The Comedie Francaise at Orange by Thomas A. Janvier

Avignon was crowded with dignitaries and personages: M. Leygues, who was to preside over the festival; the ministers of justice and of public works, who were to increase its official dignity; artistic and literary people without end. Of these last -- who also, in a way, were first, since to them the whole was due -- our special boat from Lyons had brought a gay contingent three hundred strong. With it all, the City of the Popes fairly buzzed like a hive of poetic bees got astray from Hymettus Hill.

From Avignon to Orange the distance is less than eighteen miles, not at all too far for driving; and the intervening country is so rich and so beautiful as to conform in all essentials -- save in its commendable freedom from serpents -- to the biblical description of Paradise. Therefore, following our own wishes and the advice of several poets -- they all are poets down there -- we decided to drive to the play rather than to expose ourselves to the rigours of the local railway service: the abject collapse of which, under the strain of handling twelve or fifteen hundred people, the poets truthfully prophesied.