What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter's wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its [pg 093] hiding-places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble MoliÈre, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun's warmth to the earth in spring-time.

But we are beginning at the end. Versailles is identified to us chiefly if not solely with Louis Quatorze and his age; but it was not so from the beginning. Once upon a time it was a marshy swamp, unhealthy and uncultivated; and, if we deny Louis the faculty of creating men of genius, we cannot refuse him that of having evolved an Eden from a wilderness. There is little indeed in the history of this early period to compensate the reader for keeping him waiting while we review it, still it is better to cast our glance back a little, not very far, a century or so, to see what were the antecedents of the site of one of the grandest historic monuments of France.

In the year 1561, Martial de LomÉnie was seigneur of Versailles, and was frequently honored by the visits of Henri de Navarre, who went out to hunt the stag in his subject's swampy wilderness. De LomÉnie sold it to Albert de Gondy, MarÉchal de Retz, who in his turn was honored by the presence of his sovereign, Louis XIII., there. Louis was in the habit of indulging his favorite pastime at Versailles, but, beyond placing his land and his game at the disposal of the king, the marÉchal seems to have shown scant hospitality to the royal hunter. Saint-Simon tells us that during these excursions Louis usually slept in a windmill or in a dingy inn, whose only customers were the wagoners who journeyed across that out-of-the-way place. Of the two lodgings he inclines to think the windmill was the most comfortable. Louis probably found neither quarters very luxurious, for in 1627 he purchased a piece of ground which had been in the Soisy family since the fourteenth century, and built himself a hunting-lodge on the ruins of an old manor-house there, to the great discomfiture of a large colony of owls who had made themselves at home in the moss-grown ruin. Bassompierre deplores the vandalism which swept away the venerable shelter of the owls, and declares that after all the lodge was but a sorry improvement on the windmill, being “too shabby a dwelling for even a plain gentilhomme to take conceit in.” Such as it was, it satisfied the king, and remained untouched till it was swallowed up in the great palace which was to embody all the glories of the ensuing reign. When Louis Quatorze conceived the design of building Versailles, he confided the execution of his vast idea to Mansard, laying down, however, as a primary condition that the shabby little hunting-lodge of the late king should be preserved, and comprised in the new structure. Mansard declared that this was impossible, to which Louis, with true kingly logic, replied coolly: Raison de plus.66 No argument of artistic beauty or common sense could move him from his resolution, or induce him to sanction the demolition of the quaint little building that his father had raised. Rather than be guilty of such an unfilial act, he said he would give up the notion of his new palace altogether. Mansard had nothing for it but to give way, and pledge himself [pg 094] that the ugly red-brick lodge should stand somehow and somewhere in the magnificent pile that was already reared in his imagination. The only concession he obtained was that it should be concealed, if this were possible. Mansard swore he would make it possible, and he kept his word. The lodge of Louis XIII. was swallowed up in the elaborate stone-work of that part of the palace facing the Avenue de Paris, and remains to this day an enduring if not a very sensible proof of the filial respect of Louis XIV. This was the one solitary impediment that Louis threw in the architect's way; in everything else he gave him carte blanche, power unlimited, and all but unlimited wealth to work out his fantastic and superb conception. Simultaneously with this mighty fabric another work of almost equal magnitude had to be undertaken; this was the planting of the park and the gardens. The country for miles around the site of the palace was a swamp abounding with reptiles, and reeking with vapors of so deadly a character that the men employed in draining it died like flies of a malaria that raged like a pestilence for months together. They refused after a time to continue the work, though enormous wages were offered, and it was found necessary at last, under pain of abandoning it, to press men into the service as for the army in time of war. No accurate statistics are extant as to the number of victims who perished in the execution of this royal freak; but the most authentic opinions of the time put it at the astounding figure of twenty thousand. So much for the good old times of the ancien rÉgime, that we are apt to invest with a sort of pathetic prestige. What were the lives of so many vilains67 and the tears and hunger of innumerable vilaines, widows and orphans of the dead men, in comparison to the supreme pleasure of the king and the accomplishment of his omnipotent will? The death-sweat of these human cattle rained upon the swamp, and in due time it was' made wholesome, purified as so many foul spots upon the earth are by the sweat of toil and sorrow, and fitted to grow flowers and green trees that would diffuse their fragrance and spread pleasant shade where corruption and barrenness had dwelt.

