第69章

She had the dignity of a Roman empress,and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar.I have seen washerwomen in the Trastevere who were perhaps as handsome as she;but even the headdress of the Roman contadina contributes less to the dignity of the person born to wear it than the sweet and stately Arlesian cap,which sits at once aloft and on the back of the head;which is accompanied with a wide black bow covering a considerable part of the crown;and which,finally,accommodates itself indescribably well to the manner in which the tresses of the front are pushed behind the cars.

This admirable dispenser of lumps of sugar has distracted me a little;for I am still not sufficiently historical.Before going to the cafe I had dined,and before dining I had found time to go and look at the arena.Then it was that I discovered that Arles has no general physiognomy,and,except the delightful little church of Saint Trophimus,no architecture,and that the rugosities of its dirty lanes affect the feet like knifeblades.It was not then,on the other hand,that I saw the arena best.The second day of my stay at Arles I devoted to a pilgrimage to the strange old hill town of Les Baux,the mediaeval Pompeii,of which Ishall give myself the pleasure of speaking.The evening of that day,however (my friend and I returned in time for a late dinner),I wandered among the Roman remains of the place by the light of a magnificent moon,and gathered an impression which has lost little of its silvery glow.The moon of the evening before had been aqueous and erratic;but if on the present occasion it was guilty of any irregularity,the worst it did was only to linger beyond its time in the heavens,in order to let us look at things comfortably.The effect was admirable;it brought back the impression of the way,in Rome itself,on evenings like that,the moonshine rests upon broken shafts and slabs of antique pavement.As we sat in the theatre,looking at the two lone columns that survive part of the decoration of the back of the stage and at the fragments of ruin around them,we might have been in the Roman forum.The arena at Arles,with its great magnitude,is less complete than that of Nimes;it has suffered even more the assaults of time and of the children of time,and it has been less repaired.The seats are almost wholly wanting;but the external walls minus the topmost tier of arches,are massively,ruggedly,complete;and the vaulted corridors seem as solid as the day they were built.The whole thing is superbly vast,and as monumental,for place of light amusement what is called in America a "varietyshow"as it entered only into the Roman mind to make such establishments.The podium is much higher than at Nimes,and many of the great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put into their places.

The proconsular box has been more or less reconstructed,and the great converging passages of approach to it are still majestically distinct:so that,as I sat there in the mooncharmed stillness,leaning my elbows on the battered parapet of the ring,it was not impossible to listen to the murmurs and shudders,the thick voice of the circus,that died away fifteen hundred years ago.

The theatre has a voice as well,but it lingers on the ear of time with a different music.The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld;I took a particular fancy to it.It is less than a skeleton,the arena may be called a skeleton;for it consists only of half a dozen bones.The traces of the row of columns which formed the scene the permanent backscene remain;two marble pillars I just mentioned them are upright,with a fragment of their entablature.Be fore them is the vacant space which was filled by the stage,with the line of the prosoenium distinct,marked by a deep groove,impressed upon slabs of stone,which looks as if the bottom of a high screen had been intended to fit into it.The semicircle formed by the seats half a cup rises opposite;some of the rows are distinctly marked.The floor,from the bottom of the stage,in the shape of an arc of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra,is covered by slabs of colored marble red,yellow,and green which,though terribly battered and cracked today,give one an idea of the elegance of the interior.Everything shows that it was on a great scale:the large sweep of its enclosing walls,the massive corridors that passed behind the auditorium,and of which we can still perfectly take the measure.The way in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of our epoch,as also the immense size of the place is a proof of extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors.It was after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin.The principal entrance was locked,but we effected an easy escalade,scaled a low parapet,and descended into the place behind file scenes.It was as light as day,and the solitude was complete.The two slim columns,as we sat on the broken benches,stood there like a pair of silent actors.What I called touching,just now,was the thought that here the human voice,the utterance of a great language,had been supreme.The air was full of intonations and cadences;not of the echo of smashing blows,of riven armor,of howling victims and roaring beasts.The spot is,in short,one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world;and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles,who use it to pass,by no means in great numbers,from one part of the town to the other;treading the old marble floor,and brushing,if need be,the empty benches.This familiarity does not kill the place again;it makes it,on the contrary,live a little,makes the present and the past touch each other.