Loitering in Pleasant Paths

by Marion Harland

Hence the plaint, echoed groaningly by us all.

The chamber in which Louis XIV. died is furnished very much as it was when he lay breathing more and more faintly, hour after hour, within the big bed lifted by the dais from the floor, that, sleeping or dying, he might lie above the common walks of men. Communicating with the king’s bed-room is the celebrated Salle de l’œil de Bœuf, the ox-eyed window at one side giving the name. The courtiers awaited there each day the announcement that the king was awake and visible, beguiling the tedium of their long attendance by sharp trades in love, court, and state honors. It is a shabby-genteel little room, the hardness, glass and glare that distinguish palatial parlors from those in which sensible, comfort-loving people live, rubbed and tarnished by time and disuse. Filled with a moving throng in gala-apparel, this and the expanse of the royal bed-chamber may have been goodly to behold; untenanted, they are stiff and desolate.

The central balcony, opening from the great chamber—the balcony on which, forty-four years later, Marie Antoinette stood with her children—was, upon the death-night of the king, occupied by impatient officials—impatient, but no longer anxious, for the decease of their lord was certain and not far off. The hangings of the bed, cumbrous with gold embroidery, had been twisted back to give air to the expiring man. As the last sigh fluttered from his lips, the high chamberlain upon the balcony broke his white wand of office, shouting to the crowds in the court-yard, “Le roi est mort!” and, without taking breath, “Vive le roi!”

No incident in French history is more widely known. In talking of it in the bed-chamber and balcony, it was as if we heard it for the first time.

The “little apartments of the queen” were refreshment to our jaded senses and nerves. They are a succession of cozy nooks in a retired wing. Boudoirs, where were the soft lounges and low chairs, excluded by etiquette from the courtly salons; closets, fitted up with writing-desk, chair, and footstool; others, lined on all sides with books; still others, where the queen, whether it were Maria Lesczinski or Marie Antoinette, might sit, with a favorite maid of honor or two, at her embroidery. Through these apartments, all the “home” she had had in the palace, a terrified woman fled to gain a secret door of escape, while the marauders, the delegation from Paris, were yelling and raging for her blood in the corridors and state apartments.

If this row of snug resting and working rooms were the “Innermost” of her domestic life, the Petit Trianon was her play-ground. It is a pretty villa, not more than half as large as the Grand Trianon built for Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV. Napoleon I. had a suite of small apartments in the Petit Trianon—study, salon, bath and dressing-rooms, and bed-chamber. They are furnished as he left them, even to the hard bed and round, uncompromising pillows. All are hung and upholstered with yellow satin brocade; the floors are polished and waxed, uncarpeted, save for a rug laid here and there. A door in the arras communicates with the Empress’ apartments. The villa was built by Louis XV. for the Du Barry, but interests us chiefly because of Marie Antoinette’s love for it. Her spinnet is in the salon where she received only personal and intimate friends. It is a common-looking affair, the case of inlaid woods ornamented with brass handles and corners. The keys are discolored—some of them silent; the others yielded discordant tinklings as we touched them with reverent fingers. Her work-table is in another room. Her bed is spread with an embroidered satin coverlet, once white. Her monogram and a crown were worked near the bottom. The stitches were cut out by revolutionary scissors, but their imprint remains, enabling one to trace clearly the design. In this room hang her portrait and that of her son, the lost Dauphin, a lovely little fellow, with large, dark-blue eyes like his mother’s, and chestnut hair, falling upon a wide lace collar. His coat is blue; a strap of livelier blue crosses his chest to meet a sword-belt; a star shines upon his left breast, and he carries a rapier jauntily under his arm. His countenance is sweet and ingenuous, but there is a shading of pensiveness or thought in the expression which is unchildlike. It was easy and pleasant to picture him running up and down the marble stairs, and filling the now uninhabited rooms with boyish talk and mirth. It was yet easier to reproduce in imagination the figures of mother and children in the avenues leading to the Swiss village, her favorite and latest toy.

