In this letter, after attacking king, queen, cardinal, and even M. de Breteuil, Cagliostro said: “Yes, I repeat, now free after my imprisonment, there is no crime that would not be expiated by six months in the Bastille. They ask me if I shall ever return to France. Yes, I reply, when the Bastille becomes a public promenade. You have all that is necessary to happiness, you Frenchmen; a fertile soil and genial climate, good hearts, gay tempers, genius, and grace. You only want, my friends, one little thing—to feel sure of sleeping quietly in your beds when you are innocent.”
To-day “The Bastille,” as it is commonly known and referred to, meaning the Place de la Bastille, has become a public promenade, and its bygone terrors are but a memory.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ROYAL PARKS AND PALACES
Since the romances of Dumas deal so largely with Paris, it is but natural that much of their action should take place at the near-by country residences of the royalty and nobility who form the casts of these great series of historical tales.
To-day Fontainebleau, St. Germain, Versailles, and even Chantilly, Compiègne, and Rambouillet are but mere attractions for the tourist of the butterfly order. The real Parisian never visits them or their precincts, save as he rushes through their tree-lined avenues in an automobile; and thus they have all come to be regarded merely as monuments of splendid scenes, which have been played, and on which the curtain has been rung down.
This is by no means the real case, and one has only to read Dumas, and do the round of the parks and châteaux which environ Paris, to revivify many of the scenes of which he writes.
Versailles is the most popular, Fontainebleau the most grand, St. Germain the most theatrical, Rambouillet the most rural-like, and Compiègne and Chantilly the most delicate and dainty.