The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 16

VERSAILLES! It is wonderfully beautiful! You gaze and stare and try to

understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the

Garden of Eden--but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by the world of

beauty around you, and you half believe you are the dupe of an exquisite

dream. The scene thrills one like military music! A noble palace,

stretching its ornamented front, block upon block away, till it seemed

that it would never end; a grand promenade before it, whereon the armies

of an empire might parade; all about it rainbows of flowers, and colossal

statues that were almost numberless and yet seemed only scattered over

the ample space; broad flights of stone steps leading down from the

promenade to lower grounds of the park--stairways that whole regiments

might stand to arms upon and have room to spare; vast fountains whose

great bronze effigies discharged rivers of sparkling water into the air

and mingled a hundred curving jets together in forms of matchless beauty;

wide grass-carpeted avenues that branched hither and thither in every

direction and wandered to seemingly interminable distances, walled all

the way on either side with compact ranks of leafy trees whose branches

met above and formed arches as faultless and as symmetrical as ever were

carved in stone; and here and there were glimpses of sylvan lakes with

miniature ships glassed in their surfaces. And every where--on the

palace steps, and the great promenade, around the fountains, among the

trees, and far under the arches of the endless avenues--hundreds and

hundreds of people in gay costumes walked or ran or danced, and gave to

the fairy picture the life and animation which was all of perfection it

could have lacked.

It was worth a pilgrimage to see. Everything is on so gigantic a scale.

Nothing is small--nothing is cheap. The statues are all large; the

palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are

interminable. All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles

are vast. I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and

these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more

beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be. I know

now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and

that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it

is in reality. I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred

millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so

scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now. He took a

tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this

park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris. He kept 36,000

men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used

to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night. The wife of a

nobleman of the time speaks of this as an "inconvenience," but naively

remarks that "it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of

tranquillity we now enjoy."

I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into

pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and

when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to

feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom

of it. They seek the general effect. We distort a dozen sickly trees

into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room,

and then surely they look absurd enough. But here they take two hundred

thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of

leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the

ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually

they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a

faultless tunnel of foliage is formed. The arch is mathematically

precise. The effect is then very fine. They make trees take fifty

different shapes, and so these quaint effects are infinitely varied and

picturesque. The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and

consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of

monotonous uniformity. I will drop this subject now, leaving it to

others to determine how these people manage to make endless ranks of

lofty forest trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot

and two-thirds); how they make them spring to precisely the same height

for miles; how they make them grow so close together; how they compel one

huge limb to spring from the same identical spot on each tree and form

the main sweep of the arch; and how all these things are kept exactly in

the same condition and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry

month after month and year after year--for I have tried to reason out the

problem and have failed.

We walked through the great hall of sculpture and the one hundred and

fifty galleries of paintings in the palace of Versailles, and felt that

to be in such a place was useless unless one had a whole year at his

disposal. These pictures are all battle scenes, and only one solitary

little canvas among them all treats of anything but great French

victories. We wandered, also, through the Grand Trianon and the Petit

Trianon, those monuments of royal prodigality, and with histories so

mournful--filled, as it is, with souvenirs of Napoleon the First, and

three dead kings and as many queens. In one sumptuous bed they had all

slept in succession, but no one occupies it now. In a large dining room

stood the table at which Louis XIV and his mistress Madame Maintenon, and

after them Louis XV, and Pompadour, had sat at their meals naked and

unattended--for the table stood upon a trapdoor, which descended with it

to regions below when it was necessary to replenish its dishes. In a

room of the Petit Trianon stood the furniture, just as poor Marie

Antoinette left it when the mob came and dragged her and the King to

Paris, never to return. Near at hand, in the stables, were prodigious

carriages that showed no color but gold--carriages used by former kings

of France on state occasions, and never used now save when a kingly head

is to be crowned or an imperial infant christened. And with them were

some curious sleighs, whose bodies were shaped like lions, swans, tigers,

etc.--vehicles that had once been handsome with pictured designs and

fine workmanship, but were dusty and decaying now. They had their

history. When Louis XIV had finished the Grand Trianon, he told

Maintenon he had created a Paradise for her, and asked if she could think

of anything now to wish for. He said he wished the Trianon to be

perfection--nothing less. She said she could think of but one thing--it

was summer, and it was balmy France--yet she would like well to sleigh

ride in the leafy avenues of Versailles! The next morning found miles

and miles of grassy avenues spread thick with snowy salt and sugar, and a

procession of those quaint sleighs waiting to receive the chief concubine

of the gaiest and most unprincipled court that France has ever seen!

From sumptuous Versailles, with its palaces, its statues, its gardens,

and its fountains, we journeyed back to Paris and sought its antipodes

--the Faubourg St. Antoine. Little, narrow streets; dirty children

blockading them; greasy, slovenly women capturing and spanking them;

filthy dens on first floors, with rag stores in them (the heaviest

business in the Faubourg is the chiffonier's); other filthy dens where

whole suits of second and third-hand clothing are sold at prices that

would ruin any proprietor who did not steal his stock; still other filthy

dens where they sold groceries--sold them by the half-pennyworth--five

dollars would buy the man out, goodwill and all. Up these little crooked

streets they will murder a man for seven dollars and dump the body in the

Seine. And up some other of these streets--most of them, I should say

--live lorettes.

All through this Faubourg St. Antoine, misery, poverty, vice, and crime

go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every

side. Here the people live who begin the revolutions. Whenever there is

anything of that kind to be done, they are always ready. They take as

much genuine pleasure in building a barricade as they do in cutting a

throat or shoving a friend into the Seine. It is these savage-looking

ruffians who storm the splendid halls of the Tuileries occasionally, and

swarm into Versailles when a king is to be called to account.

But they will build no more barricades, they will break no more soldiers'

heads with paving-stones. Louis Napoleon has taken care of all that. He

is annihilating the crooked streets and building in their stead noble

boulevards as straight as an arrow--avenues which a cannon ball could

traverse from end to end without meeting an obstruction more irresistible

than the flesh and bones of men--boulevards whose stately edifices will

never afford refuges and plotting places for starving, discontented

revolution breeders. Five of these great thoroughfares radiate from one

ample centre--a centre which is exceedingly well adapted to the

accommodation of heavy artillery. The mobs used to riot there, but they

must seek another rallying-place in future. And this ingenious Napoleon

paves the streets of his great cities with a smooth, compact composition

of asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flagstones--no more

assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles. I cannot feel friendly

toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon III., especially at this

time,--[July, 1867.]--when in fancy I see his credulous victim,

Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow

watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never

come--but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his shrewd good

sense.