The reader will have guessed his whereabouts. This is, or was, the Roman theatre. Upon those heavy shoulders rested the marble seats; there were the entrances and exits by which the spectators passed to and from the staircases and corridors. From the flat semi-circle below us, the chorus chanted their melodious comments upon the play that was being enacted on the stage where now the women are at work. [Illustration: ·AUTUN· ·MEDIAEVAL TOWERS·] There are those who will tell you that the Theatre is not worth the trouble of a visit,--that it has lost all charm. I cannot agree. On the contrary, ruined though the monument is, hardly one stone of it left upon another, there is nothing more impressive to be seen in Autun; for the general contour of the building is so preserved, that, for any person in the least degree familiar with the forms of these monuments, no great effort of the imagination is needed to restore the play-house to some of its ancient glory, and to re-people it with the voices of the past. Moreover, the spectator, though he cannot see the graceful columns, that, probably, as at Arles, rose from the back of the stage, nor the sculptured frieze, nor the marble capitals and statues that adorned the proscenium, nor the arcaded gallery that crowned the upper rows of seats, though he may not follow with the eye the distant white roads of Vesentio and Agrippa; yet still his glance can range over the same landscape that met the Roman of old, the near fields and meadows, the distant uplands and gloomy forest lit by the rising sun. Still more impressive must the theatre be, when moonlight has shed her revealing mystery over the terraces of this forsaken garden. Tradition has it, that, until the latter part of the 17th century, a considerable portion of the Roman theatre was still standing; and M. de Fontenay gives a very interesting sketch of the ruins in 1610, showing that soil and débris had not then obliterated the tiers of seats, and that the fore-part and the arcaded gallery of the semi-circle were still in existence.[43] This comparatively happy condition of affairs might have endured until to-day, but for an unfortunate temptation that overcame Gabriel de Roquette, Bishop of Autun, in 1675, to make use of the Roman theatre as a quarry for the new seminary he was building. It was a deed doubly inexcusable, because, at so late a period, after the publication of Eden Thomas' book, and others dealing with the subject, he had no longer the commonly-urged excuse that no interest was taken in the ancient monuments of Autun.[44] It is quite possible, however, that we are blaming the bishop needlessly. After the fate of Cluny, who shall say of what a Frenchman is not capable, when the lust of destruction is upon him?