ss
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