o. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of
the democracy.

The palace--or the Chateau, as it is modestly named--stands crosswise
upon an elevation that dominates the scene for miles around. The whole
building throughout is only of three stories, for French architecture
has a horror of high buildings. The two great wings of the Chateau reach
sideways, north and south; and one, a shorter one, runs westwards
towards the rear. In the front space between the wings is a vast paved
court-yard--the Royal Court--shut in by a massive iron fence. Into this
court penetrated, one autumn evening in 1789, the raging mob led by the
women of Paris, who had come to drag the descendant of the Grand Monarch
into the captivity that ended only with the guillotine. Here they
lighted their bonfires and here they sang and shrieked and shivered
throughout the night. That night of the fifth of October was the real
end of monarchy in France.

No one, I think--not even my friend from Kansas who boasted that he had
"put in" three hours at Versailles--could see all that is within the
Chateau. But there are certain things which no tourist passes by. One
of them is the suite of rooms of Louis XIV, a great series of square
apartments all opening sideways into each other with gilded doors as
large as those of a barn, and with about as much privacy as a railway
station. One room was the King's council chamber; next to this, a larger
one, was the "wig-room," where the royal mind selected its wig for the
day and where the royal hair-dresser performed his stupendous task.
Besides this again is the King's bedroom. Preserved in it, within a
little fence, still stands the bed in which Louis XIV died in 1715,
after a reign of seventy-two years. The bedroom would easily hold three
hundred people. Outside of it is a great antechamber, where the
courtiers jealously waited their turn to be present at the King's
"lever," or "getting up," eager to have the supreme honour of holding
the royal breeches.

But if the King's apartments are sumptuous, they are as nothing to the
Hall of Mirrors, the showroom of the whole palace, and estimated to be
the most magnificent single room in the world. It extends clear across
the end of the rear wing and has a length of 236 feet. It is lighted by
vast windows that reach almost to the lofty arch that forms its ceiling;
the floor is of polished inlaid wood, on which there stood in Louis the
Great's time, tables, chairs