Le Notre, that prince of gardeners, may be truly said to have created the pleasure-grounds of Versailles; nature had thrown many obstacles in his way, she thwarted him at every step, but her obstinate resistance only stimulated his genius to loftier flights and his indomitable energy to stronger efforts. He conquered in the end. Never was conquest more fully appreciated than Le Notre's by his royal master. Louis not only rewarded him with more than princely liberality, but admitted him to his personal intimacy, treating the plebeian artist with an affectionate familiarity that he never extended to the high and mighty courtiers who looked on in envy and admiration. Le Notre was too little of a courtier himself to value adequately the honor of the king's condescension, but he loved the man, and took no pains to conceal it; there was an expansive bonhomie, a native simplicity in his character, that, contrasting as it did with the artificial atmosphere of the court, charmed Louis, and he would listen with delight to the honest fellow's garrulity while he related, with naÏve satisfaction, the tale of his early struggles and the difficult and hardy triumphs of his talent and perseverance. Versailles was, of course, to be the crowning achievement of his life, and nothing [pg 095] could exceed the diligence and ardor that he brought to bear on it. He besought the king not to inspect the works while they were in the progressive stage, but to wait, once he had seen the disposition of the ground, till they were advanced to a certain point. Louis humored him by consenting, though greatly against his inclination. He kept his word faithfully in spite of all temptations of curiosity and impatience; contenting himself with questioning Le Notre, at stated times, as to how things were getting on, but never once, in his frequent and regular visits of inspection to the palace, did he set foot within the forbidden precincts. The day came at last when his forbearance was to be rewarded. Le Notre invited him to enter the closed doors. Louis came, and found that the reality far outstripped his most sanguine expectations; he was in raptures with all he beheld, and declared himself abundantly rewarded for his patience. Le Notre, no less enchanted than the king, walked on beside his chair, doing the honors of the gardens and the park, and listening with a swelling heart to the exclamations of delight that greeted every fresh view that opened in the landscape. It seemed, indeed, as if a whole army of fairies had been at work to bring such a paradise out of chaos; long rows of stately full-grown trees, brought from a distance and transplanted into the arid soil, had taken root and were flourishing as in their native earth; winding paths intersected majestic avenues, and led the visitor, unexpectedly, to richly planted groves, where marble fauns hid coyly, as if frightened to be caught by the sunlight in their unveiled beauty; all the elves in fairyland, all the gods in Olympia, were here congregated, now astray in the green tangle of the wood, now standing in majestic groups, or peeping singly through an opening in the foliage as if they were playing hide-and-seek; water-nymphs, dashing the soft spray round their naked limbs, started unexpectedly from nooks and corners, cooling the air that was heavy with the scent of flowers; the rush of the cascade answered the laughing ripple of the fountain; from bower to bower there came a concert of water-music, such as no mortal ear had ever heard before; it was, indeed, a sight to set before a king, and the gardener might well rejoice who had worked these wonders in the desert.

Le Notre had been all this time trotting briskly by the king's rolling-chair. When they had gone over the enchanted region, Louis said: “You are tired, my friend; get up here beside me, and let us go over it all once more.”

And Le Notre, without more ado, jumped up beside the king, and they began it all over again, as the children say of their favorite stories. He explained to Louis how he nearly despaired of ever getting that birch-grove right, owing to a bed of rock that would not be dislodged to make room for it; now and then he would catch the king by the sleeve, and bid him shut his eyes and not open them till they came to a certain point, when he would cry VoilÀ!—demeaning himself altogether like a true child of nature, and enjoying thoroughly the sympathy of the companion who, for the time being, a common delight made kindred with him. Suddenly, however, it seems to have dawned upon him that he was riding side by side with the king of France. He rubbed his hands, and exclaimed with childlike glee: “What a proud day this is in my life!” And then, as the tears came unchecked into his honest eyes, he added: “And if my good old father [pg 096] could but see me, what a happy one it would be!”

