and see one of these two structures apart from the other. But in Notre Dame
de la Garde the two are combined in one building, and tease the eye from
every point in Marseilles.

[Illustration: Abbey of S. Victor, Marseilles]

I ascended the steep crag to the church and found it full of a devout
congregation. The service was the "Salut," and the Host was being elevated
to the strains of "The Last Rose of Summer," on the hautbois stop of the
organ.

The view from the platform of the church, of Marseilles, the coast, the
blue Mediterranean and the islands is beautiful. Below Notre Dame de la
Garde, and above the old port, stands the ancient Abbey of S. Victor;
this abbey, of which the church alone remains, occupies a site where the
successive generations of Massaliots buried their dead from the earliest
pagan times, and here the first Christians formed catacombs of which
some traces remain under the church, subterranean passages bearing some
resemblance to those in the outskirts of Rome. The abbey itself was
founded by Cassian, in the fourth century, over these galleries containing
the bones of the first Christians, but his monastery was wrecked by the
Saracens four hundred years later, and it was rebuilt in the eleventh and
thirteenth centuries. What remains of this famous Abbey of S. Victor has
rather the appearance of a fortress than a church; the walls and ramparts
date from 1350, and were the work of William de Grimoard, who was prior of
the monastery before he was elevated to be pope under the title of Urban V.
The heavy, clumsy pile is a type of the architecture, at once military and
ecclesiastical, that characterises most of the churches along the coast.

Externally the venerable church is devoid of beauty. No attempt at