Bar des 13 Coins

This guide to Bar des 13 Coins in Marseille follows the case of the Marquis de Sade, who arrived at this old inn in 1772 with his valet under orders to find women for an evening that ended in a poisoning scandal. It traces how Casanova had stayed at the same inn a decade earlier, and how the servant sent to arrange that fateful night faced a harsher legal reckoning than his master ever did. You'll also hear how the square's name was garbled from Swiss cantons into a Provençal word for corner, a mistake that lasted two centuries.