But though the Prado and the Corniche are alive with carriages on sunny afternoons, it is on the quays themselves, and around the docks and basins, that the true vivacious Marseillais life must be seen in all its full flow and eagerness. The quick southern temperament, the bronzed faces, the open-air existence, the hurry and bustle of a great seaport town, display themselves there to the best advantage. And the ports of Marseilles are many and varied: their name is legion, and their shipping manifold. As long ago as 1850, the old square port, the Phocæan harbor, was felt to have become wholly insufficient for the needs of modern commerce in Marseilles. From that day to this, the accommodation for vessels has gone on increasing with that incredible rapidity which marks the great boom of modern times. Never, surely, since the spacious days of great Elizabeth, has the world so rapidly widened its borders as in these latter days in which we are all living. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean have joined the Atlantic. In 1853 the Port de la Joliette was added, therefore, to the Old Harbor, and people thought Marseilles had met all the utmost demands of its growing commerce. But the Bassin du Lazaret and the Bassin d'Arenc were added shortly after; and then, in 1856, came the further need for yet another port, the Bassin National. In 1872 the Bassin de la Gare Maritime was finally executed; and now the Marseillais are crying out again that the ships know not where to turn in the harbor. Everywhere the world seems to cosmopolitanize itself and to extend its limits: the day of small things has passed away for ever; the day of vast ports, huge concerns, gigantic undertakings is full upon us.
Curiously enough, however, in spite of all this rapid and immense development, it is still to a great extent the Greek merchants who hold in their hands--even in our own time--the entire commerce and wealth of the old Phocæan city. A large Hellenic colony of recent importation still inhabits and exploits Marseilles. Among the richly-dressed crowd of southern ladies that throngs the Prado on a sunny afternoon in full season, no small proportion of the proudest and best equipped who loll back in their carriages were born at Athens or in the Ionic Archipelago. For even to this day, these modern Greeks hang together wonderfully with old Greek persistence. Their creed keeps them apart from the Catholic French, in whose midst they live, and trade, and thrive; for, of course, they are all members of the "Orthodox" Church, and they retain their orthodoxy in spite of the ocean of Latin Christianity which girds them round with its flood on every side. The Greek community, in fact, dwells apart, marries apart, worships apart, and thinks apart. The way the marriages, in particular, are most frequently managed, differs to a very curious extent from our notions of matrimonial proprieties. The system--as duly explained to me one day under the shady plane-trees of the Allées de Meilhan, in very choice modern Greek, by a Hellenic merchant of Marseilles, who himself had been "arranged for" in this very manner--is both simple and mercantile to the highest degree yet practised in any civilized country. It is "marriage by purchase" pure and simple; only here, instead of the husband buying the wife, it is the wife who practically buys the husband.