collation,
it was a beautiful spectacle to see so many
charming women wandering in the midst of
the flowers on the terrace rising from the
banks of the canal. The air was so rich
with the mingled perfume of violets, orange
flowers, jessamines, tuberoses, hyacinths
and narcissuses that the King and his
visitors were sometimes obliged to fly from the
overpowering sweets. The flowers in the
parterres were arranged in a thousand
different figures, which were constantly
changed, so that one might have supposed
it to be the work of some fairy, who, passing
over the gardens, threw upon them each time
a new robe aglow with color."

In the salons and copses where Louis the
Great basked in the somewhat chary smiles
of his latest (and last) favorite, his
grandson, the fifteenth of his name, was to install
the fascinating Madame de Pompadour.
The very apartments once dedicated to the
use of Madame de Maintenon, and later to
Queen Marie Leczinska, became the living-rooms
of the reigning mistress of the heart
of Louis XV.

The Revolution spared the Grand Trianon.
But under pretext of restoring it and
rendering it, according to their tastes, more
habitable, Napoleon First and Louis
Philippe spared it less. The last king of France
commanded in 1836 the architectural changes
necessary to convert the Trianon into the
royal residence, in place of the chateau of
Versailles. He stayed here for the last time
in the winter of 1848, before departing for
Dreux. But, despite changes and mutilations,
the facade and the interior of the
rose-colored palace retain the stamp of the
Great King who sponsored the Gallery of
Mirrors, the Antechamber of the Bull's Eye,
and the Chapel at Versailles.

CHAPTER V

A DAY WITH THE SUN KING

Louis the Magnificent, we must agree with that profuse and sharp-witted
chronicler, the Duke of Saint-Simon, was made for a brilliant Court. "In
the midst of other men, his figure, his courage, his grace, his beauty,
his grand mien, even the tone of his voice and the majestic and natural
charm of all his person, distinguished him till his death as the King
Bee, and showed that if he had been born only a simple private gentleman,
he would have excelled in fetes, pleasures and gallantry. . . . He
liked splendor, magnificence and profusion in everything. Nobody ever
approached his magnificence."

With sumptuous detail the King's day progressed at Versailles, from the
formal "rising" to the