As we came galloping around a curve in the river—I cannot insist too strongly upon the dashing impetuosity that was the constant buoyant undertone of our voyage—this Tournon the blessed shot up before us perked out upon a bold little hill thrust forward into the stream: a crowd of heavily-built houses rising around a church or two and a personable campanile, with here and there bits of crenellated ramparts, and higher still the tough remnant of a castle still fit to do service in the wars. Indeed, it all was so good in colour—with its blendings of green and grey shot with warm yellow tones; and its composition was so excellent—with its sweep upward from the river to the castle battlements—that to my American fancy (used rather to Mediaeval semblances than to Mediaeval realities) it seemed to be temporarily escaped from an exceptionally well-set operatic stage.



All Tournon was down at the water-side to meet us, and on the landing-stage was the very Mayor: a lean and tri-coloured man who took off his hat comprehensively to our whole company in a magnificent bow. Notables were with him—the Sous-Prefect, the Mayor of Tain, the Adjoint, leading citizens—who also bowed to us; but not with a bow like his! Laurel garlands decorated the landing-stage; more laurel garlands and the national colours made gay the roadway leading up the bank; and over the roadway was a laurel-wreathed and tri-coloured triumphal arch—all as suitable to welcoming poets and patriots, such as we were, as suitable could be. As the Gladiateur drew in to the bank there was a noble banging of boites—which ancient substitute for cannon in joy-firing still are esteemed warmly in rural France—and before the Mayor spoke ever a word to us the band bounded gallantly into the thick of the "Marseillaise."

With the boite banging fitfully, with the band in advance playing "La Coupe," the tri-coloured Mayor led off with the most distinguished lady of our company upon his arm: and away we all went, under the triumphal arch and up the garlanded roadway two by two—as though Tournon were a Rhone-side Ararat and we were the animals coming out of the Ark. Our entry was a veritable triumph; and we endeavoured (I think successfully) to live up to it: walking stately through the narrow streets, made narrower by the close-packed crowds pressing to see so rare a poetic spectacle; through the cool long corridors of the Lycee; and so out upon a prettily dignified little park—where, at a triad of tables set within a garlanded enclosure beneath century-old plane-trees, our breakfast was served to us to the accompaniment of bangs from the boite and musical remarks from the band. And all Tournon, the while, stood above us on a terrace and sympathetically looked on.

In its adaptation to the needs of travelling poets the breakfast was a master-stroke. It was simple, substantial, delicious; and in its accompanying prodigal outpouring of red and white Hermitage, Cornas, and Saint-Peray, the contrast with the bottle-niggardliness of Serrieres was bravely marked. The Hermitage, from the hill-sides directly across the river from Tournon, around the town of Tain, scarcely lives up to its heroic tradition just now—the phylloxera having destroyed the old vines, planted by the hermit of blessed memory, and the new vines having in them still the intemperate strength of youth. Yet is it a sound rich wine, in a fair way to catch up again with its ancient fame.

While we feasted, the boite and the band took turns in exploding with violence; and when, with the filet, the band struck up "La Coupe" away we all went with it in a chorus that did not die out entirely until well along in the galantine. The toasts came in with the ices, and on the basis of the regional champagne, Saint-Peray—sweet, but of good flavour—that cracked its corks out with the irregular volleyings of a line of skirmishers firing in a fog. The tri-coloured Mayor on behalf of Tournon, and Paul Arene and delightful Sextius Michel on behalf of the Felibrige and the Cigaliers, and M. Maurice Faure, the Deputy, on behalf of the Nation at large, exchanged handsome compliments in the most pleasing way; and the toasts which they gave, and the toasts which other people gave, were emphasized by a rhythmic clapping of hands in unison by the entire company—in accordance with the custom that obtains always at the feasts of the Felibres.

But that was no time nor place for extended speech-making. All in a whiff our feast ended; and in another whiff we were up and off—whisking through the Lycee corridors and the crowded streets and under the triumphal arch and so back on board the Gladiateur. The Mayor, always heroically ablaze with his patriotic scarf of office, stood on the landing-stage—like a courteous Noah in morning dress seeing the animals safely up the Ark gang-plank—and made to each couple of us one of his stately bows; the boite fired a final salvo of one round; the band saluted us with a final outburst of the "Marseillaise"; everybody, ashore and afloat, cheered—and then the big wheels started, the current caught us and wrenched us apart from all that friendliness, and away we dashed down stream.

VII

Long before we came abreast of it by the windings of the river we saw high up against the sky-line, a clear three hundred feet above the water, all that is left of the stronghold of Crussol—still called by the Rhone boatmen "the Horns of Crussol," although the two towers no longer shoot out horn-like from the mountain-top with a walled war-town clinging about their flanks. One Geraud Bartet, a cadet of the great house of Crussol—of which the representative nowadays is the Duc d'Uzes—built this eagle's nest in the year 1110; but it did not become a place of importance until more than four hundred years later, in the time of the religious wars.

On the issue of faiths the Crussols divided. The head of the house was for the Pope and the King; the two cadets were for God and the Reform. Then it was that the castle (according to an over-sanguine chronicler of the period) was "transformed into an unconquerable stronghold"; and thereafter—always for the advancement of Christianity of one sort or another—a liberal amount of killing went on beneath its walls. In the end, disregarding the fact that it was unconquerable, the castle was captured by the Baron des Adrets—who happened at the moment to be on the Protestant side—and in the interest of sound doctrine all of its defenders were put to the sword. Tradition declares that "the streams of blood filled one of the cisterns, in which this terrible Huguenot had his own children bathed 'in order,' as he said, 'to give them strength and force and, above all, hatred of Catholicism.'" And then "the castle was demolished from its lowest to its highest stone."

This final statement is a little too sweeping, yet essentially it is true. All that now remains of Crussol is a single broken tower, to which some minor ruins cling; and a little lower are the ruins of the town—whence the encircling ramparts have been outcast and lie in scattered fragments down the mountain-side to the border of the Rhone.

It was on this very mountain—a couple of thousand years or so earlier in the world's history—that a much pleasanter personage than a battling baron had his home: a good-natured giant of easy morals who was the traditional founder of Valence. Being desirous of founding a town somewhere, and willing—in accordance with the custom of his time—to leave the selection of a site a little to chance, he hurled a javelin from his mountain-top with the cry, "Va lance!": and so gave Valence its name and its beginning, on the eastern bank of the river two miles away, at the spot where his javelin fell. At a much later period the Romans adopted and enlarged the giant's foundation; but nearly every trace of their occupation has disappeared. Indeed, even the ramparts, built only a few hundred years ago by Francis I., have utterly vanished; and the tendency of the town has been so decidedly toward pulling down and building up again that it now wears quite a modern and jauntily youthful air.

Valence was our next stopping-place, and we had a world of work to do there during the hour or so that we remained ashore. Very properly believing that we, being poets, could dedicate their local monuments for them far better than they could do such work for themselves, the excellent people of this town had accumulated a variety of monuments in expectation of our coming; and all of these it was our pleasant duty to start upon their immortal way.

Our reception was nothing short of magnificent. On the suspension bridge which here spans the river half the town was assembled watching for us; and the other half was packed in a solid mass on the bank above the point where our landing was made. The landing-stage was a glorious blaze of tri-colour; and there the Mayor, also gloriously tri-coloured, stood waiting for us in the midst of a guard of honour of four firemen whose brazen helmets shone resplendent in the rays of the scorching sun. A little in the background was the inevitable band; that broke with a crash, at the moment of our landing, into the inevitable "Marseillaise." And then away we all marched for half a mile, up a wide and dusty and desperately hot street, into the heart of the town. The detachment of welcoming townsfolk from the bank closed in around us; and around them, presently, closed in the detachment of welcoming townsfolk from the bridge. We poets (I insist upon being known by the company I was keeping) were deep in the centre of the press. The heat was prodigious. The dust was stifling. But, upheld by a realizing sense of the importance and honour of the duties confided to us, we never wavered in our march.

