must have been at this point
that we fortified ourselves with the gingerbread.

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