One must not deny it any reputation of this nature which it may possess, and indeed, with St. Raphael and Hyères, it shares with many another place along the French Riviera a popularity as great, perhaps, as if it were the possessor of even an extraordinarily beautiful cathedral. The churchly dignity of Antibes has departed long since, though its career as a former bishopric--in the province of Aix--was not brief, as time goes. It began in the fourth century with St. Armentaire, and endured intermittently until the twelfth century, when the see was combined with that of Grasse, and the ruling dignity transferred to that place. VIII STE. MARIE MAJEURE DE MARSEILLES "These brown men of Marseilles, who sing as they bend at their oars, are Greeks." --CLOVIS HUGHES. Marseilles is modern and commercial; but Marseilles is also ancient, and a centre from which have radiated, since the days of the Greeks, much power and influence. It is, too, for a modern city,--which it is to the average tourist,--wonderfully picturesque, and shows some grand architectural effects, both ancient and modern. [Illustration: _Marseilles_] The _Palais de Long Champs_ is an architectural grouping which might have dazzled luxurious Rome itself. The Chamber of Commerce, with its decorations by Puvis de Chavannes, is a structure of the first rank; the _Cannebière_ is one of those few great business thoroughfares which are truly imposing; while the docks, shipping, and hotels, are all of that preëminent magnitude which we are wont to associate only with a great capital. As to its churches, its old twelfth-century cathedral remains to-day a mere relic of its former dignity. [Illustration: _The Old Cathedral, Marseilles_] It is a reminder of a faith and a power that still live in spite of the attempts of the world of progress to live it down, and has found its echo in the present-day cathedral of Ste. Marie Majeure, one of the few remarkably successful attempts at the designing of a great church in modern times. The others are the new Westminster Roman Catholic Cathedral London, the projected cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and Trinity Church in Boston. As an exemplification of church-building after an old-time manner adapted to modern needs, called variously French-Romanesque, Byzantine, and, by nearly every expert who has passed comment upon it, by some special _nomenclature of his own_, the cathedral at Marseilles is one of those great churches which will live in the future as has St. Marc's at Venice in the past. Its material is a soft stone of two contrasting varieties,--the green being from the neighbourhood of Florence, and the white known as _pierre de Calissant_,--laid in alternate courses. Its deep sunken portal, with its twin flanking Byzantine towers, dominates the old part of the city, lying around about the water-front, as do few other churches, and no cathedrals, in all the world.