THE guide-books say that the visitor to the palace of Versailles is admitted, should he desire it, to five different court-yards. We cared for but one—the cour d’honneur whose gates are crowned with groups emblematical of the victories of le grand Monarque.

It is an immense quadrangle, paved with rough stones, and flanked on three sides by the palace and wings. The central chÂteau, facing the entrance, was built by Louis XIII., the wings by Louis XIV. The prevailing color is a dull brick-red; the roofs are of different heights and styles; the effect of the whole far less grand, or even dignified, than we had anticipated. The pavilions to the right and left are lettered, “À toutes les gloires de la France.” Gigantic statues, beginning, on the right hand, with Bayard, “sans peur et sans reproche,” guard both sides of the court. In the centre is a colossal equestrian statue in bronze of Louis XIV., the be-wigged, be-curled, and be-laced darling of himself and a succession of venal courtezans. At the base of this statue we held converse, long and low, of certain things this quadrangle had witnessed when, through it, lay the way to the most luxurious and profligate court that has cursed earth and insulted Heaven since similar follies and crimes wrought the downfall of the Roman Empire. Of the throngs of base parasites that flocked thither in the days when Pompadour and Du Barry held insolent misrule over a weaker, yet more vicious sovereign than Louis XIV. Of the payment exacted for generations of such amazing excesses, when Parisian garrets and slums sent howling creditors by the thousand to settle accounts with Louis XVI. Vast as is the space shut in by palace-walls and folding gates, they filled it with ragged, bare-legged, red-capped demons. Upon the balcony up there, the king, also wearing the red cap, appeared at his good children’s call. Anything for peace and life! Upon the same balcony stood, the same day, his braver wife, between her babes, true royalty sustaining her to endure, without quailing, the volleys of contumely hurled at “the Austrian woman.” Having secured king, queen, and children as hostages for the payment of the national debt of vengeance, the complainants sacked the palace, made an end of its glory as a kingly residence, until Louis Philippe repaired ravages to the extent of his ability, and converted such of the state apartments as he adjudged unnecessary for court uses into an historical picture-gallery.

The history of the French nation—of its monarchs, generals, marshals, victories, coronations, and hundreds of lesser events—is there written upon canvas. Eyes and feet give out and the brain wearies before it is half read. The polished floors, inlaid with different-colored woods, smooth as glass, are torture to the burning soles; the aching in the back of the neck becomes agony. Yet one cannot leave the work unfinished, where every step is a surprise and each glance discovers fresh objects of interest.

“If only we had the moral courage not to look at the painted ceilings!” said Dux, meditatively; “or if it were en rÈgle for a fellow to lie upon his back in order to inspect them!”

We were in the Gallery of Mirrors, two hundred and forty feet long; seventeen windows looking down upon gardens and park, upon fountains, groves, and lakelets; seventeen mirrors opposite these repeating the scenes framed by the casements.

“The ceiling by Lebrun represents scenes in the life of the Grand Monarch,” uttered the guide.

Hence the plaint, echoed groaningly by us all.

The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is furnished very much as it was when he lay breathing more and more faintly, hour after hour, within the big bed lifted by the dais from the floor, that, sleeping or dying, he might lie above the common walks of men. Communicating with the king’s bed-room is the celebrated Salle de l’oeil de Boeuf, the ox-eyed window at one side giving the name. The courtiers awaited there each day the announcement that the king was awake and visible, beguiling the tedium of their long attendance by sharp trades in love, court, and state honors. It is a shabby-genteel little room, the hardness, glass and glare that distinguish palatial parlors from those in which sensible, comfort-loving people live, rubbed and tarnished by time and disuse. Filled with a moving throng in gala-apparel, this and the expanse of the royal bed-chamber may have been goodly to behold; untenanted, they are stiff and desolate.

The central balcony, opening from the great chamber—the balcony on which, forty-four years later, Marie Antoinette stood with her children—was, upon the death-night of the king, occupied by impatient officials—impatient, but no longer anxious, for the decease of their lord was certain and not far off. The hangings of the bed, cumbrous with gold embroidery, had been twisted back to give air to the expiring man. As the last sigh fluttered from his lips, the high chamberlain upon the balcony broke his white wand of office, shouting to the crowds in the court-yard, “Le roi est mort!” and, without taking breath, “Vive le roi!”

No incident in French history is more widely known. In talking of it in the bed-chamber and balcony, it was as if we heard it for the first time.