Louis, entering into the son's emotion, made him talk on about his old father, and listened with profound interest to the story of their humble life in common. He wanted to give Le Notre letters-patent of nobility, and so raise all his family to the rank of gentilshommes, but the offer was gratefully declined; it would have been a temptation to most men, but it was not to Le Notre; he had no ambitions of a worldly cast; his sole aspirations were those of a man of genius, and he preferred retaining the name of his father and ennobling it by a higher title than it was in the power of kings to bestow.

As soon as the palace and the grounds were finished, Louis came and took up his abode at Versailles. Then began that series of fÊtes and pageants that makes the annals of that time read like the description of a long carnival. One of the most gorgeous of these fÊtes was a sort of carrousel, given in 1664, when no less than five hundred guests were conveyed to Versailles in the king's suite and at his expense—no small matter in the days when railways were unknown, and carriages drawn by six or eight horses were the only mode of travelling for persons of rank. The king played the part of “Roger” in the carrousel, and came riding on a white charger, magnificently caparisoned, all the court diamonds being given up to the adornment of rider and steed; he advanced at the head of a cavalcade of two hundred knights, after which came a golden chariot, called the “Chariot of the Sun,” and filled with shepherds and many mythological personages; the three queens, namely, the queen-dowager Anne d'Autriche, the reigning queen, and the Queen of England, widow of Charles I., surrounded by three hundred ladies of the rank and beauty of France, assisted at the entrance of the tournament, while a vast concourse of enthusiastic spectators added by their presence to the enlivenment of the scene. At night “four thousand huge torches” illuminated the gardens; the supper was spread by nymphs and fauns, while Pan and Diana, “advancing on a moving mountain,” came down to preside over the festive board. Not the least noteworthy episode of the entertainment, which lasted seven days, was the representation of MoliÈre's Princesse d'Elide and the first three acts of Tartuffe, played now for the first time. The earlier fÊtes at Versailles were marked by the presence of the greatest and fairest names that illustrated the reign of Louis Quatorze, so fertile throughout in celebrities.

Foremost in the gay and brilliant throng stands the figure of the one woman whom Louis ever really loved, the pale and pensive Louise de la ValliÈre, she who was in reality the goddess of this gorgeous temple, but who, in the words of Mme. de SÉvignÉ, “hid herself in the grass like a violet,” and whose modesty and humility in the midst of her erring triumphs drew from all hearts the pardon she never wrung from her own uncompromising conscience.

All the glories of France flocked to Versailles as to a shrine where they did homage and were glorified in turn. At every step we meet the majestic figure of the Grand Monarque. See him at the top of the great stair, calling out to the Grand CondÉ, who toils painfully up the marble steps, bending under the weight of years and the fatigues of war: “Take your time, cousin; you are too heavily laden with laurels to walk fast; we can wait for you.” Not a room, or [pg 097] a terrace, or a gallery but has a witness to bring forth of the king's courtesy or the king's magnificence. There is the cabinet du roi, where he used to work at the affairs of state with his ministers, not one of whom worked as hard as the king himself. His ministers were not his tools nevertheless; despotic as he was, Louis let them hold their own against him, and when they had justice on their side he could yield gracefully to the opposition and respect the courage that prompted it. Witness the scene between him and his Chancellor Voisin, which took place in this same cabinet du roi. One of the most disreputable men of that not very reputable court, by dint of intrigue, obtained from Louis a promise of lettres de grÂce. Next day, when the chancellor came in to his usual work, the king desired him to affix the great seals to the document, which was ready prepared. Voisin looked over it first conscientiously as was his custom, and then flatly refused to obey the king's command, denouncing the grant of the lettres de grÂce to such a man as an abuse of the royal privilege. Louis replied that his word was pledged, and it was too late now to discuss the unworthiness of the subject; he put forward his hand, and, seeing that Voisin did not move, he took the seals himself and affixed them to the deed. The chancellor looked on in silence, but, when Louis handed him back the badge of office, he drew away his hand, and said haughtily: “They are polluted; I will never take them back.”

