IV.
What strikes one particularly in wandering through the fair-ground at Orleans is that while all is different from an English festival, the difference is one of degree and not of kind. Here, for example, are several circuses, where performances very similar to those given by any travelling circus in our own land are "about to commence." On the outside platform two clowns are shouting to the crowd to walk up; the gorgeous ring-master with his whip joins in the general advertisement; a girl and a boy are dancing to the music of a small but noisy orchestra. There is this difference, however, between a French circus and an English one: the whole enterprise wears a more noticeable appearance of success, is better housed, the place being brilliantly lighted by electricity generated by an excellent portable plant, the performers better dressed. But curiously enough, the finest travelling circus I have ever seen in any land was Anderson's "Cirque Féerique," which I came upon during a flying visit to the industrial town of Vierzon, some hundred and twenty-five miles south of Paris. The proprietor was a Scotsman! "Mother Goose" was the chief item of the performance, and the coloured posters of the old lady and her goose had been printed in England!
Pitched close to such a circus stands a large wooden opera-house, capable of holding from six to eight hundred people, the seats being arranged on an inclined plane, the higher priced ones as substantial and comfortable as the stalls of one of our provincial theatres. The stage is commodious, and the performers as accomplished as any touring company that visits the second-class English towns. Indeed, their performance of "Les Cloches de Corneville" was given with a verve and a finish not seldom lacking in more ambitious opera companies one has seen at home. Instead of an orchestra, a very clever and good-looking young lady pianist played the accompaniments throughout the entire performance.
The travelling theatres, too, force comparison with the regular playhouses in the smaller English towns, rather than with the wretched "tuppenny" shows that represent the drama at an English fair. Like the opera-house just described, they are fitted up substantially, and in good taste, the charges for admission ranging from half a franc to three or four francs. Many notable French actors have graduated from these portable theatres, and, indeed, those who perform in them are of a class considerably above the mummers who exhibit in our "fit-ups"; they are the best type of "strolling-players."
One of the most detestable features of an English fair is the appalling noise created by mechanical organs. This is happily absent from the French fête, and of the few contrivances of the kind which I remember at Orleans there was only one designed solely for the sake of noise. Perhaps the most remarkable of these orchestrions was a real triumph of musical machinery, around which, and contained within an immense and brilliantly lighted wooden building, whirled an endless chain of fairy coaches, hobby horses, swan boats, and other fantastic vehicles, eminently contrived for the purpose of producing giddiness. This was truly the pièce de résistance of the Orleans Fair, and it would be impossible to conceive a more striking contrast than that between this really magnificent construction and the familiar English merry-go-round. Externally the building would have borne favourable comparison with a "Palace of Electricity" at some of our international exhibitions. The façade was of Byzantine style, and myriads of beautifully-coloured electric lamps picked out the design, two huge peacocks with outspread tails, also composed of coloured lights, being introduced with most artistic effect on each side of the glittering archway. Inside, the decorations were gorgeous "to the nth degree," as Mr. W. E. Henley might have said, but the scheme of colours was in perfect harmony, the whole making up a veritable feast of light that must dazzle and fascinate the simple country-folk wherever this wonderful merry-go-round is set up. At a moderate estimate, I should name £10,000 as the cost of this single show, and perhaps that will indicate the lavish way in which the French are catered for by their travelling showmen.
Cinematographs there were in profusion, most of them exhibiting scenes of a kind which would speedily be suppressed on this side the Channel; shooting galleries galore, exactly like our own; peep-shows, marionette theatres, panoramas; a booth with a two-headed bull and other monsters, a Breton bagpiper playing his instrument outside being worthy of inclusion in the list; but one saw no "fat women"—possibly because they are such common objects of French life! A large switchback railway seemed to be very popular, and, like all the rival attractions, its proprietors claimed for it the distinction of having come "direct from the Paris Exhibition," where it had been awarded first prize. The smallest side-shows, consisting of perhaps a few distorting mirrors, had all been "exhibited at Paris," and the two-headed bull was advertised by a huge painting showing all the crowned heads of Europe and President Loubet examining the beast, which, on inspection, turned out to be only a little removed from the normal by having a head slightly broader than usual, with the incipient formation of a third eye in its forehead, and a muzzle remotely suggestive of two joined together.