Thus the theatre of the second century, having come in comparative safety through the great gulf of time separating the present from the Roman civilization, is now given a new term of active existence, making, with the amphitheatres of Nîmes and Arles and the roadway of the Pont du Gard, the fourth Roman structure in France still in use for its original purpose.
The Church of Notre Dame was formerly a cathedral, and was first built by Liberius, Prefect of the Gauls. On the ruins of that building the present church was erected, about the twelfth century, or soon afterwards. It is small and has neither transepts nor triforia.
Orange became the capital of a small principality in the eleventh century, and in 1531, on the death of Philibert of Châlons, the little State was inherited by Count Réné of Nassau-Dillenburg, who, being childless, nominated his cousin William I. Stadtholder of the United Netherlands as his successor. All the Stadtholders who followed, including William III., held the title ‘Prince of Orange,’ and in 1688, during the Irish Revolution, the English Protestant party, under the leadership of William of Orange, became known as Orangemen. By the Treaty of Utrecht, made in 1713, Louis XIV. united the principality to the crown of France, but both the Kings of Prussia and of the Netherlands have held on tenaciously to the empty title.
THE ROAD TO MONTÉLIMAR
goes out of Orange past the Roman arch—those who drive in the dark should remember that there is no roadway through it. The River Aigues is crossed, and then, bearing to the left, the road skirts a hill and passes through the old town of Piolenc, with remains of its ramparts and a Cluniac priory or château.
At Mornas there is a gateway with a picturesque street inside. Along the overhanging precipices of rock above the houses stand the ruins of the castle, built in the twelfth century, and among the broken walls, thrown down during the religious wars, there is a small chapel and crypt of the Romanesque period. The Popes of Avignon had a toll on the Rhone at Mornas, and in the days of religious intolerance it is said that it was no uncommon thing to see the corpses of Protestants floating down the river.
Along this portion of the Rhone medieval castles are thickly sown. In nearly every direction one sees one or two precipitous rocks standing out conspicuously, their summits crowned with great towers and crenellated walls in varying states of ruin. One of these is at Montdragon, standing out boldly on a cliff above the village. It was founded in the eleventh century by a chieftain who bore the name of Dragon.
In April the villages are beautified with the delicately subtle blue of the wistaria. This touch of colour is wanted, for, owing to the dust of the Rhone Valley, the villages are all toned down to a pale biscuit colour, and even where a patch of green grass offers a wayfarer resting-ground one finds on reaching it that the blades of grass grow thinly from a soil composed of pale whity-brown dust. Every passing vehicle raises the surface of the road high in the air, and a fast car is a terror to all it passes.
Lapalud, with a Romanesque church, is typical of the dusty roadside village, and its three cassis in the road should be watched for carefully. The level vineyards are intersected with straight lines of cypresses or poplars, and on the right the hills rise suddenly and precipitously.
Pierrelatte is a rather poor little town with cobbled streets, intersected with three bad cassis. There is a covered market and a clock-tower, and on the isolated mass of rock giving its name to the town are slight ruins of a castle.