“What a man!” exclaimed Louis, with a glance of frank admiration at his sturdy minister, and he flung the deed into the fire.

Voisin quietly took up the seals, and went on with his work as if nothing had occurred to interrupt it.

It was in the cabinet du roi that Louis took leave of the Duc d'Anjou, on the eve of his departure for Spain, with those memorable words: “Partez, mon fils, il n'y a plus de PyrÉnÉes!”68

But it is in the Salle du TrÔne that the Grand Monarque appears to us in his most congenial attitude; here we see him in his true element, playing the king as the world never saw it played before, and assuredly never will again; here all the potentates of the earth came and greeted him spontaneously as le roi, as if he were the only real king, and they his vassals, or, at least, his humble imitators. One day we see the ambassador of the Dey of Algiers presenting in his name “a little present of twelve Arab steeds, and humbly praying that the mighty majesty of France would deign to accept them, seeing that King Solomon himself had accepted the leg of the grasshopper tendered to him by the ant.”

On another occasion, we see the stately Doge of Genoa advancing to pay his court; Louis questions him concerning the behavior of the courtiers to him, and the doge replies: “Truly, if the King of France steals away the liberty of our hearts, his courtiers take care to restore it.” The king suspects the reply to be provoked by some discourtesy on the part of his entourage, and, having investigated the matter and found that Louvois and De Croissy had demeaned themselves with unseemly hauteur to the sensitive stranger, he severely rebuked them in the presence of the whole court.

It was here, no doubt, seated on his golden throne, that Louis received the chief of ChÂteaubriand's tale, and astonished him by the splendor of his state, and sent the noble savage [pg 098] back to his home in the far West to relate to the awe-stricken children of the forest the wonders of the great French chief “whose superb wigwam he had beheld.”

The Salle du Sacre is less exclusive in its associations, the presence of the grand roi being thrown into the shade by the subsequent military glory of the grande armÉe. David has covered the walls with the chief events of Napoleon's career, beginning with the first consulship, and continuing through the triumphal march of the Empire. When the first series of these immense pictures was shown to Napoleon, he, startled by their magnitude, of which he was probably a better judge than of their talent, turned to the painter, and exclaimed: “Now I must build a palace to lodge them!”

The Salle des Amiraux, which, as its name indicates, is consecrated to the memory of the naval heroes of France, was formerly the room of the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV. So little is known of this prince beyond the fact that he was the direct antithesis of his father in habits and character, that the following anecdote may be found interesting as connected with him:

