We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our children’s pleasure.
My two were at once in another world—Jimmy’s a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have some notions of history.
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect for force were eliminated ... you cannot amputate a part of human nature....”
What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.”
Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.
“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”
“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.
Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.”
Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it for, if nobody was allowed in?”
“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.”