The “little apartments of the queen” were refreshment to our jaded senses and nerves. They are a succession of cozy nooks in a retired wing. Boudoirs, where were the soft lounges and low chairs, excluded by etiquette from the courtly salons; closets, fitted up with writing-desk, chair, and footstool; others, lined on all sides with books; still others, where the queen, whether it were Maria Lesczinski or Marie Antoinette, might sit, with a favorite maid of honor or two, at her embroidery. Through these apartments, all the “home” she had had in the palace, a terrified woman fled to gain a secret door of escape, while the marauders, the delegation from Paris, were yelling and raging for her blood in the corridors and state apartments.

If this row of snug resting and working rooms were the “Innermost” of her domestic life, the Petit Trianon was her play-ground. It is a pretty villa, not more than half as large as the Grand Trianon built for Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV. Napoleon I. had a suite of small apartments in the Petit Trianon—study, salon, bath and dressing-rooms, and bed-chamber. They are furnished as he left them, even to the hard bed and round, uncompromising pillows. All are hung and upholstered with yellow satin brocade; the floors are polished and waxed, uncarpeted, save for a rug laid here and there. A door in the arras communicates with the Empress’ apartments. The villa was built by Louis XV. for the Du Barry, but interests us chiefly because of Marie Antoinette’s love for it. Her spinnet is in the salon where she received only personal and intimate friends. It is a common-looking affair, the case of inlaid woods ornamented with brass handles and corners. The keys are discolored—some of them silent; the others yielded discordant tinklings as we touched them with reverent fingers. Her work-table is in another room. Her bed is spread with an embroidered satin coverlet, once white. Her monogram and a crown were worked near the bottom. The stitches were cut out by revolutionary scissors, but their imprint remains, enabling one to trace clearly the design. In this room hang her portrait and that of her son, the lost Dauphin, a lovely little fellow, with large, dark-blue eyes like his mother’s, and chestnut hair, falling upon a wide lace collar. His coat is blue; a strap of livelier blue crosses his chest to meet a sword-belt; a star shines upon his left breast, and he carries a rapier jauntily under his arm. His countenance is sweet and ingenuous, but there is a shading of pensiveness or thought in the expression which is unchildlike. It was easy and pleasant to picture him running up and down the marble stairs, and filling the now uninhabited rooms with boyish talk and mirth. It was yet easier to reproduce in imagination the figures of mother and children in the avenues leading to the Swiss village, her favorite and latest toy.

This is quite out of sight of palace and villas. The intervening park was verdant and bright as with June suns, although the season was November, and the sere leaves were falling about us. A miniature lake and the islet in the middle, a circular marble temple upon the island, giving cover to a nude nymph or goddess, were there, when the light steps of royal mother and children skimmed along the path, she, in her shepherdess hat, laughing and jesting with attendants in sylvan dress. The day was very still with the placid melancholy that consists in our country with Indian summer. The smell of withering leaves hung in the air, spiciest in the sunny reaches of the winding road, almost too powerful in shaded glens, heaped with yellow and brown masses. We met but two people in our walk—an old peasant bent low under a bundle of faggots, and an older woman in a red cloak, who may have been a gypsy. The woods are well kept, the brushwood cut out, and the trees, the finest in the vicinity of Paris, carefully pruned of decaying boughs. We saw the village between their boles long before reaching the outermost building—a mill, with peakÉd gables and antique chimneys, the hoary stones overgrown with ivy. We mounted the flight of steps leading, on the outside, to the second story; shook the door, in the hope that it might, through inadvertence, have been left unlocked. Hollow echoes from empty rooms answered. Bending over the balustrade, we looked down at the little water-wheel, warped by dryness; at the channel that once led supplies to it from the lake hard by. A close body of woods formed the background of the deserted house. In the water of the lake were reflected the gray and moss-green stones; barred windows; the clinging cloak of ivy; our own forms—the only moving objects in the picture. Louis XVI., amateur locksmith for his own pleasure, played miller here to gratify his wife’s whim, grinding tiny sacks of real corn, and taking pains to become more floury in an hour than a genuine miller would have made himself in six weeks, in order to give vraisemblance to the play enacted by the queen and her coterie. Around the bend of the pond lay the larger cottages which served as kitchen, dining, and ball-rooms. All are built of stone, with benches at the doors where peasants might rest at noon or evening; all are clothed with ivy; all closed and locked. We skirted the lake to get to the laiterie, or dairy. It is a one-storied cottage, with windows in the tiled roof. Long French casements and glazed doors allowed us to get a tolerable view of the interior. The floor, and the ledges running around the room, are marble or smooth stone. Within this building court-gallants churned the milk of the Swiss cows that grazed in the lakeside glades; maids of honor made curds and whey for the noonday dinner, and the leader of the frolic moulded rolls of butter with her beautiful hands, attired like a dairy-maid, and training her facile tongue to speak peasant patois. The industrious ivy climbs to the low-hanging eaves, and, drooping in long sprays that did not sway in the sleeping air, touched the busts of king and queen set upon tall pedestals, the one between the two windows in the side of the house, the other between the glass doors of the front gable. An observatory tower, with railed galleries encircling the first and third stories, is close to the laiterie.