Our first halt was before a dignified house on which was a flag-surrounded tablet reading: "Dans cette maison est ne General Championnet. L'an MDCCLXII." M. Faure and Sextius Michel made admirable speeches. The band played the "Marseillaise." We cheered and cheered. But what in the world we poets had to do with this military person—who served under the lilies at the siege of Gibraltar that ended so badly in the year 1783, and who did a great deal of very pretty fighting later under the tri-colour—I am sure I do not know! Then on we went, to the quick tap of the drums, the Mayor and the glittering firemen preceding us, to the laying of a corner-stone that really was in our line: that of a monument to the memory of the dramatist Emile Augier. Here, naturally, M. Jules Claretie came to the fore. In the parlance of the Academy, Augier was "his dead man"; and not often does it happen that a finer, a more discriminating, eulogy is pronounced in the Academy by the successor to a vacant chair than was pronounced that hot day in Valence upon Emile Augier by the Director of the Comedie Francaise. When it was ended, there was added to the contents of the leaden casket a final paper bearing the autographs of the notables of our company; and then the cap-stone, swinging from tackles, was lowered away.

We had the same ceremony over again, ten minutes later, when we laid the corner-stone of the monument to the Comte de Montalivet: who was an eminent citizen and Mayor of Valence, and later was a Minister under the first Napoleon—whom he had met at Madame Colombier's, likely enough, in the days when the young artillery officer was doing fitful garrison-duty in that little town. Again it seemed to me that we poets were not necessarily very closely associated with the matter in hand; but we cheered at the proper places, and made appropriate and well-turned speeches, and contributed a valuable collection of autographs to the lead box in the corner-stone: and did it all with the easily off-hand air of thorough poets of the world. In the matter of the autographs there was near to being a catastrophe. Everything was going at a quick-step—our time being so short—and in the hurry of it all the lead box was closed and the cap-stone was lowered down upon it while yet the autographs remained outside! It was by the merest chance, I fancy, in that bustling confusion, that the mistake happened to be noticed; and I cannot but think—the autographs, with only a few exceptions, being quite illegible—that no great harm would have come had it passed unobserved. However, the omission being discovered, common courtesy to the autographists required that the cap-stone should be raised again and the much-signed paper put where it belonged.

Having thus made what I believe to be a dedicatory record by dedicating three monuments, out of a possible four, in considerably less than an hour, we were cantered away to the Hotel de Ville to be refreshed and complimented with a "Vin d'honneur." That ceremony came off in the council chamber—a large, stately room—and was impressive. M. le Maire was a tall man, with a cherubic face made broader by wing-like little whiskers. He wore a white cravat, a long frock-coat, appositely black trousers, and a far-reaching white waistcoat over which wandered tranquilly his official tri-coloured scarf. The speech which he addressed to us was of the most flattering. He told us plainly that we were an extraordinarily distinguished company; that our coming to Valence was an event to be remembered long and honourably in the history of the town; that he, personally and officially, was grateful to us; and that, personally and officially, he would have the pleasure of drinking to our very good health. And then (most appropriately by the brass-helmeted firemen) well-warmed champagne was served; and in that cordial beverage, after M. Edouard Lockroy had made answer for us, we pledged each other with an excellent good will.

I am sorry to say that we "scamped" our last monument. To be sure, it was merely a tablet in a house-front setting forth the fact that Emile Augier had been born there; and already Augier had had one of the best speeches of the day. But that was no excuse for us. Actually, we scarcely waited to see the veil of pink paper torn away by a man on a step-ladder before we broke for the boat—and not a speech of any sort was made! Yet they bore us no malice, those brave Valencois. All the way down to the river, under the blaze of the sun, they crowded closely around us—with a well-meant but misapplied friendliness—and breathed what little air was stirring thrice over before it had a chance to get to our lungs. They covered again in a black swarm the bank and the bridge in our honour. Their band, through that last twenty minutes, blared steadfastly the "Marseillaise." From his post upon the landing-stage the cherubic Mayor beamed to us across his nobly tri-coloured stomach a series of parting smiles. The brass-helmeted firemen surrounded him—a little unsteadily, I fancied—smiling too. And as we slipped away from them all, into the rush of the river, they sent after us volley upon volley of cheers. Our breasts thrilled and expanded—it is not always that we poets thus are mounted upon high horses in the sight of all the world—and we cheered back to those discriminating and warm-hearted towns-folk until we fairly were under way down-stream. To the very last the cherubic Mayor, his hat raised, regarded us smilingly. To the very last—rivalling the golden glory of the helmet of Mambrino—the slightly-wavering head-gear of his attendant firemen shot after us golden gleams.

VIII

We drew away into calmer latitudes after leaving that whirlwind of a town. For the time being, our duties as public poets were ended; and there was a sense of restful comfort in knowing that for the moment we were rid of our fame and celebrity, and were free—as the lightest hearted of simple travellers—to enjoy the beauties of the river as it carried us, always at a full gallop, downward toward the sea.

In that tranquil spirit we came, presently, to the leaning Tour-Maudite: and found farther restfulness, after our own varied and too-energetic doings, in looking upon a quiet ruin that had remained soberly in the same place, and under the same sedative curse, for more than three hundred years. It is an architectural curiosity, this Cursed Tower—almost as far out from the perpendicular as is its better-known rival of Pisa; but more impressive in its unnatural crookedness because it stands upon an isolated crag which drops below it sheer to the river in a vast precipice. Anciently, before it went wrong and its curse came upon it, the tower was the keep of the Benedictine nunnery of Soyons. Most ungallantly, in the year 1569, the Huguenots captured the Abbey by assault; and thereupon the Abbess, Louise d'Amauze (poor frightened soul!) hurriedly embraced the Reformed religion—in dread lest, without that concession to the prejudices of the conquerors, still worse might come. Several of her nuns followed her hastily heterodox example; but the mass of them stood stoutly by their faith, and ended by making off with it intact to Valence. I admit that an appearance of improbability is cast upon this tradition by the unhindered departure from the Abbey of the stiff-necked nuns: who thus manifested an open scorn equally of the victorious Huguenots and of the Reformed faith. But, on the other hand, there are the ruins of the Abbey to prove conclusively that it truly was conquered; and there, slanting with a conspicuously unholy slant high up above the ruins, bearing steadfast witness to the wrath of heaven against that heretical Abbess and her heretical followers, is the Cursed Tower!

While the Abbess of Soyons, being still untried by the stress of battle, went sinless upon her still orthodox way, there lived just across the river on the Manor of l'Etoile a sinner of a gayer sort—Diane de Poitiers. The Castle of the Star dates from the fifteenth century; when Louis XI. dwelt there as Governor of Dauphiny and was given lessons in how to be a king. Diane the beautiful—"the most beautiful," as Francis I. gallantly called her—transformed the fortress into a bower, and gave to it (or accepted for it) the appropriately airy name of the Chateau de Papillon. There she lived long after her butterfly days were over; and in a way—although the Castle of the Butterfly is a silk-factory now—she lives there still: just as another light lady beautiful, Queen Jeanne of Naples, lives on in Provence. To this day her legend is vital in the country-side; and the old people still talk about her as though she were alive among them; and call her always not by her formal title of the Duchesse de Valentinois, but by her love title of "la belle dame de l'Etoile." Of this joyous person's family there is found a ghastly memento at the little town of Lene—a dozen miles down the river, beyond the great iron-works of Le Pouzin. It is the Tour de la Lepreuse: wherein a leper lady of the house of Poitiers was shut up for many years in awful solitude—until at last God in his goodness permitted her to die. I suppose that this story would have pointed something of a moral—instead of presenting only another case of a good moral gone wrong—had Diane herself been that prisoner of loathsome death in life.

