Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
History
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3: France and the Netherlands, Part 1
France -- Description and travel; Netherlands -- Description and travel
The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any
details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. This wall being the
back of the scene, the space left between it and the chord of the
semicircle (of the auditorium) which formed the proscenium is rather
less than one would have supposed. In other words, the stage was very
shallow, and appears to have been arranged for a number of performers
standing in a line, like a company of soldiers. There stands the silent
skeleton, however, as impressive by what it leaves you to guess and
wonder about as by what it tells you. It has not the sweetness, the
softness of melancholy, of the theater at Arles; but it is more
extraordinary, and one can imagine only tremendous tragedies being
enacted there--
"Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line."
At either end of the stage, coming forward, is an immense wing--immense
in height, I mean, as it reaches to the top of the scenic wall; the
other dimensions are not remarkable. The division to the right, as you
face the stage, is pointed out as the green-room; its portentous
altitude and the open arches at the top give it the air of a well. The
compartment on the left is exactly similar, save that it opens into the
traces of other chambers, said to be those of a hippodrome adjacent to
the theater. Various fragments are visible which refer themselves
plausibly to such an establishment; the greater axis of the hippodrome
would appear to have been on a line with the triumphal arch. This is
all I saw, and all there was to see, of Orange, which had a very
rustic, bucolic aspect, and where I was not even called upon to demand
breakfast at the hotel. The entrance of this resort might have been
that of a stable of the Roman days.
Vaucluse
By Bayard Taylor
[Footnote: From "Views Afoot." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]
This district borders on the desert of the Crau, a vast plain of stones
reaching to the mouth of the Rhone and almost entirely uninhabited. We
caught occasional glimpses of its sealike waste between the summits of
the hills. At length, after threading a high ascent, we saw the valley
of the Durance suddenly below us. The sun, breaking through the clouds,
shone on the mountain-wall which stood on the opposite side, touching
with his glow the bare and rocky precipices that frowned far above the
stream. Descending to the valley, we followed its course toward the
Rhone with the ruins of feudal "bourgs" crowning the crags above us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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