the shell-food vendors in the Rue Fortia, the photograph-while-you-wait men. the Kabyle-like boys fighting with their clogs, the Algerian moukères, the Armenian colonial outfitters, the shoe shiners, the Algerian Salomés, like wild animals behind their ironwork protection, the Ottoman Israelites, the false-teeth dealers, the Arabian sidis in their fezes, the Negroes in blue overalls. suggesting distant shores to which they have no desire to return—all of these people, including the sailors themselves, prefer Marseilles to the sea, to France,—to everything. Party Quay, Belgian Quay, New Bank Quay. Port Quay -so many quays from which not to depart. I see Marseilles, the doorway to the East, as a door which you open, but do not shut behind you: it is East and West together.

The blue café where the sailors are signed on; the cafe where false identification papers are sold; the café where the nervis, the Marseilles gangsters, get their death sentences reprieved, as one might elsewhere have a fine for speeding remitted; the place where emigrants have their savings stolen; the corner of the port where farm hands, in search of eternal summer, hire themselves out for the Transatlantic harvests; the back of the shop where Chinese workmen come for five francs' worth of opium, the evening dose being ground in huge kettles, then sold in a tiny piece of paper folded in four—all these streets of the old Port, where the most astonishing human flotsam and jetsam in the world is encountered, are the picturesque setting for the life of all ports, but particularly that of Marseilles.

It is to be regretted that so many authors and playwrights prefer to give us the conventional Marseilles of the Marseilles stories, which are too well known, instead of giving us the stories which have not yet been written. The poem about rice, the epic of the phosphates, the legend of the date or of the tea plant, the song of copra and of the great products of overseas—why have these not been written, with Marseilles as a background? Why these stories of love during shore leave, which are nauseating, the work of would-be literary pursers, why Marseilles in the style of a Provençal dresser, why Marius and Oliver eternally?

Oliver: Are you telling me I can't catch fish. I, who have caught whales?

Marius: Whales! Bah, I used whales for bait.

Or this quarrel between two men from Marseilles. In the crowded café one of them says: "Hold me, or 1 11 hurt someone." Nothing happens, no one interferes. He scratches his head in bewilderment and says: "What's the meaning of this? Don't you hold people any more in this café?"

I shall not discuss the Rue Bouterie nor all the inns with delightful names: the Cass' Croût Bar, the Necessary Hotel, the Classic Bar, the Monkey Bar. the Mascotte House, Azur Bar. and so forth. For fifteen years the Cubist painters of the Rue de la Boétie have had their fill of accordions, cheap roses, old fly-spotted chandeliers, and stockings filled with bank notes. The Rue la Renaude and the Rue Victor Cibu were once celebrated for their air of mystery, but now they are celebrated because they are famous. While waiting for the train or the boat, respectable foreign families go to A's to see the bawdy movies, which are probably encouraged by the authorities, and where the projector is an old housekeeper with a parrot, which says in English at the end of the picture: "Don't forget the operator." The obscene joints of Marseilles are so well known that a stranger who asked a policeman where lie could find some was told: "Go on—follow the crowd!"

Sight-seeing buses stop at the corner of the quay where the killers live and read Detective, their official gazette. The caïls, or leading white-slavers, towards evening on board their yacht, take their Pernod. The male prostitutes. on the pretext of selling Kairouan carpets, offer their wares in front of the cafés on the Cannebière, and the drug merchants, with "black" or "white"—that is to say, opium or cocaine—in their belts, come and go between L'Estaque and the Anna-mite dens.

The foreign gunmen of the Rue de la Caisserie, the Corydons of the Rue Lacydon, the doubtful cabarets of the Place Victor Gibu, which would have tempted Daumier, the most illustrious inhabitant of Marseilles—all of these interest me less than the enchanting and fairy-like trade in birds and wild beasts. With Hamburg, Marseilles is the greatest market in Europe for these products. Pretending that I am the manager of a menagerie —here everything is sold wholesale—I shall go to the Rue Jardin or the Rue Monte Cristo to bargain for Abyssinian lions, tigers from Indo-China, and bears from Soviet Russia, or to the bird dealers of the Boulevard d'Athenes, of the Cours Lieutard, of the Place de FObservance, or of the Chemin des Chartreux, to buy some long-tailed bird from Dakar or Rio, or an Amazonian parrot (which has been allowed to disembark fraudulently, as it suffers from psittacosis) ; or I shall listen to a thousand blue or green birds singing the songs of their forests and jungles, sitting on their whitewashed perches in some abandoned villa or some dilapidated old house on crutches, which has to be supported like a frightened old man going to the scaffold.

But let us return to the shipping quarters, and stroll amongst the bales of cork and bark, and the Algerian wines in enormous barrels. Beneath the eyes of Notre-Dame de la Garde, gilded with the last ray of sunshine, the stevedores are going home, the Italians are bunched like grapes on the platforms of the trams, like the Chinese on the street-cars of Shanghai; the Senegalese disappear in the direction of the Quai de la Fraternité. Let us leave the dismantled Château d'If, which was once the quarantine station, and the old Louis XIV forts of Saint Jean or Saint Nicholas, as rosy-colored as the crabs in the bouillabaisse at Basso's. Let us get away from this overpopulation, so rare in France, to which the most dangerous races in the world contribute, and which makes one wish that a new plague would visit Marseilles. Let us stop at some of the so-called fashionable places; the bar of the Hotel de Noailles, with its rajahs, its English majors in the Indian army, its Parsee millionaires from Calcutta, its tobacco merchants from Alexandria, and its old American globe-trotters with bearded chins, such as one sees on dollars. This is one of the world's universal meeting places, comparable to the Raffles in Singapore, to the Washington in Cristobal Colon, to Shepheard's in Cairo, and to the Atlantic in Hamburg. Not far off, at the Taverne de Verdun, how often have I eaten wolf grilled over a fire of vine branches, or red mullet, with yellow eyes, before setting out for distant countries—my last good French meal before contracting a diseased liver. Pascal, Isnard, renowned for their bouillabaisse—these great names are passwords. From the Cannebière,where hemp was formerly corded, one can see the aerials of the pleasure yachts and the delicate riggings of the stars of the Societe Nautique. Amongst this population which wakes tip at the Pernod or cocktail hour, I look in vain for the Norman or Angevin or Goth types who shed so much Nordic blue blood here; the blood of the South has consumed everything.

An exploration of the famed sea-port of the south, and a description of its aromas— popular, gustatory, nocturnal

Continued on page 60

Continued from page 33

Proud of its liberties, this Mediterranean Chicago, the distant lair of the Levantine mob, in revolt against the Republic of Paris as it was in revolt against the Kings of Anjou, the Counts of Provence, against Louis XIV and his bewigged intendants, as it was in revolt even as far back as Gaulish times—Marseilles has always played whatever was the most theatrical part in the history of France. Thus, after the victory of Valmy, which liberated the territory of the new French Republic in 1792, a delegation of patriots from Marseilles arrived belatedly on the battlefield. They did not carry guns; they carried a song, and that song was the "Marseillaise".