But aboard the Gladiateur our disposition was to take the world easily and as we found it—since we found it so well disposed toward us—and not to bother our heads a bit about how moral lessons came off. With cities effervescing in our honour, with Mayors attendant upon us hat in hand, with brazen-helmeted firemen playing champagne upon us to stimulate our poetic fires, with boites and bands exploding in our praise—and all under that soul-expanding sun of the Midi—'tis no wonder that we wore our own bays jauntily and nodded to each other as though to say: "Ah, you see now what it is to be a poet in these latter days!" And we were graciously pleased to accept as a part of the tribute that all the world just then was rendering to us the panorama of mountains and towns and castles that continuously opened before us for the delectation of our souls.

Off to the right, hidden behind the factory-smoke of La Voulte, was the sometime home of Bernard de Ventadour, a troubadour whom the world still loves to honour—quite one of ourselves; off to the left, commanding the valley of the Drome, were Livron and Loriol, tough little Huguenot nuts cracked all to pieces (as their fallen ramparts showed) in the religious wars; and a little lower down we came to Cruas: a famous fortified Abbey, surmounted by a superb donjon and set in the midst of a triple-walled town, whereof the Byzantine-Romanesque church is one of the marvels of Southern France. Cruas was founded more than a thousand years ago, in the time of Charlemagne, by the pious Hermengarde, wife of Count Eribert de Vivarais; being a thank-offering to heaven erected on the very spot where that estimable woman and her husband were set upon in the forest by a she-wolf of monstrous size. But the fortified Abbey was a later growth; and was not completed, probably, until the sixteenth century. It was toward the end of that century, certainly, that the Huguenots attacked it—and were beaten off finally by Abbot Etienne Deodel and his monks, who clapped on armour over their habits and did some very sprightly fighting on its walls.

Below Cruas, around the bend in the river, Rochemaure the Black came into sight: a withered stronghold topping an isolated rock of black basalt six hundred feet above the stream. It is a grewsome place: the ruin of a black nightmare of a basalt-built castle, having below and around it a little black nightmare of a basalt-built town—whereof the desperately steep and crooked streets are paved with black basalt, and are so narrowed by over-hanging houses as to show above them only the merest strip of sky. It is a town to which, by preference, one would go to commit a murder; but 'tis said that its inhabitants are kindly disposed. Only a step beyond it lies Le Teil: a briskly busy little place tucked in at the foot of a lime-stone cliff—town and cliff and the inevitable castle on the cliff-top all shrouded in a murky white cloud, half dust, half vapour, rising from the great buildings in which a famous hydraulic cement is made. Not a desirable abiding place, seemingly; but in cheerful contrast with its lowering neighbour up the stream.

And then, passing beyond a maze of islands—amidst which the river wandered so tortuously that our pilot had behind him a strong tiller-crew in order to carry us through safely—we came to the noble town of Viviers. From afar we saw its tall bell-tower, its beautiful cathedral, its episcopal palace; and as we drew nearer the whole environment of ancient houses and fortifications spread out around those governing points in a great amphitheatre. But what held us most was the gay dash of tri-colour on its bridge, and the crowd there evidently waiting for our coming to manifest toward us their good will. They cheered us and waved their hats and handkerchiefs at us, those poet-lovers, as we neared them; and as we passed beneath the bridge a huge wreath of laurel was swung downward to our deck, and a shower of laurel branches fluttered down upon us through the sunlit air. In all the fourteen centuries since Viviers was founded I am confident that nothing more gracious than this tribute to passing Poetry is recorded in the history of the town.

Naturally, being capable of such an act of nicely discriminating courtesy, Viviers has sound traditions of learning and of gentle blood. In its day it was a great episcopal city: whose bishops maintained an army, struck money, counted princes among their vassals, in set terms defied the power of the King of France—and recognized not the existence of any temporal sovereign until the Third Conrad of Germany enlarged their knowledge of political geography by taking their city by storm. Yet while finely lording it over outsiders, the bishops were brought curiously to their bearings within their own walls. Each of them, in turn, on his way to his installation, found closed against him, as he descended from his mule before it, the door of the cathedral; and the door was not opened until he had sworn there publicly that he would maintain inviolate as he found them the rights and privileges of the chapter and of the town. Moreover, once in each year the men and women of rank of Viviers asserted their right to a part enjoyment of the ecclesiastical benefices by putting on copes and mitres and occupying with the canons the cathedral stalls.

The line of one hundred and thirty bishops who in succession reigned here ended—a century back, in the time of the Revolution—in a veritable lurid flame; yet with, I think, a touch of agonized human nature too. The church historian can see only the diabolical side of the situation; and in a horror-struck way tells how that last Bishop, "being overcome by the devil, abjured the episcopacy; with his own hands destroyed the insignia of his sacred office; and thereafter gave himself up to a blasphemous attack upon the holy religion of which he had been for a long while one of the most worthy ministers."

It certainly is true that the devil had things largely his own way about that time here in France; but it does not necessarily follow that in this particular matter the devil directly had a hand. To my mind a simpler and more natural explanation presents itself: That the iconoclastic Bishop was a weak brother who had suffered himself to be forced into a calling for which he had no vocation, and into an apparent championship of a faith with which his inmost convictions were at war; that for years and years the struggle between the inward man and the outward Bishop had gone on unceasingly and hopelessly, until—as well enough might happen to one strong enough to resent yet not strong enough to overcome restraint—the galling irksomeness of such a double life had brought madness near; and that madness did actually come when the chains of a life and of a faith alike intolerable suddenly were fused in the fierce heat of the Revolution and fell away.

IX

Below Viviers the Rhone breaks out from its broad upper valley into its broader lower valley through the Defile of Donzere. Here the foothills of the Alps and the foothills of the Cevennes come together, and behind this natural dam there must have been anciently a great lake which extended to the northward of where now is Valence. The Defile is a veritable canon that would be quite in place in the Sierra Madre. On each side of the sharply-narrowed river the walls of rock rise sheer to a height of two hundred feet. The rush of the water is tumultuous. In mid-stream, surrounded by eddies and whirling waves, is the Roche-des-Anglais—against which the boat of a luckless party of English travellers struck and was shattered a hundred years ago. Indeed, so dangerous was this passage held to be of old—when faith was stronger and boats were weaker than in our day of skepticism and compound-engines—that it was customary to tie-up at the head of the Defile and pray for grace to come through it safely; and sincerely faithful travellers tied-up again when the passage was ended to offer a service of grateful praise. But nowadays they clap five men on the tiller and put on more steam—and the practical result is the same.

The cliffs bordering the canon, being of a crumbling nature, are known as the Maraniousques; but usually are called by the Rhone boatmen the Monkey Rocks—because of the monkeys who dwelt in them in legendary times and stoned from their heights the passing travellers. It was a long while ago that the monkeys were in possession—in the time immediately succeeding the Deluge. During the subsidence of the waters it seems that the Ark made fast there for the night, just before laying a course for Ararat; and the monkey and his wife—desperately bored by their long cooping-up among so many uncongenial animals—took advantage of their opportunity to pry a couple of tiles off the roof and get away. The tradition hints that Noah had been drinking; at any rate, their absence was not noticed, and the Ark went on without them the next day. By the time that the Deluge fairly was ended, and the Rhone reopened to normal navigation, a large monkey family was established on the Maraniousques; and the monkeys thenceforward illogically revenged themselves upon Noah's descendants by stoning everybody who came along.

Later, the ill-tempered monkeys were succeeded by more ill-tempered men. In the fighting times the Defile of Donzere was a famous place in which to bring armies to a stand. Fortifications upon the cliffs entirely commanded the river; and at the lower end of the Defile the castle and the walled town of Donzere, capping a defiant little hill-top, commanded both the river and the plain. Even the most fire-eating of captains were apt to stop and think a little before venturing into the Defile in those days.

All of those perils are ended now. The dangers of the river are so shorn by steam that the shooting of the canon rapids yields only a pleasurable excitement, that is increased by the extraordinary wild beauty of that savage bit of nature in the midst of a long-tamed land; and the ramparts and the castle of Donzere, having become invitingly picturesque ruins, are as placable remnants of belligerency as are to be found anywhere in the world. Indeed, as we saw them—with the afternoon sunlight slanting down in a way to bring out delectably the warm greys and yellows of the stone-work and to produce the most entrancing effects of light-and-shade—it was not easy to believe that people had been killing each other all over them not so very long ago.