This is quite out of sight of palace and villas. The intervening park was verdant and bright as with June suns, although the season was November, and the sere leaves were falling about us. A miniature lake and the islet in the middle, a circular marble temple upon the island, giving cover to a nude nymph or goddess, were there, when the light steps of royal mother and children skimmed along the path, she, in her shepherdess hat, laughing and jesting with attendants in sylvan dress. The day was very still with the placid melancholy that consists in our country with Indian summer. The smell of withering leaves hung in the air, spiciest in the sunny reaches of the winding road, almost too powerful in shaded glens, heaped with yellow and brown masses. We met but two people in our walk—an old peasant bent low under a bundle of faggots, and an older woman in a red cloak, who may have been a gypsy. The woods are well kept, the brushwood cut out, and the trees, the finest in the vicinity of Paris, carefully pruned of decaying boughs. We saw the village between their boles long before reaching the outermost building—a mill, with peakéd gables and antique chimneys, the hoary stones overgrown with ivy. We mounted the flight of steps leading, on the outside, to the second story; shook the door, in the hope that it might, through inadvertence, have been left unlocked. Hollow echoes from empty rooms answered. Bending over the balustrade, we looked down at the little water-wheel, warped by dryness; at the channel that once led supplies to it from the lake hard by. A close body of woods formed the background of the deserted house. In the water of the lake were reflected the gray and moss-green stones; barred windows; the clinging cloak of ivy; our own forms—the only moving objects in the picture. Louis XVI., amateur locksmith for his own pleasure, played miller here to gratify his wife’s whim, grinding tiny sacks of real corn, and taking pains to become more floury in an hour than a genuine miller would have made himself in six weeks, in order to give vraisemblance to the play enacted by the queen and her coterie. Around the bend of the pond lay the larger cottages which served as kitchen, dining, and ball-rooms. All are built of stone, with benches at the doors where peasants might rest at noon or evening; all are clothed with ivy; all closed and locked. We skirted the lake to get to the laiterie, or dairy. It is a one-storied cottage, with windows in the tiled roof. Long French casements and glazed doors allowed us to get a tolerable view of the interior. The floor, and the ledges running around the room, are marble or smooth stone. Within this building court-gallants churned the milk of the Swiss cows that grazed in the lakeside glades; maids of honor made curds and whey for the noonday dinner, and the leader of the frolic moulded rolls of butter with her beautiful hands, attired like a dairy-maid, and training her facile tongue to speak peasant patois. The industrious ivy climbs to the low-hanging eaves, and, drooping in long sprays that did not sway in the sleeping air, touched the busts of king and queen set upon tall pedestals, the one between the two windows in the side of the house, the other between the glass doors of the front gable. An observatory tower, with railed galleries encircling the first and third stories, is close to the laiterie.

Many sovereigns in France and elsewhere have had expensive playthings. Few have cost the possessors more dearly than did this Swiss hamlet.

Innocent as the pastimes of miller and dairymaid appear to us, the serious student of those times sees plainly that the comedy of happy lowly life was a burning, cankering insult to the apprehension of the starving people to whom the reality of peace and plenty in humble homes, was a tradition antedating the reign of the Great Louis. While their children died of famine, and men prayed vainly for work, the profligate court, to maintain whose pomp the poor man’s earnings were taxed, demeaned their queen and themselves in such senseless mummeries as beguiled Time of weight in the pleasure-grounds of the Petit Trianon.

The Place de la Concorde, from which Marie Antoinette waved farewell to the Tuileries—dearer to her in death than it had been in life—is the connecting link between the toy-village in the Versailles Park and the Expiatory Chapel, in what was formerly the Cemetery of the Madeleine in Paris. Leaving the bustling street, one enters through a lodge, a garden, cheerful in November, with roses and pansies. A broad walk connects the lodge and the tomb-like façade of the chapel. On the right and left of paved way and turf-borders are buried the Swiss Guard, over whose dead bodies the insurgents rushed to seize the queen in the Tuileries, when compromise and the mockery of royalty were at an end. The chapel is small, but handsome. On the right, half-way up its length, is a marble group, life-size, of the kneeling king, looking heavenward from the scaffold, in obedience to the gesture of an angel who addresses him in the last words of his confessor—“Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven!”