ables in the Rue de Limoges, in the Rue
Royale, and in the Avenue Saint-Cloud; to the king's vegetable garden,
comprising twenty-nine gardens and four terraces; to the great dwelling
occupied by 2,000 persons, with other tenements called "Louises" in
which the king assigned temporary or permanent lodgings,--words on paper
render no physical impression of the physical enormity.--At the present
day nothing remains of this old Versailles, mutilated and appropriated
to other uses, but fragments, which, nevertheless, one should go and
see. Observe those three avenues meeting in the great square. Two
hundred and forty feet broad and twenty-four hundred long, and not too
large for the gathering crowds, the display, the blinding velocity
of the escorts in full speed and of the carriages running "at death's
door."[2105] Observe the two stables facing the chateau with their
railings one hundred and ninety-two feet long. In 1682 they cost three
millions, that is to say, fifteen millions to day. They are so ample and
beautiful that, even under Louis XIV himself, they sometimes served as a
cavalcade circus for the princes, sometimes as a theater, and sometimes
as a ball-room. Then let the eye follow the development of the gigantic
semi-circular square which, from railing to railing and from court to
court, ascends and slowly decreases, at first between the hotels of the
ministers and then between the two colossal wings, terminating in
the ostentatious frame of the marble court where pilasters, statues,
pediments, and multiplied and accumulated ornaments, story above story,
carry the majestic regularity of their lines and the overcharged mass of
their decoration up to the sky. According to a bound manuscript bearing
the arms of Mansart, the palace cost 153 million, that is to say, about
750 million francs of to day;[2106] when a king aims at imposing display
this is the cost of his lodging. Now turn the eye to the other side,
towards the gardens, and this self-display becomes the more impressive.
The parterres and the park are, again, a drawing room in the open
air. There is nothing natural of nature here; she is put in order and
rectified wholly with a view to society; this is no place to be alone
and to relax oneself, but a place for promenades and the exchange of
polite salutations. Those formal groves are walls and hangings; those
shaven yews are vases and lyres. The parterres are flowering carpets. In
those straight, rectilinear a