Having escaped from the Defile of Donzere, the river wanders away restfully into a wilderness of islands—a maze so unexplored and so unexplorable that otters still make their home in it, and through the thick foliage poke out their snub noses at passing boatmen now and then. Thence onward for a long way islands are plentiful—past Pierrelatte, and Bourg-Saint-Andeol, (a very ancient and highly Roman flavoured town), and the confluence of the Rhone and the Ardeche—to the still larger archipelago across which the Bridge Building Brothers, with God himself helping them, built the Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Modern engineers—possibly exalting their own craft at the expense of that of the architects—declare that this bridge was the greatest piece of structural work of the Middle Ages; certainly it was the greatest work of the Freres Pontifes: that most practical of brotherhoods which, curiously anticipating one phase of modern doctrine, paid less attention to faith than to works and gave itself simply to ministering to the material welfare of mankind. In the making of it they spent near half a century. From the year 1265 steadily onward until the year 1307 the Brothers labored: and then the bridge was finished—a half-mile miracle in stone. In view of the extraordinary difficulties which the engineer in charge of the work overcame—founding piers in bad holding-ground and in the thick of that tremendous current, with the work broken off short by the frequent floods and during the long season of high water in the spring—it is not surprising that the miracle theory was adopted to explain his eventual victory. Nor is it surprising that the popular conviction presently began to sustain itself by crystalizing into a definite legend—based upon the recorded fact that the Brothers worked under the vocation of the Holy Spirit—to the effect that the Spirit of God, taking human form, was the designer of the fabric and the actual director under whose guidance the work went on. And so the genesis of the bridge was accounted for satisfactorily; and so it came by its holy name.

Personally, I like miracles; and this miracle is all the more patent, I think, now that the bridge has been in commission for almost six hundred years and still is entirely serviceable. Yet while its piers and arches, its essential parts, remain nearly as the Brothers built them, the bridge has undergone such modifications in the course of the past century—in order to fit it to the needs of modern traffic—that its picturesqueness has been destroyed. The chapel of St. Nicholas upon one of its piers, and the tower at its centre, were razed about the end of the last century; a little later the fortified approaches were removed; in the year 1854, to provide for the increasing river navigation, the first two arches from the right bank were replaced by a single iron arch of two hundred feet span over the main channel; and in the year 1860 the entire superstructure on the north side, with a part of the superstructure on the south side, was torn down—and in place of the old narrow roadway, with turn-outs on each pier, there was built a roadway uniformly twenty-two feet wide. In a sentimental way, of course, these radical changes are to be regretted; but I am sure that the good Brothers, could they have been consulted in the premises, would have been the first to sanction them. For they were not sentimentalists, the Brothers; they were practical to the last degree. What they wanted was that their bridge, living up to their own concept of duty, should do the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of men.

Almost as we came out from beneath that monument to practical Christianity, we saw over on the left bank two monuments to the theoretical Christianity of three hundred years ago: the grisly ruins of Mornas and Montdragon—each on a hill dark green with a thick growth of chene vert, and each having about it (not wholly because of its dark setting, I fancied) a darkly sinister air. In truth, the story of Mornas is sombre enough to blacken not merely a brace of hill-tops but a whole neighbourhood. In the early summer of the year 1565, a day or two before the Fete-Dieu, the Papists surprised and seized the town and castle and put the entire Huguenot garrison to the sword. Then, as now, it was the custom in honour of the Fete-Dieu to adorn the house-fronts with garlands and draperies; and by way of variant upon this pretty custom "certain of the conquerors, more fanatical than the rest, flayed the dead Huguenots and draped their houses bravely with Protestant skins." Thereupon the Baron des Adrets, the Huguenot commander in that region, sent one of his lieutenants, Dupuy-Montbrun, to avenge that deviltry. At the end of a three-days' siege Mornas was conquered again, and then came the vengeance: "for which the castle of Mornas, whereof the battlements overhung a precipice falling sheer two hundred feet to broken rocks below, offered great advantages." In a grave and orderly fashion, the survivors of the conquered garrison were assembled in the castle court-yard; were taken in orderly squads of ten up to the battlements; and thence were thrust over into that awful depth. And so the account was squared.

It is instructive to note that des Adrets, who ordered the vengeance on Mornas, a little later abjured the Reformed religion and became a Papist; and that Dupuy-Montbrun, who carried out his orders and who succeeded him upon his recantation in the command of the Protestant army, but a little while before had renounced Papacy to become a Huguenot. So the leaders, the worst of them, shifted from side to side as they happened to be swayed by pay or policy; and to such creatures of no real faith were due the direst of the atrocities of those hideous times. But the Huguenots of the rank and file were of another sort. Their singleness and sincerity in their fight for their faith were beyond question. They died for it willingly. Failing the happiness of death, yet being conquered, they still held fast to it. In the end, rather than relinquish it, they unhesitatingly elected—at a stroke giving up country, rank, fortune—to be outcast from France.

For me the history of those desperate wars has a very vital interest: for my own ancestors took the share in them that was becoming to faithful gentlemen vowed to the Reform, and I owe my American birthright to the honourable fact that they fought on the losing side. As I myself am endowed with a fair allowance of stubbornness, and with a strong distaste to taking my opinions at second hand, I certainly should have been with my kinsfolk in that fight had I lived in their day; and since my destiny was theirs to determine I am strongly grateful to them for having shaped it so well.

X

But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie; though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.

Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape—which we saw a half hour later off to the eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide vineyard-covered valley—came to its present ruin at the hands of des Adrets; who, having captured and fired it, left standing only its tall square tower and some fragments of its walls. This was an unfairly lurid ending for a castle which actually came into existence for gentle purposes and was not steeped to its very battlements in crime; for Chateauneuf was built purely as a pleasure-place, to which the Popes—when weary with ruling the world and bored by their strait-laced duties as Saint Peter's earthly representatives—might come from Avignon with a few choice kindred spirits and refreshingly kick up their heels. As even in Avignon, in those days, the Popes and cardinals did not keep their heels any too fast to the ground, it is an inferential certainty that the kicking up at Chateauneuf must have been rather prodigiously high; but the people of the Middle Ages were too stout of stomach to be easily scandalized, and the Pope's responsibilities in the premises were all the lighter because the doctrine of his personal infallibility had not then been formulated officially. And so things went along comfortably in a cheerfully reprehensible way.

It was in those easy-going days that the vineyards were planted, on the slopes below the castle, which were destined to make the name of Chateauneuf-du-Pape famous the toping world over long after the New Castle should be an old ruin and the Avignon Popes a legend of the past. Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish, when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich vintage: which has for its distinguishing taste a sublimated spiciness due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and with the blossoms of the wild thyme. It is a wine of poets, this bee-kissed Chateauneuf, and its noblest association is not with the Popes who gave their name to it but with the seven poets—Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Matthieu, Brunet, Giera, Tavan—whose chosen drink it was in those glorious days when they all were young together and were founding the Felibrige: the society that was to restore the golden age of the Troubadours and, incidentally, to decentralize France. One of the sweetest and gentlest of the seven, Anselme Matthieu, was born here at Chateauneuf; and here, with a tender love-song upon his lips, only the other day he died. The vineyards have been replanted, and in the fulness of time may come to their glory again; but the greater glories of Chateauneuf—which belonged to it once because of its Popes, and again because of its sweet-souled Poet—must be only memories forevermore.



The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow, up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque tradition—as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of Vienne; where—keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him the Papal throne—he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When that sentence was passed, the Grand Master, in turn, had passed sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged on earth before the Throne of God. And the forty days were near ended when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure—with the death-grip already so strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay the dead Pope—and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high!

