Encore Provence (11 page)

Besides Paris, I can think of only one other city in France with a distinct, internationally known personality. Mention Lille or Lyon, St.-Etienne or Clermont-Ferrand, and you are unlikely to encounter too many strongly held opinions. Mention Marseille, and practically everyone will have a clear, if often uninformed, idea of the character of the place.

Alas, it is not likely to be wholesome. Drunken sailors brawling on the Canebière; louche behavior in the dockside bars; the grim, ancient prison of the Château d’If; narrow backstreets where the visitor ventures at his peril after dark; and, thanks to
The French Connection
, a suspicion
that not only fish are changing hands at the daily market on the Quai des Belges. Marseille is generally seen as raffish, exotic, and more than a little dangerous. It’s a view that is not necessarily confined to foreigners. I remember being warned about the city many years ago by my neighbor Faustin. He had only been there once in his life, and he had no plans to repeat the experience. I asked what had happened to him, and he just shook his head. But he told me that if he ever had to go back he would take his gun.

And yet there is no place that could have had a more romantic beginning. According to legend—kept alive and embellished, no doubt, by the Marseillais’ liking for a good story—the city was founded on love. Five hundred and ninety-nine years before Christ, a Phocaean navigator named Protis hit the beach just in time for a nuptial banquet given by the local king, whose name was Nann. In the course of the banquet, the king’s daughter, Gyptis, took one look at the young navigator and decided that he was the one for her. It was a lightning bolt, a
coup de foudre
, and as a wedding gift the king presented the happy couple with a hundred and fifty acres of prime seafront property on which to set up house. Thus Marseille was born. It has been continuously inhabited ever since, for twenty-six centuries, and the population has expanded from two to around a million.

Like the city, the inhabitants have a reputation that is, as their critics say,
un peu spécial
—special, in this case, not being the complimentary label it usually is in English. The Marseillais is suspected of stretching the truth from time to time, of embroidering and exaggerating. I wonder if this is because Marseille is a fish town, and the environment somehow encourages the natural instinct of the fisherman
to improve on nature. Only in the sea around Marseille, so the story goes, do sardines regularly grow to the size of young sharks. Should you ask to see one of these marvels, you will be told it’s the wrong time of the month; the moon must be full. Or, if the moon happens to be full when you ask, you will be told to be patient. It is only at the time of the new moon when the giant sardine can be observed. To be fair, this advice is usually delivered with a nudge and a wink, and you are not really expected to take it seriously. Nevertheless, the reputation exists. I was told that you should take several grains of salt whenever you go to Marseille, and to use them frequently in the course of conversation.

That is, of course, if you can understand what is being said. Marseille has never been happy with the idea of being told what to do by a central government, and there is a long history of rebellion against officials in Paris, even down to the pomposities of their speech. Consequently, Marseille does its best to avoid speaking official French. This is partly achieved by the accent, and there is a kind of shagginess about the pronunciation which can make even familiar words sound as though they have been marinated in some thick linguistic sauce. When this is applied to the unfamiliar words and conversational quirks that are peculiar to Marseille, you find yourself wondering if you’ve been tossed into the swirling currents of a new language.

Here is just one of the many phrases that defeated me until I asked for it to be written down: “
L’avillon, c’est plus rapide que le camillon, même si y a pas de peuneus.
” The plane is faster than the truck, even if there aren’t any tires. A simple enough sentence in French, but garnished with the Marseille marinade it becomes incomprehensible. Imagine the difficulties when the phrase being spoken is a
local invention, such as: “
Il est un vrai cul cousu.
” The polite translation for this is a man who is lacking in a sense of humor, and who very rarely smiles. Or, more literally, a man who has his backside sewn up. If, in addition to his morose disposition, the poor fellow is thought to be seriously deranged, then “
Il est bon pour le cinquante-quatre
” a reference to the number 54 tram which stopped at the hospital that used to treat mental disorders.

