AN HOUR AT ORANGE
Our bill at Beauchastel for the usual accommodation--dinner, lodging,
and breakfast--was seventeen francs-twenty, including the tips to two
girls and the stableman. This was the cheapest to date; that is to say,
our expense account was one dollar each, nothing for the car.
The Beauchastel inn is not really a choice place, but it is by no means
a poor place--not from the point of view of an American who has put up
at his own little crossroad hotels. We had the dining room to ourselves,
with a round table in the center, and the dinner was good and plentiful
and well served. If the rooms were bare they were at least clean, and
the landlady was not to blame that it turned cold in the night, which
made getting up a matter to be considered.
Still, we did get up pretty promptly, for we wanted to see if our
natural wonder was on view. It was, and we took time and sketched it and
tried to photograph it, though that was hopeless, for the distance was
too great and the apparition too actinic--too blue. But it was quite
clear, and the peaceful face impressed us, I think, more than ever. The
best view is from the railway embankment.
We got another reward for stopping at Beauchastel. We saw the old Rhone
stagecoach come in, Daudet's coach, and saw descend from it Daudet's
characters, _le Camarguais_, _le boulanger_, _le remouleur_, and the
rest. At least they might have been those, for they belonged with the
old diligence, and one could imagine the knife grinder saying to the
hectoring baker, "_Tais-toi, je t'en prie" si navrant et si doux_.[13]
But now we felt the breath of the south. It was no longer chilly. The
sun began to glow warm, the wind died. Sometime in the afternoon we
arrived at Orange. Orange is not on the Rhone and we had missed it in
our northward journey in September. It was one of our special reasons
for returning to the south of France. Not the town of Orange itself,
which is of no particular importance, but for the remnants of the Roman
occupation--a triumphal arch and the chief wall of a Roman theater, both
of such fine construction and noble proportions that they are to be
compared with nothing else of their kind in France.
We came to the arch first--we had scarcely entered the town when we were
directly facing it. It stands in a kind of circular grass plot a little
below the present level, with short flights of steps leading down to it.
At the moment of our arrival a boy of about fifteen was giving an
exhibition by riding up and down these steps on a bicycle. I sincerely
wished he would not do it.
Whatever its relation to its surroundings nineteen centuries ago, the
arch of Orange is magnificently out of place to-day. Time-beaten and
weather-stained--a visible manifest of a race that built not for the
generations or the centuries, but for "the long, long time the world
shall last"--supreme in its grandeur and antiquity, it stands in an
environment quite modern, quite new, and wholly trivial.
The arch is really three arches--the highest in the center, and the
attic, as they call the part above, is lofty, with rich decorations,
still well preserved. There are restored patches here and there, but
they do little injury.
From whatever direction you look the arch is beautiful, imposing, and
certainly it seems eternal. When the present Orange has crumbled and has
been followed by successive cities, it will still be there, but I trust
the boy with the bicycle will not survive.
The theater is at the other end of town. It is not an amphitheater or an
inclosure of any kind, but a huge flat wall, about as solid as the hills
and one of the biggest things in France. Strictly speaking, it was never
part of any building at all. It was simply a stage property, a sort of
permanent back scene for what I judge to have been an open-air theater.
There is no doubt about its permanency. It is as high as an ordinary
ten-or twelve-story building, longer than the average city block, and it
is fifteen feet thick. That is the Roman idea of scenery. They did not
expect to shift it often. They set up some decorative masonry in front
of it, with a few gods and heroes solidly placed, and let it go at that.
Their stage would be just in front of this, rather narrow, and about on
a ground level. The whole was built facing a steep rocky hillside,
which was carved into a semi-circle of stone seats, in the old fashion
which Rome borrowed from Greece. This natural stonework did not stand
the wash of centuries, or it may have been quarried for the chateau
which the princes of Orange built at the summit of the hill. The chateau
is gone to-day, and the seats have been restored, I dare say, with some
of the original material. Every August now a temporary stage is erected
in the ancient theater, and the Comedie Francaise gives performances
there.
The upper works of the hill, where the chateau was, are rather
confusing. There are cave-like places and sudden drops and rudimentary
passages, all dimly suggesting dungeons, once black and horrible, now
happily open to the sun. And, by the way, I suppose that I am about the
only person in the world who needed to be told that a line of kings
originated at Orange. I always supposed that William of Orange took his
name from an Irish society whose colors, along with a shamrock, he wore
in his hat.
By some oversight the guidebook does not mention the jam that is sold at
Orange. It is put up in tin pails, and has in it all the good things in
the world--lumps of them--price, one franc per pail.
We did not stop at Avignon, for we had been there before, but followed
around outside the ancient wall and came at last to the Rhone bridge,
and to the island of our smoke adventure in the days of our
inexperience, eight months earlier. This time we camped on the island in
a pretty green nook by the water's edge, left the car under a tree, and
made tea and had some of that excellent jam and some fresh rolls and
butter, and ate them looking across to ancient Villeneuve and the tower
of Philip le Bel.
Oh, the automobile is the true flying carpet--swift, willing, always
ready, obeying at a touch. Only this morning we were at Beauchastel; a
little while ago we were under the ancient arch at Orange and sat in the
hoary theater. A twist of the crank, a little turning of the wheel, a
brief flight across wood and meadow, and behold! the walls of Avignon
and a pleasant island in the river, where we alight for a little to make
our tea in the greenery, knowing that we need only to rub the magic lamp
to sail lightly away, resting where we will.
Our tea ended, the genii awoke and dropped us into Villeneuve, where, in
an open market, we realized that it was cherry season. I thought I had
seen cherries before, but never in this larger sense. Here there were
basketfuls, boxfuls, bucketfuls, barrelfuls, wagonloads--the whole
street was crowded with wagons, and every wagon heaped high with the
crimson and yellow fruit. Officials seemed to be weighing them and
collecting something, a tax, no doubt. But what would be done with them
later? Could they ship all those cherries north and sell them? And
remember this was only one evening and one town. The thought that every
evening and every town in the Midi was like this in cherry time was
stupefying. We had to work our way among cherry wagons to get to the
open road again, and our "flying carpet" came near getting damaged by
one of them, because of my being impatient and trying to push ahead when
an approaching cherry wagon had the right of way. As it was, I got a
vigorous admonishment in French profanity, which is feathery stuff,
practically harmless. I deserved something much more solid.
Consider for a moment this French profanity: About the most violent
things a Frenchman can say are "_Sacre bleu_" and "_Nom d'un chien!_"
One means "Sacred blue" and the other "Name of a dog." If he doubles the
last and says "Name of a name of a dog," he has gone his limit. I fail
to find anything personal or destructive or profane in these things.
They don't seem to hit anything, not even the dog. And why a dog?
Furthermore, concerning the color chosen for profane use--why blue? why
not some shade of Nile green, or--or-- Oh, well, let it go, but I do
wish I could have changed places with that man a few minutes!
We considered returning to Avignon for the night, but we went to
Tarascon instead, and arrived after dark at a bright little inn, where
we were comfortably lodged, and a relative of Tartarin brought us a good
supper and entertained us with his adventures while we ate.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] "_La Diligence de Baucoire_" in _Lettre de Mon Moulin_, Alphonse
Daudet.