It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a fashion that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole. When, in my lighter youth, I entered upon what I fancied was antiquarian research I was hot for the alluring theory that oral tradition is a surer preserver of historic fact than is written record; and as I was not concerned with antiquities of a sort upon which my pretty borrowed theory could be tested I got along with it very well. But I am glad now to cite this capital instance in controversion of my youthful second-hand belief—because it entirely accords with my more mature conviction that oral tradition, save as a tenacious preserver of place-names, is not to be trusted at all. And as unsupported written record rarely is to be trusted either, it would seem that a certain amount of reason was at the root of King David's hasty generalization as to the untruthfulness of mankind.

The day was nearly ended as we passed that town with a stolen moral history: and so swept onward, in and out among the islands, toward Avignon. Already the sun had fallen below the crest of the Cevennes; leaving behind him in the sky a liquid glory, and still sending far above us long level beams which gilded radiantly—far off to the eastward—the heights of Mont-Ventour. But we, deep in the deep valley, threaded our swift way among the islands in a soft twilight which gently ebbed to night.

And then, as the dusk deepened to the westward, there came slowly into the eastern heavens a pale lustre that grew brighter and yet brighter until, all in a moment, up over the Alpilles flashed the full moon—and there before us, almost above us, the Rocher-des-Doms and the Pope's Palace and the ramparts of Avignon stood out blackly against the moon-bright sky. So sudden was this ending to our journey that there was a wonder among us that the end had come!

* * * * *

All the Felibres of Avignon were at the water-side to cheer us welcome as the Gladiateur, with reversed engines, hung against the current above the bridge of Saint-Benezet and slowly drew in to the bank. Our answering cheers went forth to them through the darkness, and a stave or two of "La Coupe" was sung, and there was a mighty clapping of hands. And then the gang-plank was set ashore, and instantly beside it—standing in the glare of a great lantern—we saw our Capoulie, the head of all the Felibrige, Felix Gras, waiting for us, his subjects and his brethren, with outstretched hands. From him came also, a little later, our official welcome: when we all were assembled for a ponch d'honneur at the Hotel du Louvre—in the great vaulted chamber that once served the Templars as a refectory, and that has been the banquet-hall of the Felibrige ever since this later and not less honorable Order was founded, almost forty years ago.



Not until those formalities were ended could we of America get away to receive the personal welcome to which through all that day we had been looking forward with a warm eagerness—yet also sorrowing: because we knew that among the welcoming voices there would be a silence, and that a face would be missing from among those we loved. Roumanille was dead; and in meeting again in Avignon those who had been closest and dearest to him, and who to us were close and dear, there was heartache with our joy.

SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE, August, 1894.



The Comedie Francaise at Orange

I

After a lapse of nearly fifteen centuries, the Roman theatre at Orange—founded in the time of Marcus Aurelius and abandoned, two hundred years later, when the Northern barbarians overran the land—seems destined to arise reanimate from its ruins and to be the scene of periodic performances by the Comedie Francaise: the first dramatic company of Europe playing on the noblest stage in the world. During the past five-and-twenty years various attempts have been made to compass this happy end. Now—as the result of the representations of "Oedipus" and "Antigone" at Orange, under government patronage and by the leading actors of the National Theatre—these spasmodic efforts have crystallized into a steadfast endeavour which promises to restore and to repeople that long-abandoned stage.[4]



If they know about it—over there in the Shades—I am sure that no one rejoices more sincerely over this revival than do the Romans by whom the theatre at Orange was built, and from whom it has come down to us as one of the many proofs of their strong affection for that portion of their empire which now is the south-east corner of France. To them this region, although ultimately included in the larger Narbonensis, always was simply Provincia—the Province: a distinguishing indistinction which exalted it above all the other dependencies of Rome. Constantine, indeed, was for fixing the very seat of the Empire here; and he did build, and for a time live in, the palace at Arles of which a stately fragment still remains. Unluckily for the world of later periods, he was lured away from the banks of the Rhone by the charms of the Bosporus—and so, without knowing it, opened the Eastern Question: that ever since has been fought over, and that still demands for its right answering at least one more general European war.

Thus greatly loving their Province, the Romans gladly poured out their treasure in adding to its natural beauties the adornments of art. Scattered through this region—through the Provence of to-day, and, over on the other side of the Rhone, through Languedoc—are the remnants of their magnificent creations: the Pont-du-Gard; the arena, and the baths, and the Tour-Magne, and the beautiful Maison-Carree, at Nimes; at Arles the arena, the palace of Constantine, and the wreck of the once exquisite theatre; the baths at Aix; the triumphal arches at Orange and Carpentras; the partly ruined but more perfectly graceful arch, and the charming monument, here at Saint-Remy—all these relics of Roman splendour, with many others which I have not named, still testify to Roman affection for this enchanting land.

The theatre at Orange—the Arausio of Roman times, colonized by the veterans of the Second Legion—was not the best of these many noble edifices. Decidedly, the good fortune that has preserved so large a part of it would have been better bestowed upon the far more beautiful, because more purely Grecian, theatre at Arles: which the blessed Saint Hilary and the priest Cyril of holy memory fell afoul of in the fifth century and destroyed because of its inherent idolatrous wickedness, and then used as raw material for their well-meant but injudicious church-building. But the Orange theatre—having as its only extant rival that at Pompeii—has the distinction of being the most nearly perfect Roman theatre surviving until our day; and, setting aside comparisons with things nonexistent, it is one of the most majestic structures to be found in the whole of France. Louis XIV., who styled it "the most magnificent wall of my kingdom," placed it first of all.

The unknown architect who wrought this great work—traversing the Roman custom of erecting a complete building on level ground—followed the Grecian custom of hollowing out a hill-side and of facing the open cutting with a structure of masonry: which completed the tiers of seats cut in the living rock; provided in its main body the postscenium, and in its wings the dressing-rooms; and, rising in front to a level with the colonnade which crowned and surrounded the auditorium, made at once the outer facade and the rear wall of the stage.[5] The dominant characteristic of the building—a great parallelogram jutting out from the hill-side into the very heart of the town—is its powerful mass. The enormous facade, built of great blocks of stone, is severely simple: a stony height—the present bareness of which formerly was a little relieved by the vast wooden portico that extended along the entire front—based upon a cornice surmounting open Tuscan arches and broken only by a few strong lines. The essential principle of the whole is stability. It is the Roman style with all its good qualities exaggerated. Elegance is replaced by a heavy grandeur; purity by strength.

The auditorium as originally constructed—save for the graceful colonnade which surmounted its enclosing wall, and for the ornamentation which certainly was bestowed upon the rear wall of the stage and probably upon the facing-wall of the first tier of seats—was as severe as the facade: simply bare tiers of stone benches, divided into three distinct stages, rising steplike one above another in a great semi-circle. But when the theatre was filled with an eager multitude its bareness disappeared; and its brilliant lowest division—where sat the nobles clad in purple-bordered white robes: a long sweep of white dashed with strong colour—fitly brought the auditorium into harmony with the splendour of the permanent setting of the stage.

It was there, on the wall rising at the back of the stage and on the walls rising at its sides, that decoration mainly was bestowed; and there it was bestowed lavishly. Following the Grecian tradition (though in the Grecian theatre the sides of the stage were open gratings) that permanent set represented very magnificently—being, indeed, a reality—a royal palace, or, on occasion, a temple: a facade broken by richly carved marble cornices supported by marble columns and pilasters; its flat surfaces covered with brilliantly coloured mosaics, and having above its five portals[6] arched alcoves in which were statues: that over the royal portal, the aula regia, being a great statue of the Emperor or of a god.

Extending across the whole front of this wall, entirely filling the space between the wings, was the stage. Ninety feet above it, also filling the space between the wings, was a wooden roof (long since destroyed) which flared upward and outward: at once adding to the acoustic properties of the building and protecting the stage from rain. Still farther to strengthen the acoustic effect, two curved walls—lateral sounding-boards—projected from the rear of the stage and partly embraced the space upon which the action of the play usually went on.