Not even the names lovingly chosen by parents for their offspring can escape the Marseille treatment. André, whether he likes it or not, becomes
Dédou
, Francis becomes
Sissou
, Louise becomes
Zize
. As they grow up, the children will learn to use words that one is unlikely to hear anywhere else in France: words like
momo
and
mafalou
,
toti
and
scoumougne
and
cafoutchi
. It is a language within a language, sometimes very close to the old Provençal dialects, sometimes borrowing from the immigrants who have come to Marseille over the centuries from Italy, Algeria, Greece, Armenia, and heaven knows where else. A stew of speech, rich and often ripe, guaranteed to bewilder the newly arrived visitor.

But the first obstacle to be overcome is finding the center of town. The most direct and spectacular way to arrive is by sea, a route that would probably find you agreeing with Madame de Sévigné, who was “overwhelmed by the singular beauty of this town.” From a boat, you would see it all: the neat rectangular form of the old port, the sprawl of the city, and, high above, the glint of gold from the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde. But if you arrive by road, as we did, your first impressions will be somewhat lacking in singular beauty. The outskirts of modern Marseille are not what Madame de Sévigné had in mind; they are dreary. Traffic is on several levels, darting in and out of
tunnels and along overpasses through the kind of architecture that makes you want to take up demolition as a hobby.

Eventually, more by luck than a command of local geography, we managed to find our way to the old port, and the scenery took an instant turn for the better. There is always a magic about arriving in a city on the sea—the sudden unfolding of a long view to the horizon after congested streets, the change in the air from fumes to fresh brine, and, in Marseille, the hubbub of the fish-sellers drumming up trade.

They are there on the eastern side of the port from about eight o’clock each morning, rubber booted and leather faced, standing and shouting behind shallow boxes the size of small dining tables. The catch of the day, often still alive and kicking, shimmers in the sun, silver and gray and blue and red, the odd reproachful eye looking up at you as you walk by Pause for a second, and Madame—it seems that the husbands do the catching and their wives do the selling—plucks a fish from her tray and holds it under your nose. “Here,” she says, “smell the sea!” She gives the fish an appreciative slap, and it twitches. “I must be mad,” she says, “I’m selling a live one for the price of a dead one! Fish is good for your brain, fish is good for your love life,
venez, la mamie, venez!
” The customers look and sniff and buy, walking off with their blue plastic bags, the contents still flapping, held carefully away from their bodies.

In the harbor behind the stalls, the water is covered with a bobbing mosaic of boats, so closely moored that you feel you could walk several hundred yards out to sea without getting your feet wet. Floating gin palaces, day sailers, graceful yachts with the sheen of a dozen coats of varnish,
and the fat-bellied ferries that will take you across the mile or so that separates the mainland from the bleak little island with the sinister reputation.

The Château d’If, an earlier version of Alcatraz, was built in the sixteenth century, and was used to keep undesirables at a safe distance from the city. A small consolation for the inmates was the clean sea air; a daily torment must have been the sight of Marseille—a picturesque view of liberty—across the water. It is a setting that could have been devised in a novel, and so it’s not surprising to learn that the Château d’If’s most famous prisoner, the Count of Monte Cristo, never existed. Alexandre Dumas
père
invented him, and lived to see his invention commemorated when the authorities, not wanting to disappoint Dumas’s readers, provided an official Count of Monte Cristo cell. But there was no shortage of genuine prisoners. At one time, thousands of Protestants were kept here before going on to become galley slaves. And, an example of the law being as absurd then as it often is today, there was the unfortunate Monsieur de Niozelles, who committed the unspeakable crime of failing to remove his hat in front of the king. Shock and horror ensued, followed by a sentence of six years in solitary confinement on the island. No wonder royalty came to a sticky end in France.

A short sea voyage, we thought, would be a bracing way to start the day, and we went to the quayside office to buy tickets for the ferry. The young man at the counter barely raised his head. “Not this morning,” he said. “The weather.”

The weather was ideal, sunny and mild. The ferry, which we could see behind him, looked substantial enough to cross the Atlantic, let alone the sheet of glass
that stretched between us and the Château d’If. What was the problem with the weather? we asked.