The dauphin, like most princes of his time, was passionately fond of the chase. On one occasion he set out on a hunting expedition accompanied by a large party, and towards nightfall he and one of his equerries got separated from the rest, and found themselves astray in a dense wood, where they wandered for some hours without meeting any signs of human habitation. They came at last upon a small cottage, which, from its isolated position and shabby appearance, he set down as most likely a rendezvous of robbers, that part of the country being much frequented by these worthies. They were well armed, however, and determined to risk the barbarous hospitality of the thieves rather than pass the night amidst the snakes and other uncomfortable inmates of the woods. They knocked at the door, first meekly, then more peremptorily, and at last furiously; getting no answer, they resolved to break open the house, and began hammering away vigorously with the but-end of their guns at the shaky old door. At this crisis a window opened somewhere, and a voice, that quavered with fright, besought the burglars to go away, as they would find nothing in so poor a lodging to repay their trouble. Summoned to say whom it belonged to, the voice replied that it was that of the curÉ of the neighboring hamlet, whereupon the huntsmen begged him to come down and spare them further trouble by opening the door himself. After much expostulation the host obeyed, and then his guests desired him to serve the best he had for their supper; there was no use protesting with visitors who had such formidable arguments on their shoulders and glistening in their belts, so the curÉ obeyed with the best grace he could. There was nothing substantial in the larder, he declared, but a leg of mutton, which the gentlemen were welcome to if they would undertake to cook it and let him go back to his bed. This they agreed to, with great good-humor and many courteous thanks, and the old priest, after showing them where to find food and shelter for their horses, wished them a good appetite and betook himself to his couch, marvelling much at the sudden gentleness and courtesy of these singular burglars who had made their entry in so boisterous and uncivil a manner. The burglars, meantime, did full justice to his hospitality and their own cooking, and, having supped [pg 099] heartily, flung themselves at full length on the floor, and were soon sound asleep—sounder, no doubt, than their host, whose slumbers, if he slept at all, were most likely disturbed by visions of highwaymen arresting and murdering the king's subjects or throttling honest folk in their beds, and such like unrefreshing dreams. The good man was up betimes, and while the hunters were still fast asleep he slipt out to seek some breakfast for them. Meantime the hunt, which had been in pursuit of the prince all night, perceived the little wreath of smoke that curled up from the curÉ's chimney on the clear morning air, and at once made for the point whence it proceeded, sounding the horn as it approached. The prince and his companions started to their feet at the first note of the welcome signal, rushed to their horses, and were in the saddle and far out of sight before their host returned from his foraging expedition. Great was his surprise to find the birds had flown, but he was glad to be rid of them, and on such easy terms, for they had carried off nothing—the house was just as he had left it. It was not a thing to boast of, having harbored a couple of highwaymen for a night, though they had behaved so considerately to him—the curÉ, therefore, kept the adventure to himself. But he had not heard the last of it. The next day a messenger came in hot haste from Versailles with a summons for him to appear without further delay before the king. Terrified out of his five wits, and knowing full well what had brought this judgment upon him, the worthy old priest took up his stick and asked no questions, but forthwith made his way to the palace. He was conducted at once to the Salle du TrÔne, where Louis, surrounded by the rank and blood of France, was seated as for some solemn ceremonial on his chair of state. He bent a stern gaze on the curÉ, and in accents that made the culprit's soul shake within him, demanded how it came to pass that a man of his holy calling made his house a rendezvous for midnight robbers who prowled about the country, disturbing honest subjects and breaking the king's laws. The curÉ fell upon his knees, and humbly confessing cowardly concealment of a fact that he was in conscience bound to have denounced at once to the nearest magistrate, pleaded, nevertheless, that the bearing of those malefactors was so noble and their manners so courteous that he had doubts as to whether they were indeed such and not rather two knights of his majesty's court; whereupon Louis bade the malefactors come forward, and, introducing them by name to the bewildered curÉ, enjoined him to be less cautious another time in opening his doors to benighted gentlemen.

“And in payment of the leg of mutton which my son was so unmannerly as to confiscate on you,” continued the king, “I name you Grand Prieur, with the revenues and privileges attached to the office.” This was assuredly the highest price that ever a leg of mutton fetched.

The chambre  coucher de la reine69 plays a distinct part of its own in the annals of Versailles. We forget its first occupant, the gentle, long-suffering Marie ThÉrÈse, of whom, on hearing of her death, Louis Quatorze exclaimed: “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me!” we forget the longer-suffering wife of Louis Quinze, the charitable Marie Leczinska, surnamed by the people “the good queen”; we lose sight of all the august figures who pass before us in the retrospect of this royal chamber, and see only [pg 100] Marie Antoinette, the haughty sovereign, the heroic mother and devoted wife, who has made it all her own. We see her, woke out of her sleep, and the cries of the mob menacing the palace in the dead of the night, and flying hardly dressed from the chambre de la reine to take refuge in the dauphin's apartment, while the faithful guards dispute with their lives the entrance of her own to the mad multitude that have now broken in like a destroying torrent and are close upon the threshold. The walls seem still to echo the cry of those two brave guards as they fell: “Save the queen! Save the queen!” The great tragedy that was to change the whole destinies of France may be said to have begun on this terrible night of the 6th of October.