Many sovereigns in France and elsewhere have had expensive playthings. Few have cost the possessors more dearly than did this Swiss hamlet.

Innocent as the pastimes of miller and dairymaid appear to us, the serious student of those times sees plainly that the comedy of happy lowly life was a burning, cankering insult to the apprehension of the starving people to whom the reality of peace and plenty in humble homes, was a tradition antedating the reign of the Great Louis. While their children died of famine, and men prayed vainly for work, the profligate court, to maintain whose pomp the poor man’s earnings were taxed, demeaned their queen and themselves in such senseless mummeries as beguiled Time of weight in the pleasure-grounds of the Petit Trianon.

The Place de la Concorde, from which Marie Antoinette waved farewell to the Tuileries—dearer to her in death than it had been in life—is the connecting link between the toy-village in the Versailles Park and the Expiatory Chapel, in what was formerly the Cemetery of the Madeleine in Paris. Leaving the bustling street, one enters through a lodge, a garden, cheerful in November, with roses and pansies. A broad walk connects the lodge and the tomb-like faÇade of the chapel. On the right and left of paved way and turf-borders are buried the Swiss Guard, over whose dead bodies the insurgents rushed to seize the queen in the Tuileries, when compromise and the mockery of royalty were at an end. The chapel is small, but handsome. On the right, half-way up its length, is a marble group, life-size, of the kneeling king, looking heavenward from the scaffold, in obedience to the gesture of an angel who addresses him in the last words of his confessor—“Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven!”

Opposite is an exquisite portrait-statue of the queen, her sinking figure supported by Religion. Anguish and resignation are blended in the beautiful face. Her regards, like those of the king, are directed upward. The features of Religion are Madame Elizabeth’s, the faithful sister of Louis, who perished by the guillotine May 12, 1794. Both groups are admirably wrought, and seen in the dim light of the stained windows, impressively life-like.

In the sub-chapel, gained by a winding stair, is an altar of black marble in a recess, marking the spot where the unfortunate pair were interred after their execution. The Madeleine was then unfinished, and in the orchard back of it the dishonored corpse of Louis, and, later, of his widow, were thrust into the ground with no show of respect or decency. The coffins were of plain boards; the severed heads were placed between the feet; quicklime was thrown in to hasten decomposition; the grave or pit was ten feet deep, and the soil carefully leveled. No pains were spared to efface from the face of the earth all traces of the victims of popular fury. But loving eyes noted the sacred place; kept watch above the mouldering remains until the nation turned to mourn over the slaughter wrought by their rage. Husband and wife were removed to the vaults of the Kings of France, at St. Denis, in 1817, by Louis Philippe. The consciences of himself and people fermented actively about that time, touching the erection of a monument expiatoire. The Place de la Concorde was re-christened “Place de Louis XVI.,” with the ulterior design of raising upon the site of his scaffold, obelisk or church, which should bear his name and be a token of his subjects’ contrition. To the like end, the king of the French proposed to change the Temple de la Gloire of Napoleon I.—otherwise the Madeleine—into an expiatory church, dedicated to the manes of Louis XVI., Louis XVII. (the little Dauphin), Marie Antoinette, and Madame Elizabeth, a hapless quartette whose memory needed rehabilitation at the hands of the reigning monarch and his loving subjects, if ever human remorse could atone for human suffering.

The Chapelle Expiatoire is the precipitate and settlement into crystallization of this mental and moral inquietude.

“No, madame!” said the custodian, in a burst of confidence. “We have not here the corpses of Louis XVI. and his queen. Their skeletons repose at St. Denis. But only their bones! For there are here”—touching the black marble altar—“the earth, the lime, the clothing that enclosed their bodies. And upon this spot was their deep, deep grave. People of true sensibility prefer to weep here rather than in the crypt of St. Denis!”

