The Grand Trianon alone were we permitted to enter. It is in the form of an Italian villa, with a ground floor only, and long windows opening upon delightful gardens. Like Versailles, it is now a mere show, although a suit of apartments was fitted up here some time since, in anticipation of a neighborly visit from Queen Victoria to Eugenie, making of the little palace a kind of guest chamber, a spare bedroom. As we followed a winding path through the park, we came suddenly upon an open glade, surrounded and shaded by forest trees. Over the tiny lake, in the centre, swans were sailing. Half hidden among the wide-spread, sweeping branches of the trees were the scattered farm-houses of a deserted village--only half a dozen in all, of rude, half Swiss architecture, made to imitate age and decay, quaintly picturesque. Here Marie Antoinette and her court played at poverty. Do you remember how, when she grew weary of solemn state, she came here with a few favored ones to forget her crown, and dream she was a farmer's wife? The dairy was empty, the marble slab bare upon which she made butter for her guests. Just beyond was the mill, but the wheel was still. It was a pleasant dream--a dream of Arcadia. Ah, but there was a fearful awakening! "The poorest peasant in the land," said the queen, "has one little spot which she can call her own; the Queen of France asks no more." So she shut the gates upon the people who had claimed and held the right, from all time, to wander at will through the gardens of their kings. Then they hated her, whom they had greeted with shouts of welcome when she came a bride from over the border. "The Austrian! the Austrian!" they hissed through the closed gates. And one day they dragged her out from a bare cell in the Conciergerie,--no make-believe of rough walls, of coarse fare there,--they bound the slender hands behind her, they thrust into a prison cart the form that had been used to rest upon down and silken cushions, and bore her over the rough stones to the scaffold. Ah, it makes one shudder!
To see the two hundred rooms of the palace of Versailles requires a day, at least; but we, fearful that this might be our last opportunity, determined to spend the remaining hour or two and our last atom of strength in the attempt. A wandering cabman pounced upon us as we came down the avenue from the Trianons, and bore us back to the palace, where we toiled up and down the grand stairway, and peeped into the chapel that had echoed to the mockery of worship in the time of the king who built all this--the king who loved everybody's wife but his own--so faithlessly! There was a dizzy hurrying through corridors lined with statuary, through one _salon_ after another hung with Horace Vernet's paintings describing the glories of France--the crowning of its kings, the reception of its ambassadors, the signing of its treaties, the winning of its battles; but was all this bloodshed, and all this agony depicted upon canvas, for the glory of France? There were immense galleries, where, on every side, from cornice to floor, one was conscious of nothing but smoke and cannon, wounds and gore, and rolling eyes. We walked over the prescribed three miles and a half of floors slippery as ice, and gazed upon the seven miles of pictures, with a feeling less of pleasure or gratified curiosity than of satisfaction at having _done_ Versailles. Room after room was devoted to portraits, full lengths and half lengths, side faces and full fronts; faces to be remembered, if one had not been in such mortal haste, and faces that would never have been missed from the ermined robes. In a quiet corner we were startled to find some of our good presidents staring down upon us from the wall. A mutual surprise it seemed to be. But if we Americans must be awkward and clownish to the last degree, half civilized, and but one remove from barbarism, don't let us put the acme of all this upon canvas, and hang it in the palace of kings. Here was President Grant represented in the saloon of a steamboat,--America to the last,--one leg crossed, one heel upon the opposite knee, and his head about to sink into his coat collar in an agony of terror at finding himself among quality. His attitude might have been considered graceful and dignified in a bar-room, or even in the saloon of a Mississippi steamer; but it utterly failed in both particulars in the Palace of Versailles, among courtly men and high-bred women.