I shall not enter into the vexed question of scenery. It is sufficient to say that this permanent set, in regard to which there can be no dispute—a palace, that also would serve as a temple—made an entirely harmonious framework for most of the plays which were presented here. Indeed, a more fitting or a more impressive setting could not have been devised for the majority of the tragedies of that time: which were filled with a solemn grandeur, and which had for their chief personages priests or kings. Above all, the dignity of this magnificent permanent scene was in keeping with the devotional solemnity of the early theatre: when an inaugural sacrifice was celebrated upon an altar standing in front of the stage, and when the play itself was in the nature of a religious rite.

II

Certainly for two centuries, possibly for a longer period, the people of Arausio maintained and enjoyed their theatre. The beautiful little city of which it was a part was altogether charming: abounding in comforts and luxuries and rich in works of art. From the hill-top where now stands the statue of the Virgin was to be seen in those days a miniature Rome. Directly at the base of the hill was the theatre, and beyond it were the circus and the baths; to the left, the Coliseum; to the right, the Field of Mars; in front—just within the enclosing ramparts, serving as the chief entrance to the town—the noble triumphal arch that remains almost perfect even until this present day. Only the theatre and the arch are left now; but the vanished elegance of it all is testified to by the fragments of carved walls and of mosaic pavements which still continue to be unearthed from time to time. Surrounding that opulent little city were farms and vineyards and olive-orchards—a gentle wilderness interset with garden-hidden villas whereto the citizens retired to take their ease; and more widely about it was the broad Rhone Valley, then as now a rich store-house of corn and wine and oil.

No wonder that the lean barbarians of the North came down in hungry hordes and seized upon that fatness as Roman strength decayed; and no wonder, being barbarians, that the invaders wrecked much of the beauty which they could neither use nor understand. After the second German invasion, in the year 406 of our era, there was little left in Gaul of Roman civilization; and after the coming of the Visigoths, four years later, Roman civilization was at an end.

Yet during that period of disintegration the theatre was not injured materially; and it actually remained almost intact—although variously misused and perverted—nearly down to our own day. The Lords of Baux, in the twelfth century, made the building the outguard of their fortress on the hill-top in its rear; and from their time onward little dwellings were erected within it—the creation of which nibbled away its magnificent substance to be used in the making of pygmy walls. But the actual wholesale destruction of the interior did not begin until the year 1622: when Prince Maurice of Nassau and Orange, in manner most unprincely, used the building as a quarry from which to draw material for the system of fortifications devised for his little capital by his Dutch engineers. And this piece of vandalism was as useless as it was iniquitous. Only half a century later—during the temporary occupation of Orange by the French—Prince Maurice's fortifications, built of such precious material, were razed.

In later times quarrying was carried on in the theatre on a smaller scale; but, practically, all that this most outrageous Prince left standing of it still stands: the majestic facade, together with the rooms in the rear of the stage; the huge wings, which look like, and have done duty as, the towers of a feudal fortress; the major portion of the side walls; most of the substructure, and even a little of the superstructure, of the tiers which completed the semi-circles of seats hollowed out of the hill-side; and above these the broken and weathered remains of the higher tiers cut in the living rock. But the colonnade which crowned the enclosing walls of the auditorium is gone, and many of the upper courses of the walls with it; the stage is gone; the wall at the rear of the stage, seamed and scarred, retains only a few fragments of the columns and pilasters and cornices and mosaics which once made it beautiful; the carvings and sculptures have disappeared; the royal portal, once so magnificent, is but a jagged gap in the masonry; the niche above it, once a fit resting place for a god's image, is shapeless and bare. And until the work of restoration began the whole interior was infested with mean little dwellings which choked it like offensive weeds—while rain and frost steadily were eating into the unprotected masonry and hastening the general decay.

III

This was the theatre's evil condition when, happily, the architect Auguste Caristie, vice-president of the commission charged with the conservation of historical monuments, came down to Orange early in the nineteenth century—and immediately was filled with an enthusiastic determination that the stately building should be purified and restored. The theatre became with him a passion; yet a steadfast passion which continued through more than a quarter of a century. He studied it practically on the ground and theoretically in the cabinet; and as the result of his patient researches he produced his great monograph upon it (published in a sumptuous folio at the charges of the French Government) which won for him a medal of the first class at the Salon of 1855. In this work he reestablished the building substantially as the Roman architect created it; and so provided the plan in accordance with which the present architect in charge, M. Formige—working in the same loving and faithful spirit—is making the restoration in stone. Most righteously, as a principal feature of the ceremonies of August, 1894, a bust of Auguste Caristie was set up in Orange close by the theatre which owes its saving and its restoration to the strong purpose of his strong heart.

And then came another enthusiast—they are useful in the world, these enthusiasts—who took up the work at the point where Caristie had laid it down. This was the young editor of the Revue Meridionale, Fernand Michel—more widely known by his pseudonym of "Antony Real." By a lucky calamity—the great inundation of the Rhone in the year 1840—Michel was detained for a while in Orange: and so was enabled to give to the theatre more than the ordinary tourist's passing glance. By that time, the interior of the building had been cleared and its noble proportions fully were revealed; and as the result of his first long morning's visit he became, as Caristie had become before him, fairly infatuated with it.

For my part, I am disposed to believe that a bit of Roman enchantment still lingers in those ancient walls; that the old gods who presided over their creation—and who continue to live on very comfortably, though a little shyly and in a quiet way, here in the south of France—have still an alluring power over those of us who, being at odds with existing dispensations, are open to their genial influences. But without discussing this side issue, it is enough to say that Michel—lightly taking up what proved to be the resolute work of half a lifetime—then and there vowed himself to the task of restoring and reanimating that ruined and long-silent stage.

For more than twenty years he laboured without arriving at any tangible result; and the third decade of his propaganda almost was ended when at last, in August, 1869, his dream was made a reality and the spell of silence was broken by the presentation of Mehul's "Joseph" at Orange. And the crowning of his happiness came when, the opera ended, his own ode composed for the occasion, "Les Triomphateurs"—set to music by Imbert—echoed in the ancient theatre, and the audience of more than seven thousand burst into enthusiastic cheering over the victory that he had won. Truly, to be the hero of such a triumph was worth the work of nine-and-twenty years.

Even through the dismal time of the German war no time was lost. M. Michel and his enthusiastic colabourers—prominent among them being "Antony Real, fils," upon whom has descended worthily his father's mantle—cared for the material preservation of the building; and succeeded so well in keeping alive a popular interest in their work that they were able to arrange for yet another dramatic festival at Orange in August, 1874. Both grand and light opera were given. On the first evening "Norma" was sung; on the second, "Le Chalet" and "Galatee." To the presentation of these widely differing works attached a curious importance, in that they brought into strong relief an interesting phase of the theatre's psychology: its absolute intolerance of small things. "Norma" was received with a genuine furore; the two pretty little operas practically were failures. The audience, profoundly stirred by the graver work, seemed to understand instinctively that so majestic a setting was suited only to dramas inspired by the noblest passions and dealing with the noblest themes.

During the ensuing twelve years there was no dramatic performance in the theatre; but in this interval there was a performance of another sort (in April, 1877) which in its way was very beautiful. M. Michel's thrilling "Salute to Provence" was sung by a great chorus with orchestral accompaniment; and sung, in accord with ancient custom—wherein was the peculiar and especial charm of it—at the decline of day. The singers sang in the waning sunlight, which emphasized and enlarged the grandeur of their surroundings: and then all ended, as the music and the daylight together died away.

