being tapestried as such, so
as not to be immediately seen,--a style of finish that is quite usual in
French houses. It was owing to this circumstance that Marie Antoinette
made her escape, undetected, to the King's chamber, the night the palace
was entered by the fish-women.

We saw the rooms in which Louis XIV. and Louis XV. died. The latter, you
may remember, fell a victim to the small-pox, and the disgusting body,
that had so lately been almost worshipped, was deserted, the moment he
was dead. It was left for hours, without even the usual decent
observances. It was on the same occasion, we have been told, that his
grandchildren, including the heir, were assembled in a private
drawing-room, waiting the result, when they were startled by a hurried
trampling of feet. It was the courtiers, rushing in a crowd, to pay
their homage to the new monarch! All these things forced themselves
painfully on our minds, as we walked through the state rooms. Indeed
there are few things that can be more usefully studied, or which awaken
a greater source of profitable recollections, than a palace that has
been occupied by a great and historical court. Still they are not
poetical.

The balcony, in which La Fayette appeared with the Queen and her
children, opens from one of these rooms. It overlooks the inner court;
or that in which the carriages of none but the privileged entered, for
all these things were regulated by arbitrary rules. No one, for
instance, was permitted to ride in the King's coach, unless his nobility
dated from a certain century (the fourteenth, I believe), and these were
your _gentilshommes_; for the word implies more than a noble, meaning an
ancient nobleman.

The writing cabinet, private dining-room, council-room in ordinary,
library, etc. of the King, came next; the circuit ending in the Salles
des Gardes, and the apartments usually occupied by the officers and
troops on service.

There was one room we got into, I scarce know how. It was a long, high
gallery, plainly finished for a palace, and it seemed to be lighted from
an interior court, or well; for one was completely caged when in it.
This was the celebrated Bull's Eye (_oeil de boeuf_), where the
courtiers danced attendance before they were received. It got its name
from an oval window over the principal door.

We looked at no more than the state apartments, and those of the King
and Queen, and yet we must have gone through some thirty or forty rooms,