The Pillars of Hercules

On my last day in Marseilles I treated myself to a bouillabaisse, the dish that Marseilles gave to the world. The fish broth was pungent and flavorful, saffron-colored as in the classic recipe, presented with croutons and cheese and remoulade and potatoes. And the vital ingredients were the fruit of the Mediterranean—rouget (mullet), rascasse (red spiny hogfish found only in the Mediterranean), Saint-Pierre (John Dory), moules, whiting, monkfish, bass, gurnet, weever, conger eel, crab, crawfish, clams.

The crab was very small. The waiter lifted the shell with a fork.

“And this, as they say in English, you suck.”

This one meal cost nearly as much as my hotel room, but it was worth it to sit with a view of the port, stuffing myself and reading a book and glancing at the boats in the port. Marseilles was obviously a tough place, but it was neither irritatingly sophisticated nor conspicuously poor. That was what I liked most about it, its air of being a cultural bouillabaisse made up of distinctly Mediterranean ingredients. I also had a confidence that I could go anywhere in the city—not a confidence I had ever had in New York or London. There were no mansions in Marseilles. The rich stayed in outlying villages, behind high hedges and barbed wire and Chien Méchant (“Wicked Dog”) signs, pretending they are in the bosom of Provence, and not in the city of stray cats and prostitutes and wanderers from the Barbary Coast. The reality of Marseilles was Arabs, skateboarders, hookers, the drug trade, and people working, all of them together, usually in the same narrow lanes.

I took a boat—a small launch—to the islands in the Bay of Marseilles, to the tiny Château d’If of The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas lived in Marseilles) and to the Frioul Islands. Château d’If was a combination of Alcatraz and the Magic Kingdom, a Disney prison, and like the nearby islands of crumbly sun-faded rock that looked like stale cake. No trees here, but ashore there were dry treeless headlands dusted with green, which were the last of the bushes.

I liked being out on the blue Mediterranean, among the sailboats, again that feeling of being at the edge of the sea that obliterated any clear idea of nationhood—the ports having mixed populations and a common destiny, living by the sea.

“The Mediterranean is beautiful in a different way from the ocean, but it is as beautiful,” Victor Hugo wrote on a visit to Marseilles. He made some pleasing distinctions. “The ocean has its clouds, its fogs, its glaucous glassy billows, its sand dunes in Flanders, its immense vaults, its magnificent tides. The Mediterranean lies wholly under the sun; you feel it by the inexpressible unity that lies at the foundation of its beauty. It has a tawny stern coast, the hills and rocks of which seem rounded or sculptured by Phidias, so harmoniously is the shore wedded to gracefulness.”

When I returned from the little cruise I decided to take another launch, and let it be my departure from Marseilles. We sailed along the coast, past the offshore islands of Tiboulen, Maire, Jane, Calseraigne, stopping briefly at Sormion and Morgiouy, and ending up at Cassis, where I caught another train. It was “Le Grand Sud,” stopping at Toulon, St. Raphael, and Cannes, passing St. Tropez, Fréjus, and Antibes. Most of the time the line was within sight of the sea, and the Aleppo pines and the palms at the shore, but as the train approached Nice the large apartment blocks and tall buildings obstructed the sea view.

The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land—the corner of the Mediterranean from the outskirts of Toulon eastward to Monte Carlo, a hundred-odd miles of Frenchness—food, wine, style, heat, rich old farts, gamblers and bare-breasted bimbos. All that and art too. It is the Cagnes of Renoir, the Nice of Matisse, the Antibes of Graham Greene; the Cannes Film Festival, the casinos. In describing the machismo of the corrida, Hemingway had put Spain on the map. Fitzgerald in his short stories and Tender Is the Night was the first chronicler of the Riviera, the bon vivants and drunks and flappers and phonies of Antibes or Juan-les-Pins. It could be said that Fitzgerald invented the Riviera as a fashionable place, but he had many collaborators in keeping it in business.