One’s impression of Marseilles, when he is on the eve of departure, will be as varied as the temperament of individuals; but one thing is certain--its like is to be found nowhere else in the known and travelled world. Port Said is quite as cosmopolitan, but it is not grand or even picturesque; New York is as much of a mixture of nationalities and “colonies,” from those of the Syrians and Greeks on the lower East Side to those of the Hungarians, Poles, and Slavs on the West, but they have not yet become firmly enough established to have become picturesque,--they are simply squalid and dirty, and no one has ever yet expressed the opinion that the waterside life of New York’s wharves and locks has anything of the colour and life of the Mediterranean about it; Paris is gay, brilliant, and withal cosmopolitan, but there is a conventionality about it that does not exist in the great port of Marseilles, where each reviving and declining day brings a whole new arrangement of the mirror of life. Marseilles is, indeed, “_la plus florissante et la plus magnifique des villes latines_.” CHAPTER X. AIX-EN-PROVENCE AND ABOUT THERE Much sentimental and historic interest centres around the world-famed ancient capital of Aix-en-Provence. To-day its position, if subordinate to that of Marseilles in commercial matters, is still omnipotent, so far as concerns the affairs of society and state. To-day it is the _chef-lieu_ of the Arrondissement of the same name in the Département des Bouches du Rhône; the seat of an archbishopric; of the Cour d’Appel; and of the Académie, with its faculties of law and letters. Aix-en-Provence, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Aix-les-Bains are all confused in the minds of the readers of the Anglo-Parisian newspapers. There is little reason for this, but it is so. Aix-la-Chapelle is the shrine of Charlemagne; Aix-les-Bains, of the god of baccarat--and in a later day bridge and automobile-boat races; but Aix-en-Provence is still prominent as the brilliant capital of the beauty-loving court of the middle ages. The remains of this past existence are still numerous, and assuredly they appeal most profoundly to all who have ever once come within their spell, from that wonderfully ornate portal of the Église de St. Sauveur to King René’s “Book of Hours” in the Bibliothèque Méjanes. Three times has Aix changed its location. The ancient _ville gauloise_, whose name appears to be lost in the darkness of the ages, was some three kilometres to the north, and the _ville romaine_ of Aquæ-Sextiæ was some distance to the westward of the present city of Aix-en-Provence.