IV

In August, 1886, a venture was made at Orange the like of which rarely has been made in France in modern times: a new French play demanding positive and strong recognition, the magnificent "Empereur d'Arles," by the Avignon poet Alexis Mouzin, was given its first presentation in the Orange theatre—in the provinces—instead of being first produced on the Paris stage. In direct defiance of the modern French canons of centralization, the great audience was brought together not to ratify opinions formulated by Parisian critics but to express its own opinion at first hand. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, was the Maximien; Madame Caristie-Martel, of the Odeon (a grand-daughter of Caristie the architect who saved the theatre from ruin), was the Minervine. The support was strong. The stately tragedy—vividly contrasting the tyranny and darkness of pagan Rome with the spirit of light and freedom arising in Christian Gaul—was in perfect keeping with its stately frame. The play went on in a whirl of enthusiastic approval to a triumphant end. There was no question of ratifying the opinion of Parisian critics: those Southerners formed and delivered an opinion of their own. In other words, the defiance of conventions was an artistic victory, a decentralizing success.

Then it was that the Felibres—the poets of Languedoc and of Provence who for forty years have been combating the Parisian attempt to focus in Paris the whole of France—perceived how the Orange theatre could be made to advance their anti-centralizing principles, and so took a hand in its fortunes: with the avowed intention of establishing outside of Paris a national theatre wherein should be given in summer dramatic festivals of the highest class. With the Felibres to attempt is to accomplish; and to their efforts was due the presentation at Orange in August 1888, of the "Oedipus" of Sophocles and Rossini's "Moses"—with Mounet-Sully and Boudouresque in the respective title-roles. The members of the two Felibrien societies of Paris, the Felibrige and the Cigaliers, were present in force at the performances—so timed as to be a part of their customary biennial summer festival in the Midi—and their command of the Paris newspapers (whereof the high places largely are filled by these brave writers of the South) enabled them to make all Paris and all France ring with their account of the beauty of the Orange spectacle.

Out of their enthusiasm came practical results. A national interest in the theatre was aroused; and so strong an interest that the deputy from the Department of the Drome—M. Maurice Faure, a man of letters who finds time to be also a statesman—brought to a successful issue his long-sustained effort to obtain from the government a grant of funds to be used not merely for the preservation of the building, but toward its restoration. Thanks to his strong presentation of the case, forty thousand francs was appropriated for the beginning of the work: a sum that has sufficed to pay for the rebuilding of twenty of the tiers. And thus, at last, a substantial beginning was made in the recreation of the majestic edifice; and more than a beginning was made in the realization of the Felibrien project for establishing a national theatre in provincial France.

The festival of last August—again promoted by the Felibres, and mainly organized by M. Jules Claretie, the Director of the Comedie Francaise—was held, therefore, in celebration of specific achievement; and in two other important particulars it differed from all other modern festivals at Orange. First, it was directly under government patronage—M. Leygues, minister of public instruction and the fine arts, bringing two other cabinet ministers with him, having come down from Paris expressly to preside over it; and, secondly, its brilliantly successful organization and accomplishment under such high auspices have gone far toward creating a positive national demand for a realization of the Felibrien dream: that the theatre, again perfect, shall become the home of the highest dramatic art, and a place of periodic pilgrimage, biennial or even annual, for the whole of the art-loving world.

I am disposed to regard myself as more than usually fortunate in that I was able to be a part of that most brilliant festival, and I am deeply grateful to my Felibrien brethren to whom I owe my share in it. With an excellent thoughtfulness they sent me early word of what was forward among them, and so enabled me to get from New York to Paris in time to go down with the Felibres and the Cigaliers by train to Lyons, and thence—as blithe a boat-load of poets as ever went light-heartedly afloat—on southward to Avignon on the galloping current of the Rhone.

V

Avignon was crowded with dignitaries and personages: M. Leygues, who was to preside over the festival; the ministers of justice and of public works, who were to increase its official dignity; artistic and literary people without end. Of these last—who also, in a way, were first, since to them the whole was due—our special boat from Lyons had brought a gay contingent three hundred strong. With it all, the City of the Popes fairly buzzed like a hive of poetic bees got astray from Hymettus Hill.

From Avignon to Orange the distance is less than eighteen miles, not at all too far for driving; and the intervening country is so rich and so beautiful as to conform in all essentials—save in its commendable freedom from serpents—to the biblical description of Paradise. Therefore, following our own wishes and the advice of several poets—they all are poets down there—we decided to drive to the play rather than to expose ourselves to the rigours of the local railway service: the abject collapse of which, under the strain of handling twelve or fifteen hundred people, the poets truthfully prophesied.

It was five in the afternoon when we got away from Avignon. A mistral—the north wind that is the winter bane and summer blessing of Provence—was blowing briskly; the sun was shining; the crowded Cours de la Republique was gay with flags and banners and streamers, and with festoons of coloured lanterns which later would be festoons of coloured fire. We passed between the towers of the gateway, left the ramparts behind us, and went onward over the perfect road. Plane-trees arched above us; on each side of the road were little villas deep-set in gardens and bearing upon their stone gate-posts the names of saints. As we increased our distance from the city we came to market-gardens, and then to vineyards, olive-orchards, farms. Rows of bright-green poplars and of dark-green cypress—set up as shields against the mistral—made formal lines across the landscape from east to west. The hedges on the lee-side of the road were white with dust—a lace-like effect, curious and beautiful. Above them, and between the trees, we caught glimpses of Mont Ventour—already beginning to glow like a great opal in the nearly level sun-rays. Old women and children stood in the gateways staring wonderingly at the long procession of vehicles, of which our carriage was a part, all obviously filled with pleasure-seekers and all inexplicable. Pretty girls, without stopping to wonder, accepted with satisfaction so joyous an outburst of merrymaking and unhesitatingly gave us their smiles.

We crossed the little river Ouveze, and as we mounted from it to the northward the tower of the ruined Chateauneuf-du-Pape came into view. A new key was struck in the landscape. The broad white road ran through a brown solitude: a level upland broken into fields of sun-browned stubble and of grey-brown olive-orchards; and then, farther on, through a high desolate plain tufted with sage-brush, whence we had outlook to wide horizons far away. Off to the eastward, cutting against the darkening sky, was the curious row of sharp peaks called the Rat's Teeth. All the range of the Alpilles was taking on a deeper grey. Purple undertones were beginning to soften the opalescent fire of Mont Ventour.

Presently the road dipped over the edge of the plain and began a descent, in a perfectly straight line but by a very easy grade, of more than a mile. Here were rows of plane-trees again, which, being of no great age and not meeting over the road, were most noticeable as emphasizing the perspective. And from the crest of this acclivity—down the long dip in the land, at the end of the loom of grey-white road lying shadowy between the perspective lines of trees—we saw rising in sombre mass against the purple haze of sunset, dominating the little city nestled at its base and even dwarfing the mountain at its back, the huge fabric of the theatre.

Dusk had fallen as we drove into Orange—thronged with men and beasts like a Noah's ark. All the streets were alive with people; and streams of vehicles of all sorts were pouring in from the four quarters of the compass and discharging their cargoes on the public squares to a loud buzzing accompaniment of vigorous talk—much in the way that the ark people, thankful to get ashore again, must have come buzzing out on Ararat.

I am sorry to say that the handling of a small part of this crowd by the railway people, and of the whole of it by the local management, was deplorably bad. The trains were inadequate and irregular; the great mistake was made of opening only three of the many entrances to the theatre; and the artistic error was committed (against the protest of M. Mounet-Sully, who earnestly desired to maintain the traditions of the Greek theatre by reserving the orchestra for the evolutions of the chorus) of filling the orchestra with chairs: with the result that these so-called first-class seats—being all on the same level, and that level four feet lower than the stage—were at once the highest-priced and the worst seats in the building. Decidedly the best seats, both for seeing and hearing, were those of the so-called second class—the newly erected tiers of stone. But so excellent are the acoustic properties of the theatre, even now when the stage is roofless, that in the highest tier of the third-class seats (temporary wooden benches filling the space not yet rebuilt in stone in the upper third of the auditorium) all the well-trained and well-managed voices could be clearly heard.

