Sunday morning is probably the quietest it gets in Marseille near Vieux Port and the quiet part doesn't happen until dawn. Our flat was on the 3rd floor (that would be 4th at home). We had a corner with windows on cross streets. With the excellent thermal windows closed it was quiet inside, but with them open, it was the rip of the scooters, the unmuffled motorcycles, and the conversations outside of bars that stayed open until 6 or 7 in the morning and opened again two hours later.
Linny didn't feel like walking the hills early, so I headed out with the camera to see what might be just up the hill from us. I knew that anything in the immediate bowl of the port was old city, but I figured that up the hill would also mean up the socio-economic ladder. That turned out to be partly true, it took a lot of climbing to get there. Meanwhile, there was an interesting stratum of government buildings, courts, tidy parks, consulates, and official monumnets from when this was the city. These spots, including some excellent places to hang out and drink coffee were closer than I'd imagined.
It was by accident that I was walking with my eyes focussed across the wide street at an enormous, over-decorated government edifice and I glanced left to see bouquets stuck in a tall gate. This is quite common in France to commemorate fallen heroes, victims of the various terrors, and precious relatives or friends. There are many actual descriptive commemorative plaques on buildings where flowers often appear, apparently for generations after. I walked over to look at these and discovered that they were in memory of those murdered by the gunman at the concert in Las Vegas and that this gate belonged to the US Consulate in Marseille. I hadn't known about it, but it's a good thing to note.
Next to the gate there was a plaque dedicated to Varian Fry. And the next block was a massive fountain with four immense flag poles dedicated to this man. I hadn't thought about Fry in a long while. I made his historical acquaintance only in 2001, when the film Varian's Way was released. It had quite a cast: William Hurt, Julia Ormond, Maury Chaykin, Matt Craven, and Alan Arkin.
Fry was an American journalist who risked his life for years to facilitate the escapes of between 2,000-4,000 anti-Nazis (today's antifa), artists, and European Jews. Among the names I recognized are Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Franz Werfe, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, and Heinrich Mann. After the war, Fry lived out his life as a Latin teacher in Connecticutt.
