The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

by Albert Bigelow Paine

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 château which the princes of Orange built at the summit of the hill. The château 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 Comédie Française gives performances there.

The upper works of the hill, where the château 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.