There are some whimsical particularities in the churches at Pont St. Esprit; but perhaps depending rather on the fancy of the architect than on the style of the time, and therefore not very interesting. The date is probably the fifteenth century. In one of these is a vault, said to have the property of preserving the human body, but like so many other things, most of the objects thus preserved were destroyed in the fury of the revolution, when the French populace gave full play to the desire to injure and destroy, which seems so natural in an ignorant multitude. One, the body of a female, was, as I was informed, still entire, and I went to see it; arms, legs, and mutilated trunks, were pulled out from a hole, one after another, to gratify my curiosity, and at last the desired object. It was exceedingly light, of a dingy buff colour, somewhat shrivelled, but in other respects very perfect.
We engaged a voiture from Pont St. Esprit to Orange, and travelled the whole way in a mizzling rain, which continued all the evening and the next morning. My companion finds the climate of the south of France much like that of Ireland, and I cannot contradict him; but I suppose that such summers are very rare.
Orange is a little city of about 8,000 inhabitants, but it is said to have had 15,000 under the government of its own princes. It was added in 1713, by the treaty of Utrecht, to the crown of France. The situation is at the foot of an insulated hill, round which a fine plain extends to a considerable distance; beyond are hills, mountains, rocks, and valleys, all of which are seen to great advantage from the summit of this eminence. The inns are in the suburbs, the high road passing on the outside of the town; and this is absolutely necessary, as the widest part of the widest street does not exceed twelve or thirteen feet, and few are more than nine or ten. Here we first saw an order which we have since met with in several other places, that no carts are permitted to enter the city. The inhabitants tell us, that the situation of the town is cold, and subject to violent blasts of wind from the Alps; but we observed pomegranates in full bloom in the hedges. The general aspect of the vegetation is very different from that of England and the north of France.
There are few places, even in Italy, which can vie with this part of France, in the number and beauty of Roman antiquities. At Orange, our first object was the celebrated Arch of Triumph, one of the most interesting in existence for the beauty of its proportions, as well as for the singularity of its disposition, which differs widely from those remaining at Rome; but it has never been even tolerably well published. There are holes in the architrave on the north side, by means of which the metal letters have been fixed, but the inscription itself is wanting, and the monument has baffled all attempts of the French antiquaries to determine its date, or the object of its erection. At Orange it is attributed to Marius, or rather to Domitius Ahenobarbus, under whom they suppose Marius to have served a campaign in Gaul: but the chief evidence of this is the name ‘Mario,’ sculptured on one of the shields among the trophies. There are many other names, similarly placed, which seem to be in the nominative case, as Udillus, Sacrovir, and it therefore seems probable, that those, whose case is not determined by the termination, should be in the nominative also, as Beve, Ratui, Varene, and this Mario, which has given rise to the opinion of the occasion of the building. The letters S. R. E. occur in several places. We have no good reason to believe that stone triumphal arches were in use before the time of the emperors, and the profusion of ornament on the mouldings announces a style of art posterior to the Augustan age. Another hypothesis gives it to Marius and Catulus, on their defeat of the Cimbri, somewhere in this neighbourhood; a third to Julius Cæsar, on his conquest of Marseille. The Baron de Bastie contends that it is of the time of Augustus; and Maffei, that it was constructed in the reign of Hadrian. The result is, that we know nothing at all about it.
In the Corinthian capitals, as executed by the Romans, the angles of the abacus are always cut off. Among the Greeks the acute point was, sometimes at least, preserved. The capitals of this arch are too much damaged to admit of absolute certainty, but I am pretty confident that the Greek manner was adopted. Again, the Attic base, among the Romans, has a deep scotia, and the fillet above it is nearly under the fillet of the apophysis; the Greeks used a wide and shallow scotia, and made the projection of the fillet nearly as great as that of the torus above.
The bases here are decidedly Greek, and the foliage of the capitals is also somewhat Greek in character. These circumstances have not before been noticed, and indeed it is only lately that we have become sufficiently acquainted with the remains of architecture in Greece, to be aware of the differences which distinguished the two styles; the finding them here is curious, and seems to point out some connexion between the building and the Greek colony of Marseille. The composition of this edifice is very good, and the architect has contrived to give it something of a pyramidal form, which suits admirably with its character, as a monumental building. The French architects complain of it as top-heavy, and compared with the Roman triumphal arches, the opening is small in proportion to the whole edifice; but the character is different. In the Roman, the arch itself is the principal object, and the architecture and sculpture merely adorn a chosen point in the course of a triumphal procession. Here it is a fine pyramidal mass, erected to commemorate some important event, in which the openings must be such as not to destroy the apparent firmness and solidity. Nothing could be taken away without injuring the effect, and if any thing could be added, it could only be some additional sculpture at the top, which probably once existed. The mouldings are overloaded with ornaments, and the corona is small and channelled, as if to indicate dentils; an abuse which I should not have supposed to exist prior to the time of Hadrian. The best external evidence we have, would perhaps, assign this arch, and two others at Carpentras and Cavaillon, to Domitius Ahenobarbus; but the proofs are very slight, and the internal evidence is strongly against so early a period.
This building was converted into a fortress in the thirteenth century, by Raymond de Baux, Prince of Orange, and he appears to have damaged it considerably, but he probably preserved it from total destruction. At present it is quite out of the town, and perfectly insulated.
Besides the arch, here is a large theatre, of which the scene wall, now standing, is about 300 feet long, and 100 feet high; or, more exactly, according to M. de Gasparin, ‘Histoire de la ville d’Orange,’ 336 feet in length, and 114 in height; the seats were in the slope of a hill, as in the Greek theatres. Nothing is known as to its date, and the workmanship is rude and gives no help; the lower part is occupied with shops, and part of the ruin is the town prison, but the building well deserves an accurate examination. The outside presents a range of arches, now mostly occupied by little shops, and ornamented with a sort of Doric pilaster and an entablature. Over this is a plain face of wall with holes in it, and some projecting stones, which suggest the idea of an advancing roof and colonnade in front of the present arches. Higher up is another range of arches, low and without pilasters: nevertheless a small capital is shown over each pier, and there is a second continued entablature about the same size as that below. In the wall above these, we have, first a row of blocks to receive the base of the posts of the velum, then a very simple cornice, of considerable projection, in which there are no perforations over the three blocks nearest to the angles of the building; over the six following blocks this cornice is perforated, but in the remainder there are no holes till we arrive at the same distance from the opposite end; higher up is a second range of blocks, all of which are perforated. The upper cornice has no perforations or channels, and it is probable that the posts escaped it by a slight inclination outwards, as it has but a small projection.
