Of street music there was none, though once an old couple wailing a plaintive duet passed under our windows. Britain is not esteemed a melodious nation, yet the unclassical piano is ever with us, and even in the smallest provincial towns one is rarely out of hearing of the insistent note of some itinerant musician. And no matter how far one penetrates into the recesses of the country, he is always within reach of some bucolic rendering of the popular music-hall ditty of the year before last. But never during our stay in Versailles, a stay that included what is supposedly the gay time of the year, did we hear the sound of an instrument, or—with the one exception of the old couple, whom it would be rank flattery to term vocalists—the note of a voice raised in song.
With us, New Year's Day was a quiet one. A dozen miles distant, Paris was welcoming the advent of the new century in a burst of feverish excitement. But despite temptations, we remained in drowsy Versailles, and spent several of the hours in the little room where two pallid Red-Cross knights, who were celebrating the occasion by sitting up for the first time, waited expectant of our coming as their one link with the outside world.
It was with a sincere thrill of pity that at déjeûner we glanced round the salle-à-manger and found all the Ogams filling their accustomed solitary places. Only Dunois the comparatively young, and presumably brave, was absent. The others occupied their usual seats, eating with their unfailing air of introspective absorption. Nobody had cared enough for these lonely old men to ask them to fill a corner at their tables, even on New Year's Day. To judge by their regular attendance at the hotel meals, these men—all of whom, as shown by their wearing the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, had merited distinction—had little hospitality offered them. Most probably they offered as little, for, throughout our stay, none ever had a friend to share his breakfast or dinner.
The bearing of the hotel guests suggested absolute ignorance of one another's existence. The Colonels, as I have said in a previous chapter, were exceptions, but even they held intercourse only without the hotel walls. Day after day, month after month, year after year as we were told, these men had fed together, yet we never saw them betray even the most cursory interest in one another. They entered and departed without revealing, by word or look, cognisance of another human being's presence. Could one imagine a dozen men of any other nationality thus maintaining the same indifference over even a short period? I hope future experience will prove me wrong, but in the meantime my former conception of the French as a nation overflowing with bonhomie and camaraderie is rudely shaken.
The day of the year would have passed without anything to distinguish it from its fellows had not the proprietor, who, by the way, was a Swiss, endeavoured by sundry little attentions to reveal his goodwill. Oysters usurped the place of the customary hors d'oeuvres at breakfast, and the meal ended with café noir and cognac handed round by the deferential Iorson as being "offered by the proprietor," who, entering during the progress of the déjeûner, paid his personal respects to his clientèle.
The afternoon brought us a charming discovery. We had a boy guest with us at luncheon, a lonely boy left at school when his few compatriots—save only the two Red-Cross prisoners—had gone home on holiday. The day was bright and balmy; and while strolling in the park beyond the Petit Trianon, we stumbled by accident upon the hameau, the little village of counterfeit rusticity wherein Marie Antoinette loved to play at country life.
Following a squirrel that sported among the trees, we had strayed from the beaten track, when, through the leafless branches, we caught sight of roofs and houses and, wandering towards them, found ourselves by the side of a miniature lake, round whose margin were grouped the daintiest rural cottages that monarch could desire or Court architect design.
History had told us of the creation of this unique plaything of the capricious Queen, but we had thought of it as a thing of the past, a toy whose fragile beauty had been wrecked by the rude blows of the Revolution. The matter-of-fact and unromantic Baedeker, it is true, gives it half a line. After devoting pages to the Château, its grounds, pictures, and statues, and detailing exhaustively the riches of the Trianons, he blandly mentions the gardens of the Petit Trianon as containing "some fine exotic trees, an artificial lake, a Temple of Love, and a hamlet where the Court ladies played at peasant life."