illas with stone walls around quaint
gardens. At every moment it passes little inns and suburban restaurants
with cool arbours in front of them, and waiters in white coats pouring
out glasses of red wine. It makes one thirsty just to look at them.

In due time the little train rattles and rocks itself over the dozen
miles or so that separate Paris from Versailles, and sets you down right
in front of the great stone court-yard of the palace. There through the
long hours of a summer afternoon you may feast your eyes upon the
wonderland of beauty that rose at the command of the grand monarch,
Louis XIV, from the sanded plains and wooded upland that marked the spot
two hundred and fifty years ago.

All that royal munificence could effect was lavished on the making of
the palace. So vast is it in size that in the days of its greatest
splendour it harboured ten thousand inmates. The sheer length of it from
side to side is only about a hundred yards short of half a mile. To make
the grounds the King's chief landscape artist and his hundreds of
workers laboured for twenty years. They took in, as it were, the whole
landscape. The beauty of their work lies not only in the wonderful
terraces, gardens, groves and fountains that extend from the rear of the
Chateau, but in its blending with the scene beyond. It is so planned
that no distant house or building breaks into the picture. The vista
ends everywhere with the waving woods of the purple distance.

Louis XIV spent in all, they say, a hundred million dollars on the
making of the palace. When made it was filled with treasures of art not
to be measured in price. It was meant to be, and it remains, the last
word of royal grandeur. The King's court at Versailles became the sun
round which gravitated the fate and fortune of his twenty million
subjects. Admission within its gates was itself a mark of royal favour.
Now, any person with fifteen cents may ride out from Paris on the
double-decked street car and wander about the palace at will. For a five
cent tip to a guide you may look through the private apartments of Marie
Antoinette, and for two cents you may check your umbrella while you
inspect the bedroom of Napoleon the First. For nothing at all you may
stand on the vast terrace behind the Chateau and picture to yourself the
throng of gay ladies in paniered skirts, and powdered gentlemen, in
sea-green inexpressibles, who walked among its groves and fountains two
hundred years ag