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!
[Illustration: "IT LOOKED TREASONS, CONSPIRACIES AND MUTINOUS
OUTBURSTS"]
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.