“The mistral.”

There was a hesitant breeze, no more. Certainly nothing that would qualify as a life-threatening storm. “But there isn’t a mistral.”

“There will be.”

“Then why are you here?”

That provoked the first shrug of the day, against which there is no argument. Leaving the quay, we were stopped by a small, dark man who wagged an agitated finger at my wife. “Put it away,” he told her, pointing at the camera slung from her shoulder. “Put it in your bag. This is Marseille.”

We looked around for gangs of camera thieves, sailors out of control on shore leave, dark-windowed cars carrying senior executives from the underworld, or indeed any sign of menace. There was none. The sun was warm, the cafés were full, the sidewalks busy in that slow-moving way you find in Mediterranean towns, where nobody seems to be in a hurry to go anywhere. The Marseille version of the man in the street, we noticed, is often more prosperously padded than his counterpart in the country, and we saw more impressive stomachs in half an hour than we normally see in a week. And the human color scheme is different, many of the faces reflecting the various tints of Africa, from café au lait to the deep gleaming black of Senegal.

We turned up the Canebière, the broad boulevard leading east from the port. Once a southern Champs-Elysées, this has now gone the way of many grand avenues around the world, and unless you have a particular interest in the offices of banks, airlines, and travel agents, there isn’t
much to detain you. However, keep walking and turn left on to the Boulevard Dugommier, and you’ll eventually come to one of the sights on everyone’s list, the Saint-Charles station. Or rather, the staircase leading down from the station—a wide, nineteenth-century folly of a staircase, a film set of a staircase, decorated with statues representing Asia and Africa, the perfect spot to make your grand entrance to Marseille as long as you don’t have heavy suitcases. And from here, if time or aching feet have become a problem, you can duck underground and try the Marseille metro.

My record with underground transit systems is one of almost unbroken failure. I can, and do, get lost in the bowels of London, New York, or Paris as quickly as most people buy a ticket. But the Marseille system, even to someone who has a useless void where his sense of direction ought to be, is delightfully compact and straightforward. Fifteen minutes after leaving the station, we were on the south side of the Vieux Port, walking along the Corniche in the general direction of lunch.

It was one of the most pleasant strolls I have ever had in a city. Above the modern skyline, there were occasional golden glimpses of Notre Dame de la Gare. The sea was just below us, the views across to the Frioul islands were glorious, the air was balmy. On the sloping ledges of rock between the road and the sea, figures were stretched out taking the Indian summer sunshine. One man, who appeared to be totally naked except for a rubber bathing hat, was swimming, jerking forward with froglike kicks, his body pale against the dark blue water. It was more like June than October.

The coastline here has been nibbled into a succession of tiny coves, or
anses
, not all of them with reassuring
names. The Anse de Maldormé conjures up a colony of insomniacs, with their neighbors the counterfeiters installed not far away in the Anse de la Fausse Monnaie. Our destination was the Anse des Auffes (highly respectable ropemakers), home of a long-established restaurant with the engaging name of Chez Fonfon. There, we had been told, one could eat fish so fresh they winked at you as they came to the table.

Coming down from the Corniche into the Anse des Auffes, we felt we had left the city to find ourselves in a miniature fishing village. Boats were pulled up to a small ramp. Two children played football among the tables and chairs of a restaurant terrace. An optimist with an attaché case at his feet stood on the quay with his fishing rod, the line dangling in a slick of shallow water that was iridescent with diesel oil. It was washday, and the local laundry was festooned across the facades of the houses—a bunting of underwear, brilliant reds, purples, and greens interspersed with the more sober and matronly dark peach. Why is it that washing lines are more colorful in the south than in the white and pastel north? Is lingerie, like so much else, influenced by climate? It would be hard to imagine coming across such a vibrant and extrovert display in Manchester or Scarsdale.

After the dazzle of the underwear, the interior of Chez Fonfon seemed muted and unremarkable; a pleasant, sensible room with no visible efforts at an obvious style. The clients, in any case, were far too busy with the menus to notice decorative refinements. They were here for the fish.