The chambre À coucher du roi70 is, on the other hand, filled with Louis Quatorze to the exclusion of all other memories. Here was performed that solemn comedy in which the warriors and statesmen of the day took their part so gravely: the lever and coucher de roi. When we read the minute details given in the chronicles of the time of the ceremonial gone through by his courtiers every time the king got in and out of bed, it is a severe tax on our credulity to believe that the dramatis personÆ who played the farce so seriously were not fools or grinning idiots, but sane and sober men whose lineage was second only in blue-blooded antiquity to that of CÆsar himself, men of talent, men of genius, heroes who fought their country's battles and deemed it no derogation to come from the field of glory and fight for the honor of handing the king his stockings or his pantaloons. This proud noblesse whom Richelieu could not conquer by the sword or subdue by tortures and imprisonment, lay down at the feet of Louis, and, it is hardly a figure of speech to say, licked them. They appear to have looked upon him, not as a mortal like themselves, however elevated above them in rank and power, but as a god, a being altogether apart from them in species. One is tempted to believe that both they and he must occasionally have been possessed with some vague notion that it was so; there is no other way of accounting for the servile worship which they tendered as a duty, and which he accepted as a due. Truly that famous “L'État c'est moi!”71 sounds more of a god than a man; and that other utterance of Louis, Messieurs, j'ai failli attendre!72 addressed to the proudest nobility in Europe, who were barely in their places when the flourish of trumpets announced the king's entrance, is scarcely less grotesque in its superhuman pride.

This great and little coucher which was surrounded by so much prestige in the court of France was somewhat ridiculed by contemporary sovereigns, for the honor of humanity be it said; their admiration for Louis did not go the length of viewing the august ceremonial otherwise than in the light of a bore or a joke. When Frederick the Great heard from his ambassador an account of the first grand lever at which he assisted at Versailles, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, and exclaimed: “Well, if I were king of France, I would certainly hire some small king to go through all that for me!”

Considering how eagerly his courtiers contended for the honor of dressing the king's person, one [pg 101] would have fancied the privilege of making his bed would have been proportionately coveted, and held second only to the honor of holding his majesty's boots; but, such is the inconsistency of human beings, this was not the case. The courtiers probably felt that a line should be drawn somewhere, so they drew it here; they would not perform this menial office for the Grand Monarque, and the distinction of turning his mattresses and spreading his quilt devolved on valets of a lower grade. Among this inferior herd was one named MoliÈre, a youth whom his comrades laughed at and treated as a sort of crazy creature who was always in the moon. One day when it happened to be his turn to spread the royal sheets, the poet Belloc overheard them chaffing him and refusing to help him in his work. He went up to MoliÈre, and said: “Monsieur de MoliÈre, will you do me the honor of allowing me to help you to make the king's bed?” and MoliÈre granted the request. The incident came to the king's ear and led to his noticing the eccentric valet. A little later, and we see him standing behind the valet's chair in this same room, where his majesty's dinner was sometimes served, and waiting upon him, while the courtiers who had refused to sit at table with MoliÈre stood round, looking on in “mute consternation at the strange spectacle,” Saint-Simon tells us, who owns naÏvely to sharing their consternation.

“Since none of my courtiers will admit Monsieur de MoliÈre to their table,” said Louis, “I must needs set him down at mine, and show them that I count it an honor for the King of France to wait upon so great a man.”

Here, in this bed that Belloc and MoliÈre had made together, Louis Quatorze died. From under the crimson and gold canopy which had witnessed the eternal levers and couchers, Louis rebuked the violent grief of two young pages who stood within the balustrade, that sanctum sanctorum which none under a prince of the blood or a high chancellor dare pass at any other time; they were weeping bitterly. “What!” exclaimed the king, “did ye, then, think I was immortal?” There was a time when he himself seemed to have thought so; but viewed by that vivid light that breaks through the mists of death, things wore a different aspect in his eyes; and the adulation which would fain have treated him as immortal, and which was during life as the breath of his nostrils to Louis, showed now as the empty bubble that it was.

