"No, Madame." A pause, during which our hostess, screwing up her courage for the plunge, eyed us with a glance, half-timid, half-amused.
"Where did Monsieur et Dame lunch yesterday?" The speaker looked at my wife; my wife looked at me. I looked innocently at Madame.
"On a wall, Madame." Madame's eyebrows rose slightly. She could make nothing of it.
"But it was raining all day yesterday, Monsieur!"
"Not on the wall, Madame. The fact is, we never lunch at an hotel—even when it rains."
"Vous faites bien" was what she said to us. What she said to her husband, an hour later, I leave to the reader to guess. But we parted excellent friends.
These picnic lunches, of course, are rather scrappy. Things get blown away sometimes, or are fastened upon by ants. Il faut souffrir pour bien vivre.
While I have been writing these notes, my wife has left the bench of Roman stone that is our table, and is seated on the grass half way down towards the orchestra, where she is exercising her not inconsiderable powers of imagination in recreating the traditions of the spot. Also she is proving, unwittingly, the excellent acoustic properties of the natural theatre, constructed in the Greek, rather than in the Roman method; that is to say, by hollowing out of the hill, not building up upon the plain. The keeper of the buvette told us that a play is to be given in the theatre next June (1911) and "a little bull-fight."
Going back to the hotel that day, we noticed, among the crisp leaves of the Promenade des Marbres, many a handful of confetti,—souvenirs of the great fair or festival of St. Lazare, that, for nearly the whole of September, disturbs the tranquillity of Autun. Let the traveller, therefore, see the Roman city before September, or after it.
The stone benches beneath the trees of the Promenade des Marbres, placed there about 1765, appear to have been taken from another of the most important Roman monuments of Autun, the Amphitheatre, a building which, in the middle ages, was known by the same name as its neighbour, the Theatre, and suffered a similar fate. It was situate to the north of the Caves Joyaux, close to the wall of the town, in such a position that the Faubourg des Marbres nearly bisects its site. Not very much is known concerning it; but its dimensions have been determined by excavations that prove it to have been the largest of the known amphitheatres of France, as it is of Burgundy as a whole.