On the same day we saw St. Roch. Bonaparte planted his cannon upon the broad steps, October 3, 1795, and fired into the solid ranks of the advancing Royalists—insurgents now in their turn. The front of the church is scarred by the balls that returned the salute. The chief ornament of the interior is the three celebrated groups of statuary in the Chapelle du Calvaire. These—the Crucifixion, Christ on the Cross, and the Entombment—are marvelous in inception and execution. The small chapel enshrining them becomes holy ground even to the Protestant gazer. They moved us as statuary had never done before. Returning to them, once and again, from other parts of the church, to look silently upon the three stages in the Story that is above all others, we left them finally with lagging tread and many backward glances. At the same end of the church is the altar at which Marie Antoinette received her last communion, on the day of her death.

“Were they here, then?” we asked of the sacristan, pointing to the figures in the Chapelle du Calvaire.

“But certainly, Madame! They are the work, the most famous, of Michel Anguier, who died in 1686. The queen saw them, without doubt.”

While the bland weather lasted, we drove out to PÈre Lachaise, passing en route, the Prison de la Roquette, in which condemned prisoners are held until executed. The public place of execution is at its gates. This was a slaughter-pen during the Commune. The murdered citizens,—the Archbishop of Paris, and the curÉ of the Madeleine among them,—were thrown into the fosses communes of PÈre Lachaise. These common ditches, each capable of containing fifty coffins, are the last homes donated by the city of Paris to the poor who cannot buy graves for themselves. One is thankful to learn that the venerable Archbishop and his companions were soon granted worthier burial. Our cocher told us what may, or may not be true, that the last victim of the guillotine suffered here; likewise that one of the fatal machines is still kept within the walls ready for use.

For a mile—perhaps more—before reaching PÈre Lachaise, the streets are lined with shops for the exhibition and sale of flowers,—a few natural, many artificial,—wreaths of immortelles, yellow, white and black, and an incredible quantity of bugle and bead garlands, crosses, anchors, stars and other emblematic devices. Windows, open doors, shelves and pavement are piled with them. Plaster lambs and doves and cherubs, porcelain ditto; small glazed pictures of deceased saints, angels and other creatures; sorrowing women weeping over husbands’ death-beds, empty cradles and little graves,—all framed in gilt or black wood,—are among the merchandise offered to the grief-stricken. A few of the mottoes wrought into the immortelle and bead decorations will give a faint idea of the “Frenchiness” of the display.

“HÉlas!” “À ma chÈre femme,” “ChÈre petite,” “Ah! mon amie,” “Bien-aimÉe,” “ChÉrie,” and every given Christian name known in the Gallic tongue.

The famous Cemetery, which contains nearly 20,000 monuments, great and small, is a curious spectacle to those who have hitherto seen only American and English burial-grounds. PÈre Lachaise is a city of the dead; not “God’s Acre,” or the garden in which precious seed have been committed to the dark, warm, sweet earth in hope of Spring-time and deathless bloom. The streets are badly paved and were so muddy when we were there, that we had to pick our steps warily in climbing the steep avenue beginning at the gates. Odd little constructions, like stone sentry-boxes, rise on both sides of the way. Most of these are surrounded by railings. All have grated doors, through which one can survey the closets within. Flagging floors, plain stone, or plastered walls and ceilings; low shelves or seats at the back, where the meditative mourner may sit to weep her loss, or kneel to pray for the belovÉd soul,—these are the same in each. The monotony of the row is broken occasionally by a chapel, an enlarged and ornate edition of the sentry-box, or a monument resembling in form those we were used to see in other cemeteries. The avenues are rather shady in summer. At our November visit, the boughs were nearly bare, and rotting leaves, trampled in the mud of the thoroughfares, made the place more lugubrious. Really cheerful or beautiful it can never be. The flowers set in the narrow beds between tombs and curbings, scarcely alleviate the severely business-like aspect. Still less is this softened by the multitudinous bugled and beaded ornaments depending from the spikes of iron railings, cast upon sarcophagi, and the marble ledges within the gates. All Soul’s Day was not long past and we supposed this accounted for the superabundance of these offerings. We were informed subsequently that there are seldom fewer than we saw at this date. About and within one burial-closet—a family-tomb—we counted fifty-seven bugle wreaths of divers patterns, in all the hues of the rainbow, besides the conventional black-and-white. The parade of mortuary millinery, for a while absurd, became presently sickening, horribly tawdry and glistening. It was a relief to laugh heartily and naturally when we saw a child pick up a garland of shiny purple beads, and set it rakishly upon the bust of Joseph Fourier, the inclination of the decoration over the left eyebrow making him seem to wink waggishly at us, in thorough enjoyment of the situation.