No one ever again slept in the bed which had been honored by the last sigh of the Grand Monarque; the room remained henceforth unoccupied, and, with the exception of the pictures which have been removed, is still just as he left it. Louis carried his favorite pictures about with him wherever he went. “David,” by Domenichino, his best beloved of them all, is now to be seen at the Louvre; otherwise little has been altered in the chambre du roi; the bed and the ruelle are in their old place, also the table, on which a cold collation was laid every night in case of the king's awaking and feeling hungry; this precautionary little meal was called the en cas; and the name with the habit, which had given rise to it, is still perpetuated in many old-fashioned French families. Louis Quinze, from some superstitious feeling, could never bring himself to sleep in the death-chamber of his illustrious great-grandfather; he took possession of what was then the salle de billiard, a noble room opening [pg 102] into the oeil-de-boeuf (bull's eye), so called from its having an oeil-de-boeuf over the large window at the north end. In an alcove in this billiard hall, Louis XV. died. The adjoining oeil-de-boeuf was filled with the courtiers, who dare not venture within the polluted atmosphere of the royal chamber, but stood outside it, consulting together in “guilty whispers” as to what they ought to do; dreading on one hand the reward of their cowardice if the king should recover, and fearing on the other to fly too soon with their servile congratulations to his successor. In the great court below another crowd was assembled, watching in breathless silence for the signal which was to proclaim the king's death. What a spectacle it was!—what a lesson for a king! The flatterers who yesterday had been his slaves, pandering to his vices, and helping to make him the abject creature that he was, abandoned him now that he was struggling with grim Death, and, all absorbed in selfish cares for their own interest, in speculations of the favor of the new king, they had no pity in their hearts for the master who could pay them no more. It came at last, the signal; the small flame of a candle was seen flickering through the darkness, and then held up at the window of the oeil-de-boeuf. “Suddenly there was a noise,” says the historian of that ghastly scene, “like a roll of thunder, it was the courtiers rushing from the antechamber of the dead king to greet his successor.” Only his daughters had been brave enough to stand by the bedside of the dying man, and, now that he was gone, there was not one in all that multitude who could be induced to perform the last office of mercy towards his poor remains. It was imperative, nevertheless, that the body should be embalmed, and this appalling task devolved upon AndouillÉ, the late king's surgeon. The Duc de Villequier went up to him and reminded him of it; he knew that the operation must insure certain death to the operator, but that was not his concern.

“It is your duty, monsieur,” said the duke; and he was coolly turning away when AndouillÉ stopped him. “Yes,” he replied, “it is my duty, and it is yours to hold the head.” De Villequier had forgotten this; he made no answer, but left the room, and nothing more was said about the embalmment. The body was hustled into a coffin, and smuggled rather than conveyed in the dead of the night to S. Denis, a few menials accompanying the King of France to his last resting-place. The spirit of French loyalty may be said to have been buried with Louis Quinze; “the divinity that doth hedge a king” was that night laid low in France, wrapped in the shroud that covered the unutterable mass of corruption consigned like a dog to the ready-made grave in S. Denis. Le roi could never again be to the nation what he had been heretofore. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!73 ceased to be the watchword of its fealty; le roi, that being invested not merely with supreme authority, but with a sort of vague personal sacredness that has no parallel in modern loyalty, died with Louis Quinze, never to be resuscitated. The miserable death of the libertine prince, fit ending to an ignoble life, came upon his people in the light of a divine judgment, swift and awful, and dealt the last blow at that prestige which had for generations been the bulwark of king-worship and shaded with its mysterious reverence the iniquities of the throne. No man suffers alone for his sins, but [pg 103] how much more truly may this be said of kings! Who could measure the depth of the gulf that Louis XV. had dug through his long reign for those who were to come after him, and realize the consequences of his evil deeds to future generations of Frenchmen? There is no greater fallacy than to attribute to an age the responsibility of its own destinies; none probably ever saw the beginning and end of its own history, for good or evil, but less than any other can the period of the Revolution be said to have witnessed this unity. We must look much further back to trace the rising of the red flood that inundated France in '93. It was the insane extravagance of Louis XIV.'s reign and the official depravity of the succeeding one that sowed the harvest that was to be reaped in fire by the innocent victims of a corruption which for a whole century had been seething as in the caldron of the Prophet's vision, till it boiled over in the mad frenzy of the Revolution, and swallowed up not only the monarch, but the soul and reason of France, in a deluge of exasperated hate and suicidal revenge. Louis Seize, the martyred king who was to expiate the follies and crimes of his predecessors, next passes before us along the galleries of Versailles. There is an interval of peace, a short halcyon time of pastorals and idyls, we see Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess in Arcadia, we hear Trianon ringing with the music of her light-hearted laughter, we see her choosing a friend,74 and braving the jealous anger that makes a crime of her friendship though it be wise, and rebukes her mirth though it be innocent; but the queen turns a deaf ear to all warning sounds and shuts her eyes to the gathering clouds. Imprudent Marie Antoinette! Ill-adapted wife of timid, hesitating, magnanimous Louis Seize, the Bourbon of whom it was written with truth:

