l
Ministers of State and for the transaction of public business. The
Palaces I have named were all constructed from time to time to serve as
residences for the ten to thirty persons recognized as of the blood
Royal, who removed from one to the other as convenience or whim may have
suggested. They are generally very spacious, probably averaging one to
two hundred apartments each, all constructed of the best materials and
furnished and adorned with the most lavish disregard of cost. I roughly
estimate the cost of these Palaces, if they were now to be built and
furnished in this style, at One Hundred Millions of Dollars; but the
actual cost, in the ruder infancy of the arts when most of them were
erected, was probably much more. Versailles alone cost some Thirty
Millions of Dollars at first, while enormous sums have since been
expended in perfecting and furnishing it. It would be within the truth
to say that France, from the infancy of Louis XIV. to the expulsion of
Louis Philippe, has paid more as simple interest on the residences of
her monarchs and their families than the United States, with a larger
population and with far greater wealth than France has averaged through
that period, now pays for the entire cost of the Legislative, Executive
and Judicial departments of her Government. All that we have paid our
Presidents from Washington inclusive, adding the cost of the
Presidential Mansion and all the furniture that has from time to time
been put into it, would not build and furnish one wing of a single Royal
Palace of France--that of Versailles.

But the point to which I would more especially call attention is that of
the unwearied exertions of Royalty to foster and inflame the passion for
Military glory. I wandered for hours through the spacious and
innumerable halls of Versailles, in which Art and Nature seem to have
been taxed to the utmost to heap up prodigies of splendor. At least one
hundred of these rooms would each of itself be deemed a marvel of
sumptuous display anywhere else; yet here we passed over floors of the
richest Mosaic and through galleries of the finest and most elaborately
wrought Marble as if they had been but the roughest pavement or the
rudest plaster. The eye is fatigued, the mind bewildered, by an almost
endless succession of sumptuous carving, gilding, painting, &c., until
the intervention of a naked ante-room or stair-case becomes a positive
relief to both. And the ideas everywhere predomi