Page:A Motor-Flight Through France.djvu/221

THE PYRENEES TO PROVENCE its Gothic vaguely suggests that of the Ponte Sant' Angelo, of the fortified arches and tombs of mediæval Rome, and reconciles itself as easily to the florid façade of the seventeenth-century Papal Mint in the square below as to the delicate classic detail of the west door of the church.

Rome—but Imperial not Papal Rome—was still in the air as we left Avignon and followed the Rhone valley northward to Orange. All this part of France is thick with history, and in the ancient principality of Orange the layers are piled so deep that one wonders to see so few traces of successive dominations in the outward aspect of its capital. Only the Rome of the Emperors has left a mark on the town which lived with so vigorous and personal life from the days when it was a Gaulish city and a trading station of Massaliote Greeks, and which, when it grew too small for its adventurous brood, sent rulers to both shores of the North Sea; and the fact that the theatre and the arch survive, while the Orange of Carlovingian bishops and mediæval princes has been quite wiped out, and even Maurice of Nassau's great seventeenth-century fortress razed to the ground—this permanence of the imperial [ 135 ]