old culverins, great gilded lanterns, old blocks and tackle, old rusting
anchors, old rigging, old megaphones, old telescopes, dating from the
time of Jean Bart.

There were women selling shellfish, crouched bawling beside their wares,
sailors passing, some with pots of tar, some with steaming pots of stew,
others with baskets full of squid which they were taking to wash in the
fresh water of the fountains. Everywhere prodigious heaps of merchandise
of every kind. Silks, minerals, baulks of timber, ingots of lead,
carobs, rape-seed, liquorice, sugar cane, great piles of dutch cheeses.
East and west hugger-mugger.

Here is the grain berth. Stevedores empty the sacks onto the quay from
a scaffold, the grain pours down in a golden torrent raising a cloud of
pale dust, and is loaded by men wearing red fezes into carts, which
set off followed by a regiment of women and children with brushes and
buckets for gleaning.

There is the careening basin. The huge vessels lie over on one side and
are flamed with fires of brushwood to rid them of seaweed, while their
yardarms soak in the water. There is a smell of pitch and the deafening
hammering of shipwrights lining the hulls with sheets of copper.

Sometimes, between the masts, a gap opened and Tartarin could see the
harbour mouth and the movement of ships. An English frigate leaving for
Malta, spruce and scrubbed, with officers in yellow gloves, or a big
Marseilles brig, casting off amid shouting and cursing, with, in the
bows, a fat captain in an overcoat and a top hat, supervising the
manoeuvre in broad provencal. There were ships outward bound, running
before the wind with all sails set, there were others, far out at sea,