re word came
to me that over the swords of his dying guardsmen they had pressed in
and slain the king!

[Illustration: "IT LOOKED TREASONS, CONSPIRACIES AND MUTINOUS
OUTBURSTS"]

The soldiers on guard at the ascent, and thickly posted on the hill-side
above the highest tiers, gave colour to my fancy. And, actually, it was
as guards against assassins that the soldiers were there. Only a little
more than two months had passed since the slaying of President Carnot
at Lyons; and the cautionary measures taken to assure the safety of the
three ministers at Orange were all the more rigid because one of them
was the minister of justice--of all the government functionaries the
most feared and hated by anarchists, because he is most intimately
associated with those too rare occasions when anarchist heads are sliced
off in poor payment for anarchist crimes. This undercurrent of real
tragedy--with its possibility of a crash, followed by a cloud of smoke
rising slowly above the wreck of the gaily decorated ministerial
box--drew out with a fine intensity the tragedy of the stage: and
brought into a curious psychological coalescence the barbarisms of the
dawn and of the noontime of our human world.

VI

We came again to the front of the theatre: to an entrance--approached
between converging railings, which brought the crowd to an angry focus,
and so passed its parts singly between the ticket-takers--leading into
what once was the postscenium, and thence across where once was the
"court" side of the stage to the tiers of stone seats.

[Illustration: THE GREAT FACADE]

However aggravating was this entrance-effect in the matter of
composition, its dramatically graded light-and-shade was masterly. From
the outer obscurity, shot forward as from a catapult by the pushing
crowd, we were projected through a narrow portal into a dimly lighted
passage more or less obstructed by fallen blocks of stone; and thence
onward, suddenly, into the vast interior glaring with electric lamps:
and in the abrupt culmination of light there flashed up before us the
whole of the auditorium--a mountain-side of faces rising tier on tier; a
vibrant throng of humanity which seemed to go on and on forever upward,
and to be lost at last in the star-depths of the clear dark sky.

Notwithstanding the electric lamps--partly, indeed, because of their
violently contrasting streams of strong light and fantastic shadow--the
general effect of the auditorium was so