We wanted to be thoughtful and respectful in presence of the dead, but the achievement required an effort which was but lamely successful. Dispirited we did become, by and by, and fatigued with trampling up steep lanes and cross-alleys. Carriages cannot enter the grounds, and even a partial exploration of them is a weariness. We drooped like the weeping-willow set beside Alfred de Musset’s tomb, before we reached it. An attenuated and obstinately disconsolate weeper is the tree planted in obedience to his request:—

The conditions of the sylvan sentinel whose sprays caressed his bust, were, when we beheld it, comically “according to order.” There were not more than six branches upon the tree, a few sickly leaves hanging to each. At its best the foliage must have been “pale” and the shade exceedingly “light.”

The Gothic chapel roofing in the sarcophagus of Abelard and HeloÏse, was built of stones from the convent of Paraclet, of which HeloÏse was, for nearly half a century, Lady Superior. From this retreat she addressed to her monkish lover letters that might have drawn tears of blood from the heart of a flint; which impelled Abelard to the composition of quires of homilies upon the proper management of the nuns in her charge, including by-laws for conventual housewifery. Under the pointed arches the mediÆval lovers rest, side by side, although they were divided in death by the lapse of twenty-two years. Sarcophagus and effigies are very old, having been long kept among the choice antiquities of a Parisian museum and placed in PÈre Lachaise by the order of Louis Philippe. The monument was originally set up in the Abbey of HeloÏse near the provincial town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where the rifled vault is still shown. Prior and abbess slumbered there for almost seven centuries. Their statues are of an old man and old woman, vestiges of former beauty in the chiseled features; more strongly drawn lines of thought and character in brow, lip, and chin. They wear their conventual robes.

Peripatetic skeletons and ashes are À la mode in this polite country. The “manes,” poets and epitaphs are so fond of apostrophizing, should have lively wits and faithful memories if they would keep the run of their mortal parts.

Marshal Ney has neither sentry-box, nor chapel, nor memorial-tablet. His grave is within a square plat, railed in by an iron fence. The turf is fresh above him, and late autumn roses, lush and sweet, were blooming around. The ivy, which grows as freely in France as brambles and bind-weed with us, made a close, green wall of the railing. We plucked a leaf, as a souvenir. It is twice as large as our ivy-leaves, shaded richly with bronze and purple, and whitely veined, and there were hundreds as fine upon the vine.

One path is known as that of the “artistes,” and is much frequented. Upon Talma’s head-stone is carved a tragic mask. Music weeps over the bust of Bellini and beside Chopin’s grave, and, in bas-relief, crowns the sculptured head of Cherubini. Bernardin de St. Pierre lies near BoÏeldieu, the operatic composer. Denon, Napoleon’s companion in Egypt, and general director of museums under the Empire, sits in bronze, dark and calm as a dead Pharaoh, in the neighborhood of Madame Blanchard, the aËronaut, who perished in her last ascent. There was a picture of the disaster in Parley’s Magazine, forty years ago. I remembered it—line for line, the bursting flame and smoke, the falling figure—at sight of the inscription setting forth her title to artistic distinction. Upon another avenue lie La Fontaine, MoliÈre,—(another itinerant, re-interred here in 1817,) Laplace, the astronomer, and Manuel Garcia, the gifted father of a more gifted daughter,—Malibran. “Around the corner,” we stumbled, as it were, upon the tomb of Madame de Genlis.

Rachel sleeps apart from Gentile dust in the Jewish quarter of PÈre Lachaise. Beside the bare stone closet above her vault is a bush of laurestinus, with glossy green leaves. The floor inside was literally heaped with visiting-cards, usually folded down at one corner to signify that he or she, paying the compliment of a post-mortem morning-call, deposited the bit of pasteboard in person. There was at least a half bushel of these touching tributes to dead-and-gone genius. No flowers, natural or false, no immortelles—no bugle wreaths! Only visiting-cards, many engraved with coronets and other heraldic signs, tremendously imposing to simple Republicans. We examined fifty or sixty, returning them to the closet, with scrupulous care, after inspection. Some admirers had added to name and address, a complimentary or regretful phrase that would have titillated the insatiate vanity of the deceased, could she have read it,—wounded to her death as she had been by the success of her rival Ristori. Her votaries may have had this reminiscence of her last days in mind, and a shadowy idea that her “manes,” in hovering about her grave, would be cognizant of their compassionate courtesies.

Most of the offerings were from what we never got out of the habit of styling “foreigners.” There were a few snobbish-looking English cards,—one with a sentence, considerately scribbled in French—“Mille et mille compliments.” So far as our inspection went, there was not one that bore an American address. Nor did we leave ours as exceptions to this deficiency in National appreciation of genius and artistic power—or National paucity of sentimentality.