nneur_ at the Hotel du Louvre--in the great vaulted chamber that
once served the Templars as a refectory, and that has been the
banquet-hall of the Felibrige ever since this later and not less
honorable Order was founded, almost forty years ago.

[Illustration: AVIGNON]

Not until those formalities were ended could we of America get away to
receive the personal welcome to which through all that day we had been
looking forward with a warm eagerness--yet also sorrowing: because we
knew that among the welcoming voices there would be a silence, and that
a face would be missing from among those we loved. Roumanille was dead;
and in meeting again in Avignon those who had been closest and
dearest to him, and who to us were close and dear, there was heartache
with our joy.

SAINT-REMY-DE-PROVENCE,
_August, 1894._

The Comedie Francaise at Orange

I

After a lapse of nearly fifteen centuries, the Roman theatre at
Orange--founded in the time of Marcus Aurelius and abandoned, two
hundred years later, when the Northern barbarians overran the
land--seems destined to arise reanimate from its ruins and to be the
scene of periodic performances by the Comedie Francaise: the first
dramatic company of Europe playing on the noblest stage in the world.
During the past five-and-twenty years various attempts have been made to
compass this happy end. Now--as the result of the representations of
"Oedipus" and "Antigone" at Orange, under government patronage and by
the leading actors of the National Theatre--these spasmodic efforts have
crystallized into a steadfast endeavour which promises to restore and
to repeople that long-abandoned stage.[4]

[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE THEATRE]

If they know about it--over there in the Shades--I am sure that no one
rejoices more sincerely over this revival than do the Romans by whom the
theatre at Orange was built, and from whom it has come down to us as one
of the many proofs of their strong affection for that portion of their
empire which now is the south-east corner of France. To them this
region, although ultimately included in the larger Narbonensis, always
was simply Provincia--_the_ Province: a distinguishing indistinction
which exalted it above all the other dependencies of Rome. Constantine,
indeed, was for fixing the very seat of the Empire here; and he did
build, and for a time live in, the palace at Arles of which a stately
fragment still remains. Unluckily f