Glory Days
If...and other tales of my summer vacation
Last Tuesday was the hottest day on record EVER in France, with the temperature reaching into the 100s in some places, and I was very proud of myself for having found an activity that involved a boat ride. It was just fortuitous, too - ever since I visited St. Helena last year, I consider myself to be on a world tour of island prisons, so I was especially eager to go to the Chateau D’If.
If not now, when? I’m staying in a village 2 hours away,, and France is trainland, so off I went, despite the fact that the trains had all declared it a national emergency. The island of If is right off the coast of Marseille and easy to get to from the old Port, though I wasn’t clear if it was Alcatraz distance from the city (near) or Robben Island distance (far), but it’s actually right in between the two, distance-wise. (And cruelty wise, as well I think, though that’s debatable.) You can walk to the port from the station and get a feel for Marseille as you do so: it is, as advertised over the years, scuzzy but picturesque, like a cross between Paris and Portland, and I enjoyed the vibe a lot, especially it’s North African-ness. At the port, tourism abounds, some of it from the big cruise ships parked elsewhere in the bay. The tourists are all being led around in a long crocodile, like Madeline, or kindergartners in Golden Gate Park, but they get priority when boarding the tourist boats, so the laugh’s on me.
As mentioned, it was super hot, and the boat to If also goes to Port Frioul so there were lots of young people in bikinis carrying sunblock and a towel in their string bags on it. As it chugs on out, you get a great view of the city, as well as people in their underpants plunging off the quai and the rocks that guard the harbor in a very unsafe looking manner. It looked like fun, but truly there is nothing like a short boat journey to assuage the heat! Whether you are looking back at the city or ahead to the Calanques, you can feel the cool breeze of the wine dark sea and the thoughts that swirl in my head when I am afloat in the Mediterranean are the best thoughts you can have, tapping on every neuron. Lucky and blessed, that is me.
As mentioned above, I didn’t know how far the island is from the city before I went. In the book, Edmond Dantes swims there after his escape in a burlap bag which it turns out is...feasible, if bloody unlikely. If you don’t know the story, it goes like this. Our friend ED is thrown into the Chateau D’If on his wedding day on a false charge, spends 14 years languishing there, meets a priest in the next cell who tunnels a hole to him, confides the site of an enormous treasure, and dies. Edmond escapes by sewing himself into his shroud. He’s then thrown in the sea, gets the treasure, dubs self Count of Monte Cristo, and wreaks revenge on his enemies in a highly satisfying manner.
The Count of Monte Cristo was the first best seller of the 19th century and it made a fortune for its author, Alexander Dumas whom, it turns out, was black, the son of an actual enslaved person whose white grandfather sold he and his three siblings into slavery to pay off a debt. As with Edmond Dantes’ fate, it is very satisfying to know that he became so rich and famous and beloved, and as that fact indicates, the tour of the island is super interesting - even though, let’s be clear, Edmond Dantes is IMAGINARY. The prison isn’t, though, and it has all kinds of interesting features. For example, in 15 something or other, the King of Portugal sent a rhinoceros to the King of France, Francis 1, as a present, because no one in Europe had ever seen one. But the ship foundered on If Island and the poor rhinoceros lived there, until it was eventually drowned at sea when they tried to send it onward. I think that’s so awful and cruel. The gift store t-shirts depict the rhino, but I couldn’t wear that because it’s just too sad.
In the Chateau D’If there is a lot of graffiti. The earliest is from prisoners and soldiers who were garrisoned there; more recently - it opened for tourism in 1880 - tourists scratched their names in the walls there. Because today that behavior is frowned on, they’ve provided a large wall of paper to write on, and people do: if you look carefully you will see the words you’re hoping to see, link to the name of the current French prez. One of the things I find here in Europe is that every single American you meet, wherever they are from, has but a single thought regarding home, in fact you can have quite a nice conversation with a total stranger by just discussing the question of what you are planning to do when “It” happens. At the wineries for example. People are like, “I’m buying this wine for when “IT” happens,” and so forth.
As I said, I am on a world tour of prison islands right now and I don’t quite know the appeal. Well, that’s not quite true: it may be that because we live in a time when the idea of politically motivated imprisonment, punishment, and exile feels both impossible, and desirable, and looking at former ways of dealing with the problem is therefore intellectually satisfying. Sadly, given our modern forms of communication and travel, there is now no such thing as an impenetrable island; and, in the same way that no band can ever really break up for good, there is no way, short of death, to rid ourselves of our enemies. Hence the enduring appeal of the Count of Monte Cristo. (Spoiler alert: in the end his worst enemy commits suicide. From shame. As if.) Of course, Edmond Dantes was innocent, and many of the other people imprisoned there were also politically railroaded in an unfair way. In that sense, Napoleon’s exile on St Helena is a far different thing than Edmond Dantes, and also, rather than throw him in a stone cell with no windows, they built him a lovely house in a hill. Happily for those who had it in for him, he still didn’t like it there because he liked being at the center of the action. And the center of attention.
Anyway, thank you for listening to my TED talk on what I did on my summer vacation. I apologize if the lack of musical content was jarring, doubtless it will reappear at some point soon. Just for context, I write these substacks for my own amusement, because I love to write, so it’s very kind of people - of you, I guess if you got this far -- to read them. Suffice it to say, one of my favorite places to be in life is alone in a strange city with a notebook. That being the case, thanks for coming through, Marseille: to quote the words of your beloved song and also Bruce Springsteen, le jour de gloire est arrivee ...glory days are here.
There is a very decent version of THE COUNT OF MONTE CHRISTO on PBS Masterpiece right now !!
On the bbc podcast series “in our time”, which is fascinating, on an episode about Durer, they suggested that he never saw the rhino but drew it from descriptions.