ROMANTIC TOULON

Greymouth Evening Star, 19 December 1933, Page 10

ROMANTIC TOULON

A VIVID PEN SKETCH. ; i. Looked at. as a spectacle, Toulon is the one city on the Mediterranean that comes near to being flawless. Most of its inhabitants are engaged in fabricating warships for the State. This is a job that in Britain or America would make hideous a vast tract of littoral and completely ruin the water’s edge for miles. If a French city has works and arsenals, it banishes them to the background, where they won’t be an affront to the eye (writes Idwal Jones in the “San Francisco Chronicle”).

Sitting before the cafe on the Quai de Cronstadt, where the warships tie up, you can perceive not a single noxious detail. There is a soft, autumn haze, opalescent, glittering with specks like diamond lire, and a sky bluish pearl. The cafe shutters are down for the first time in three days, tor the blow is over.

• Dogs are trotting in the sunshine, and stevedores with red sashes are rolling barrels with thumps of their bare feet. At the next table is a Senegalese, an ungainly fellow who, having finished his grog, is reading a comic paper and spitting out cardamon seeds from between his flaglike teeth. He is a dealer in these seeds, and has a. basketload’ of them. After a while he prowls off in search of customers—other Senegalese. Four dinghy? shoot back and forth from a warship and debark sailors with red pompons on their caps, who file before the cafe silently, with eyes averted so as not to embarrass the clients sipping their vermouth and locking out over the gulf. Besides destroyers, torpedo boats, and such like are feluccas , with ochre sails. Fishermen are on these, who lift and drop their arms as they lean over and haul in their nets. The tableau reminds you of the Child’s Illustrated Bible.

Mostly they are catching little sharks and dogfish, but they can’t help this. However, they skin this fauna and cut it up before landing, and sell it for gurnet, which is pretty expensive but makes great bouillabaise. So do these other beasts. The crew of one felucca, have knocked off toil to make some now for breakfast, cooking it over a jar of charcoal lashed to the mast.

Allow me to instruct you in the art of making a bouillabaise. Sink a pot in rearing Hames, throw in wine and oil. Also onions and herbs and ground carrot. Then saffron. Then throw in anything you can drag up from the sea, even a discarded oilskin or a rubber boot. Boil like mad. then pour out on a chunk of bread. This valuable recipe was given me in a cafe quite famous for it. The sun is climbing higher. Launches carrying workers to the arsenal nose out of the wharf and put-put out of sight, leaving white furrows chased in indigo. The grand' allure of the town is disclosed in the full sunshine that strikes on the thin, ancient glass along the facade of the port. The windows glow like the eyes of mortals open on the eternal beauty of Amphytrite. The new town is just so-so, but the old town is jumbly, with washing hanging from the upper windows, and looks like Naples. It has Romanesque arches, high rubble buildings, a tile of Ligurian towers, close and haughty, reared in the sombre, ent-throut

■Genoese architecture of the 1600’s. The nicade lias been softened by masks of pink and orange stucco, chipped by the mistral and the vapours from the sea. It has the decor of opera bouffe and the charm ot the unreal. A FIGHT. More warships glide by, floating machine shops emitting noxious smoke, but the haze makes them less unfortunate to the senses. There was a big fight here in the alley, just off the Quai. early this morning, and ii was my good fortune to be an eye-witness. A billsticker slapped on the wall a poster urging everyone to vote tor the Right Centre candidate and Justice. This lapped over an inch on the poster urging everyone to vote lor a Communist candidate and equality. This brought ten red-sashed stevedores bellowing to the scene, and after threatening the billsticker with death they fetched more stevedores, who brought along twenty Right Centrists, who argued that no real crime had been committed. The spokesman of the. red sashes declared the symbol of his party had been defaced at the orders of a gang of assassins. He would go so far as to call them, he said, “aged camels.”

This is the ultimate in French invective. The Right Centrists paled at the insuit, then exploded in individual rage and charged on masse. The battle was on. The verba] impacts were tctrihlc. However, the lists struck no one actually; they merely brandished under noses, but according to the French rules this was a good fight. What ended it was the arrival of a small gendarme, who listened to the grievances, twisting first one moustache, then the other. Then he trotted eff to bring a police head. This dignitary was a Corsican, with large and fierce moustaches. For some mysterious reason all chefs de police in France are Corsicans. Nobody knows why. It would be as astonishing to find one that is not a Corsican as it would be in the United States to find one that is not an Irishman.

This one pulled cut a rule and applied it to the posters. “Only an inch lap,” he said. “Seulement une pouce!”

Therefore there was no casus belli. If it had been an inch and a half there would have been, with a 10-franc hue for the offending billsticker. So everybody shook hands except the red-sashed spokesman, who was mortally offended and stalked off by himself, muttering “Camels!”

How much trouble in this world can be obviated by just a modicum of logic, though logic can be extremely illogical at times.

A short while before, the Communists of Toulon printed off a stack o" leaflets to be passed out on the street and in cafes. The distributors were “pinched” because of an oversight in the matter- of a licence. The leaflets were confiscated and hauled to the town warehouse. Nothing could have been more logical. It came time for the municipality to send our, tax blanks to the citizens. A clerk pointed out that there was a lot of excellent paper on hand that could lie used tor (he purpose. True, one side was printed on, but. the other side was blank, and thrift dictated the use of (be material.

So the leaflets were imprinted on the reverse with a questionnaire, and 10,000 of them dispatched by mail to homes and into the hands of Right Centrists, Left Centrists, Royalists,

and whatnot—a feat quite beyond the accomplishment of the Communists, and they have not yet left off laughing and congratulating themselves.

What harm was done I could never find out. Perhaps none whatever. The brand of Communist in Toulon, which i.s supposed to be a hotbed of syndicalism—even worse than Brest—another naval town—appeared to be quite moderate and as amiable as the Centrists (Right and Left). If that scene had happened in Russia or Germany there would httve been fusillades in the alley. The French Communist is inherently a Frenchman, and is not- a Com jmunist because he has more of a liking for Russians than he has for other 'foreigners. He is a peaceable, moderately gay, and hard-working' citizen, and curiously patriotic, even when singing the “Internationale,” which has French words and music.