eople were continually haunted by memories of their
former independence, and not only struggled for municipal rights and
liberties, but took sides for or against the most powerful monarchs of
continental history as if they had been a resourceful country rather
than a city. It succored the League, defied Henry IV and Richelieu; and
treating Kings in trouble as cavalierly as declining Counts, Marseilles
tried at the death of Henry III to secede from France and recover its
autonomy under a Consul, Charles de Cazaulx. Promptly defeated, it still
continued to think independently, and struggle, as best it might, for
freedom of administration; and although from the time of Pompey to that
of Louis XIV it has had an ineradicable tendency to stand against the
government, it has survived the results of all its contumacies, its
plagues, wars, and sieges, and the destructiveness of its phase of the
Revolution, when it had a Terror of its own. Notwithstanding modern
rivals in the Mediterranean, Marseilles is to-day one of the largest and
most prosperous of French cities. Built in amphitheatre around the bay,
it is beautiful in general view, its streets bustle with commercial
activity, and its vast docks swarm with workmen. The storms of the past
have gone over Marseilles as the storms of nature over its sea, have
been as passionate, and have left as little trace. Instead of Temples,
Forum, and Arena, there are the Palais de Longchamps, the Palais de
Justice, and the Christian Arch of Triumph. Instead of the muddy and
unhealthy alley-ways of Mediaevalism, there are broad streets and wide
boulevards, and in spite of its antiquity Marseilles is a city of
to-day, in monuments, aspect, spirit, and even in class distinction.
"Here," writes Edmond About, "are only two categories of people, those
who have made a fortune and those who are trying to make one, and the
principal inhabitants are parvenus in the most honourable sense of the
word."

[Illustration: _Entrevaux._

People gather around the mail-coach as it makes its daily halt before
the drawbridge.]

[Illustration: THE NEW CATHEDRAL.--MARSEILLES.]

"In the most honourable sense of the word," the Cathedral of Marseilles
is also typical of the city, "parvenue." Its first stone was placed by
Prince Louis Napoleon in 1852, and as the modern has overgrown the
classic and mediaeval greatness of Marseilles, so the new "Majeure" has
eclipsed, if it has not yet entirely replaced, the old C