He loved and forgave to the end, but he never learned to punish. Warnings were not wanting, but he would not heed them. See him standing in the embrasure of the window of that cabinet du roi whence Louis Quatorze ruled the kings and peoples of Europe; a new power has arisen; it is the people's turn to rule the king, his brow is clouded, his lip trembles, not with fear—that base emotion never stirred the soul of Louis Seize—but with anguish, perplexity, doubts in himself that amounted to despair. He listens to the murmurs of the crowd down below; and to De BrÉzÉ, who repeats, in tremulous accents, Mirabeau's message of tremendous import: “Go tell the king that the will of the people has brought us here, and nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence!” That force he knew full well would never be appealed to; it was not the people who should be driven hence, it was they who would drive the king. Presently we see the ponderous state coach jolting slowly down the Avenue de Paris, the first stage of the royal martyrs towards the guillotine; the mob, in a frenzy of drunken triumph, jostled it from side to side, pressing rudely through the windows to stare at their victims, and insulting them by thrusting the red cap into their faces, and shouting as they go: “The baker and the bakeress! now we have caught them, and the people shall have bread!” This journey dates a new era in the annals of Versailles, it is the death-knell of the pleasant days of royalty; [pg 104] there are to be no more fÊtes pastorales at Trianon, no more merry children of France careering over the flowery terraces, making the sombre alleys bright and the gay flowers brighter with the sweet melody of child laughter; all this is gone, and passed like a dream. “The old order of things has vanished, making place for the new.” Soon we shall see the palace of Louis Quatorze stripped of its costly furniture, invaded by the rabble, and pillaged from garret to cellar. The Convention will deem it right to utilize the “foregoing abode of the tyrants” by turning it into a hospital; they will transport the invalids to Versailles, but the rheumatic old heroes will find the apartments of the Grand Monarque too grand to be comfortable, they will complain of their pains and aches being aggravated by the draughts, and beg to be taken back to their homely quarters, and the Convention, in its benevolence, will accede to the request.

Louis XVIII. was anxious to fix his residence at Versailles, and went the length of spending six millions of francs on repairing the faÇade, which had been sadly battered by the Revolution, but he found that the expense of refurnishing the palace would have been too much for the exhausted finances of France; so he gave up the idea.

Louis Philippe restored it to its ancient splendor, but not for his own use; he made it over to the nation as a museum, where they might go and enjoy themselves, and see all the glories of their country commemorated. Many of the victories of the grande armÉe were painted to his order to complete the series already decorating the walls. Versailles has retained ever since this national character. Under the Second Empire it was used occasionally for fÊtes given to foreign princes; the most magnificent of these was the one prepared for the Queen of England when she visited Napoleon III. after his marriage.

France has undergone many strange vicissitudes, and her palaces have harbored many unlikely guests; but among the strangest on record none can assuredly compete with the recent experiences of Versailles. If the spirit of Louis XIV. be permitted sometimes to haunt the scene of his earthly pride, what must his feelings have been during the last two years! What did he feel on beholding the halls which had echoed to his conquering step held by the victorious soldiers of Germany, and vacated by them to make way for the President of the French Republic? But this crowning enormity stopped short at the threat. The chambre du roi was indeed placed at the disposal of the President, but whether it was that he shrank from the profanation, or feared the vast proportions of the great king's palace, as likely to prove too large a frame for the representative of a republic, he declined taking up his abode there. Versailles continues still to be the resort of the people and of travellers from all parts of the world.