The Pillars of Hercules

Marseilles was a frightener; it was famous for its boasters and liars, for the way its people exaggerated, and it had a wicked reputation—for its gangs, its badly housed immigrants, its racism, and most of all for its crime. No wonder people compared it to New York City. It was certainly a center for drugs. The cocaine that was produced in the former French colonies in West Africa, the raw paste was smuggled into Marseilles to be processed, made into crack or base or crystal, or else powdered and cut with dry milk from Italy and sold all over Europe. Petty crime was commonly spoken of in Marseilles; I kept my head down and was safe. Such wickedness as drugs and racketeering, which kept both the police and the gangsters busy, did not affect the idle wanderer that I was.

It seemed to me to be the ultimate Mediterranean city, for its size and its diversity. As soon as I left the station and started down the marble stairs to the city, I saw a Gypsy woman smoking a pipe in the sunshine, and another counting coins she had made from playing tunes on her accordion. These Gypsies were as sorry-looking here as in Spain where they are relentlessly romanticized by travel journalists and persecuted by locals. Gypsies are generally despised in the Mediterranean as they are in the rest of Europe. The same could be said for the Moroccans and Algerians, who were said to account for Marseilles’s being notorious for crime. But every Mediterranean race was represented here, the Arabs were as common as the French, and there were Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians; there were tall loping Tuaregs in blue robes, and Berbers from Tunisia, and Senegalese selling handbags and watches. Arab women begged, each one squatting and holding a snotty-nosed child instead of a pleading sign, in a futile attempt—the Marseillaise seemed impervious to the pleas—to elicit sympathy.

In Marseilles the foreign men linger on street corners in small groups, because they come from cultures without telephones, where men linger on street corners in small groups. There they stood, dusky men, yakking and smoking. The so-called Foreign Quarter is in the Old Town, just below the station. The Baedeker Guide, Mediterranean for 1911, mentions this area: “On the N. side of the Quai du Port, the scene of motley popular traffic (pickpockets not uncommon), lies the Old Town, with its narrow and dirty streets, inhabited by the lower classes, including numerous Italians of whom the city contains about 100,000.” Now it is Arabs and Vietnamese in the Old Town; and the same perceptions—motley pickpockets, lower classes, cutpurses, parasites.

I walked down the Canebière (“Can o’ Beer”) along the Promenade Louis Brauquier (“poet and painter”) to the mouth of the Old Port. Out of the wind, sitting in the sunshine against a wall, was a line of people in various postures—old Moroccan women in shawls, men in berets, dog walkers, men with their shirts off, other men stripped to their underwear grinning into the sunshine.

Farther on, standing at the limit of the fort I looked out, and the Mediterranean had the look of a limitless ocean. I walked on, to the Gare Maritime, where ferries left for Algeria and Tunisia, and Corsica. I was headed for Corsica but the station timetables told me that I could continue down the Côte d’Azur and catch the once-a-week (in the winter) ferry from Nice to Bastia, a port in the north of Corsica. At the ferry station passengers were boarding the French ship to Algiers, all of them Algerian Arabs. Not a single Frenchman, nor any foreigners. There was a good reason for this: at that point seventy-one foreigners, and tens of thousands of Algerians, had been killed by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in a fifteen-month period.

I kept walking. Because of Marseilles’s pleasant thoroughfares, its absence of heavy traffic, its venerable architecture and its hills, it is pleasant for walking in and full of views. It was not particularly expensive either. My hotel, near the railway station, was about forty dollars a night.

It was fairly easily to get lost in Marseilles, particularly in the Old Town. As the Arab quarter, it had the fiercest reputation, though all I saw were cats and stragglers and the mindless defacing of the ancient walls with spray-painted graffiti. From behind bolted shutters I heard Algerian hilarity and screechy music. This was the area which in 1911 had the disreputable Italians.

My greatest fear walking down these backstreets was of being killed by a garbage truck. These vehicles came quickly around the corners and did not slow down, and as they filled the entire street I found myself diving for a doorway and flattening myself against it.