Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge by Stephen Leacock

Author:Stephen Leacock [Leacock, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Published: 2007-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

IV.—A Visit to Versailles

“W HAT!” said the man from Kansas, looking up from his asparagus, “do you mean to say that you have never seen the Palace of Versailles?”

“No,” I said very firmly, “I have not.”

“Nor the fountains in the gardens?”

“No.”

“Nor the battle pictures?”

“No.”

“And the Hall of Mirrors,”—added the fat lady from Georgia.

“And Madame du Barry’s bed”—said her husband.

“Her which,” I asked, with some interest.

“Her bed.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll go.”

I knew, of course, that I had to. Every tourist in Paris has got to go and see

Versailles. Otherwise the superiority of the others becomes insufferable, with foreigners it is different. If they worry one about palaces and cathedrals and such

—the Château at Versailles, and the Kaiserhof and the Duomo at Milan—I answer them in kind. I ask them if they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch at St. Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and

the Toboggo at Montreal. That quiets them wonderfully.

But, as I say, I had to go.

You get to Versailles—as the best of various ways of transport—by means of

a contrivance something between a train and a street car. It has a little puffing steam-engine and two cars—double deckers—with the top deck open to the air

and covered with a wooden roof on rods. The lower part inside is called the first-

class and a seat in it costs ten cents extra. Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it. The engine is a quaint little thing and wears a skirt, painted green, all around it, so that you can just see the tips of its wheels peeping modestly out below. It was a great relief to me to see this engine. It showed that there is such a thing as French delicacy after all. There are so many sights along the boulevards that bring the carmine blush to the face of the tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying to avoid seeing them), that it is well to know that the French draw the line somewhere. The sight of the bare wheels of an engine is too much for them.

The little train whirls its way out of Paris, past the great embankment and the

fortifications, and goes rocking along among green trees whose branches sweep

its sides, and trim villas with stone walls around quaint gardens. At every moment it passes little inns and suburban restaurants with cool arbours in front

of them, and waiters in white coats pouring out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty just to look at them.

In due time the little train rattles and rocks itself over the dozen miles or so

that separate Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right in front of the great stone court-yard of the palace. There through the long hours of a summer afternoon you may feast your eyes upon the wonderland of beauty that rose at the command of the grand monarch, Louis XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland that marked the spot two hundred and fifty years ago.

All that royal munificence could effect was lavished on the making of the palace. So vast is it in size that in the days of its greatest splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates. The sheer length of it from side to side is only about a hundred yards short of half a mile. To make the grounds the King’s chief landscape artist and his hundreds of workers laboured for twenty years. They took in, as it were, the whole landscape. The beauty of their work lies not only in the wonderful terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that extend from the rear

of the Château, but in its blending with the scene beyond. It is so planned that no distant house or building breaks into the picture. The vista ends everywhere with the waving woods of the purple distance.

Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred million dollars on the making of

the palace. When made it was filled with treasures of art not to be measured in

price. It was meant to be, and it remains, the last word of royal grandeur. The King’s court at Versailles became the sun round which gravitated the fate and fortune of his twenty million subjects. Admission within its gates was itself a

mark of royal favour. Now, any person with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris on the double-decked street car and wander about the palace at will. For a five

cent tip to a guide you may look through the private apartments of Marie Antoinette, and for two cents you may check your umbrella while you inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First. For nothing at all you may stand on the vast

terrace behind the Château and picture to yourself the throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two hundred years ago. The palace of the

Kings has become the playground of the democracy.

The palace—or the Château, as it is modestly named—stands crosswise upon

an elevation that dominates the scene for miles around. The whole building throughout is only of three stories, for French architecture has a horror of high buildings. The two great wings of the Château reach sideways, north and south;

and one, a shorter one, runs westwards towards the rear. In the front space between the wings is a vast paved court-yard—the Royal Court—shut in by a massive iron fence. Into this court penetrated, one autumn evening in 1789, the

raging mob led by the women of Paris, who had come to drag the descendant of

the Grand Monarch into the captivity that ended only with the guillotine. Here they lighted their bonfires and here they sang and shrieked and shivered throughout the night. That night of the fifth of October was the real end of monarchy in France.

No one, I think—not even my friend from Kansas who boasted that he had

“put in” three hours at Versailles—could see all that is within the Château. But there are certain things which no tourist passes by. One of them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV, a great series of square apartments all opening sideways into each other with gilded doors as large as those of a barn, and with about as

much privacy as a railway station. One room was the King’s council chamber; next to this, a larger one, was the “wig-room,” where the royal mind selected its wig for the day and where the royal hair-dresser performed his stupendous task.

Besides this again is the King’s bedroom. Preserved in it, within a little fence, still stands the bed in which Louis XIV died in 1715, after a reign of seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily hold three hundred people. Outside of it is a great antechamber, where the courtiers jealously waited their turn to be present

at the King’s “lever,” or “getting up,” eager to have the supreme honour of holding the royal breeches.

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