hill,
high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The
whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any
details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the
back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the
semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather
less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very
shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers
placed in a line like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent
skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and
wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the
softness of melancholy, of the theatre at Aries; but it is more
extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being
enacted there--

"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."

At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--immense
in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the
other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, _as you_
face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous
altitude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The
compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the
traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to
the theatre. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves
plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome
would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is all
I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very rustic,
bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand breakfast
at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been that of a
stable of the Roman days.

[Illustration]

Chapter xxxvii

[Macon]

I have been trying to remember whether I fasted all the way to Macon,
which I reached at an advanced hour of the evening, and think I must
have done so except for the purchase of a box of nougat at Montelimart
(the place is famous for the manufacture of this confection, which, at
the station, is hawked at the windows of the train) and for a bouillon,
very much later, at Lyons. The journey beside the Rhone--past Valence,
past Tournon, past Vienne--would have been charming, on that luminous
Sunday, but for two disagreeable accidents. The express from Marseilles,
which I took