The Comedie Francaise at Orange by Thomas A. Janvier

This was the theatre's evil condition when, happily, the architect Auguste Caristie, vice-president of the commission charged with the conservation of historical monuments, came down to Orange early in the nineteenth century -- and immediately was filled with an enthusiastic determination that the stately building should be purified and restored. The theatre became with him a passion; yet a steadfast passion which continued through more than a quarter of a century. He studied it practically on the ground and theoretically in the cabinet; and as the result of his patient researches he produced his great monograph upon it (published in a sumptuous folio at the charges of the French Government) which won for him a medal of the first class at the Salon of 1855. In this work he reestablished the building substantially as the Roman architect created it; and so provided the plan in accordance with which the present architect in charge, M. Formige -- working in the same loving and faithful spirit -- is making the restoration in stone. Most righteously, as a principal feature of the ceremonies of August, 1894, a bust of Auguste Caristie was set up in Orange close by the theatre which owes its saving and its restoration to the strong purpose of his strong heart.

And then came another enthusiast -- they are useful in the world, these enthusiasts -- who took up the work at the point where Caristie had laid it down. This was the young editor of the _Revue Meridionale_, Fernand Michel -- more widely known by his pseudonym of "Antony Real. " By a lucky calamity -- the great inundation of the Rhone in the year 1840 -- Michel was detained for a while in Orange: and so was enabled to give to the theatre more than the ordinary tourist's passing glance. By that time, the interior of the building had been cleared and its noble proportions fully were revealed; and as the result of his first long morning's visit he became, as Caristie had become before him, fairly infatuated with it.