Chapter 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.