Naturally, the third-class seats were the most in demand; and from the moment that the gates were opened the way to them was thronged: an acute ascent—partly rough stairway, partly abrupt incline—which zigzagged up the hill between the wall of the theatre and the wall of an adjacent house and which was lighted, just below its sharpest turn, by a single lamp pendant from an outjutting gibbet of iron. By a lucky mischance, three of the incompetent officials on duty at the first-class entrance—whereat, in default of guiding signs, we happened first to apply ourselves—examined in turn our tickets and assured us that the way to our second-class places was up that stairway-path. But we heartily forgave, and even blessed, the stupidity of those officials, because it put us in the way of seeing quite the most picturesque bit that we saw that night outside of the theatre's walls: the strong current of eager humanity, all vague and confused and sombre, pressing upward through the shadows, showing for a single moment—the hurrying mass resolved into individual hurrying figures—as it passed beneath the hanging lamp, and in the same breath swept around the projecting corner and lost to view. It looked, at the very least, treasons, conspiracies, and mutinous outbursts—that shadowy multitude surging up that narrow and steep and desperately crooked dusky footway. I felt that just around the lighted turn, where the impetuous forms appeared clearly in the moment of their disappearance, surely must be the royal palace they were bent upon sacking; and it was with a sigh of unsatisfied longing that I turned away (when we got at last the right direction) before word came to me that over the swords of his dying guardsmen they had pressed in and slain the king!



The soldiers on guard at the ascent, and thickly posted on the hill-side above the highest tiers, gave colour to my fancy. And, actually, it was as guards against assassins that the soldiers were there. Only a little more than two months had passed since the slaying of President Carnot at Lyons; and the cautionary measures taken to assure the safety of the three ministers at Orange were all the more rigid because one of them was the minister of justice—of all the government functionaries the most feared and hated by anarchists, because he is most intimately associated with those too rare occasions when anarchist heads are sliced off in poor payment for anarchist crimes. This undercurrent of real tragedy—with its possibility of a crash, followed by a cloud of smoke rising slowly above the wreck of the gaily decorated ministerial box—drew out with a fine intensity the tragedy of the stage: and brought into a curious psychological coalescence the barbarisms of the dawn and of the noontime of our human world.

VI

We came again to the front of the theatre: to an entrance—approached between converging railings, which brought the crowd to an angry focus, and so passed its parts singly between the ticket-takers—leading into what once was the postscenium, and thence across where once was the "court" side of the stage to the tiers of stone seats.



However aggravating was this entrance-effect in the matter of composition, its dramatically graded light-and-shade was masterly. From the outer obscurity, shot forward as from a catapult by the pushing crowd, we were projected through a narrow portal into a dimly lighted passage more or less obstructed by fallen blocks of stone; and thence onward, suddenly, into the vast interior glaring with electric lamps: and in the abrupt culmination of light there flashed up before us the whole of the auditorium—a mountain-side of faces rising tier on tier; a vibrant throng of humanity which seemed to go on and on forever upward, and to be lost at last in the star-depths of the clear dark sky.

Notwithstanding the electric lamps—partly, indeed, because of their violently contrasting streams of strong light and fantastic shadow—the general effect of the auditorium was sombre. The dress of the audience—cloaks and wraps being in general use because of the strong mistral that was blowing—in the main was dark. The few light gowns and the more numerous straw hats stood out as spots of light and only emphasized the dullness of the background. The lines of faces, following the long curving sweep of the tiers, produced something of the effect of a grey-yellow haze floating above the surface of a sable mass; and in certain of the strange sharp combinations of light and shade gave an eerie suggestion of such a bodiless assemblage as might have come together in the time of the Terror at midnight in the Place du Greve. The single note of strong colour—all the more effective because it was a very trumpet-blast above the drone of bees—was a brilliant splash of red running half-way around the mid-height: the crimson draperies in front of the three tiers set apart for the ministerial party and the Felibres. And for a roof over all was the dark star-set sky: whence the Great Bear gazed wonderingly down upon us with his golden eyes. We were in close touch with the higher regions of the universe. At the very moment when the play was beginning there gleamed across the upper firmament, and thence went radiantly downward across the southern reaches of the heavens, a shooting-star.

Not until we were in our seats—at the side of the building, a dozen tiers above the ground—did we fairly see the stage. In itself, this was almost mean in its simplicity: a bare wooden platform, a trifle over four feet high and about forty by sixty feet square, on which, in the rear, was another platform, about twenty feet square, reached from the lower stage by five steps. The upper level, the stage proper, was for the actors; the lower, for the chorus—which should have been in the orchestra. The whole occupied less than a quarter of the space primitively given to the stage proper alone. Of ordinary theatrical properties there absolutely were none—unless in that category could be placed the plain curtain which hung loosely across the lower half of the jagged gap in the masonry where once the splendid royal portal had been.

But if the stage were mean in itself it was heroic in its surroundings: being flanked by the two castle-like wings abutting upon huge half-ruined archways, and having in its rear the scarred and broken mighty wall—that once was so gloriously magnificent and that now, perhaps, is still more exalted by its tragic grandeur of divine decay. And yet another touch of pathos, in which also was a tender beauty, was supplied by the growth of trees and shrubs along the base of the great wall. Over toward the "garden" exit was a miniature forest of figs and pomegranates, while on the "court" side the drooping branches of a large fig-tree swept the very edge of the stage—a gracious accessory which was improved by arranging a broad parterre of growing flowers and tall green plants upon the stage itself so as to make a very garden there; while, quite a master-stroke, beneath the fig-tree's wide-spreading branches were hidden the exquisitely anachronistic musicians, whose dress and whose instruments alike were at odds with the theatre and with the play.

Two ill-advised electric lamps, shaded from the audience, were set at the outer corners of the stage; but the main illumination was from a row of screened footlights which not only made the whole stage brilliant but cast high upward on the wall in the rear—above the gaping ruined niche where once had stood the statue of a god—a flood of strong yellow light that was reflected strongly from the yellow stone: so making a glowing golden background, whence was projected into the upper darkness of the night a golden haze.

VII

With a nice appreciation of poetic effect, and of rising to strong climax from an opening note struck in a low key, the performance began by the appearance in that heroic setting of a single figure: Mademoiselle Breval, in flowing white draperies, who sang the "Hymn to Pallas Athene," by Croze, set to music by Saint-Saens—the composer himself, hidden away with his musicians beneath the branches of the fig-tree, directing the orchestra.

The subduing effect produced by Mademoiselle Breval's entrance was instantaneous. But a moment before, the audience had been noisily demonstrative. As the ministerial party entered, to the music of the "Marseillaise," everybody had roared; there were more roars when the music changed (as it usually does change in France, nowadays) to the Russian Anthem; there were shouts of welcome to various popular personages—notably, and most deservedly, to M. Jules Claretie, to whom the success of the festival so largely was due; from the tiers where the Parisians were seated came good-humored cries (reviving a legend of the Chat Noir) of "Vive notre oncle!" as the excellent Sarcey found his way to his seat among the Cigaliers; and when the poet Frederic Mistral entered—tall, stately, magnificent—there broke forth a storm of cheering that was not stilled until the minister (rather taken aback, I fancy, by so warm an outburst of enthusiasm) satisfied the subjects of this uncrowned king by giving him a place of honour in the ministerial box.

And then, suddenly, the shouting ceased, the confusion was quelled, a hush fell upon the multitude, as that single figure in white swept with fluttering draperies across from the rear to the front of the stage, and paused for a moment before she began her invocation to the Grecian goddess: whose altar-fires went out in ancient ages, but who was a living and a glorious reality when the building in which was this echo of her worship came new from the hands of its creators—seventeen hundred years ago. The mistral, just then blowing strongly and steadily, drew down upon the stage and swept back the singer's Grecian draperies in entrancing folds. As she sang, standing in the golden light against the golden background, her supple body was swayed forward eagerly, impetuously; above her head were raised her beautiful bare arms; from her shoulders the loose folds of her mantle floated backward, wing-like—and before us, in the flesh, as in the flesh it was of old before the Grecian sculptors, was the motive of those nobly impulsive, urgent statues of which the immortal type is the Winged Victory.