knew nothing about the matter,
and had failed to comprehend his meaning, so that out of complaisance he
said to her:

"Perhaps you are getting tired of this?"

"No, no--quite the reverse." And lifting up her chin, and casting around
her a glance of the vaguest description, Rosanette let these words
escape her lips:

"It recalls some memories to me!"

Meanwhile, it was easy to trace on her countenance a strained
expression, a certain sense of awe; and, as this air of gravity made her
look all the prettier, Frederick overlooked it.

The carps' pond amused her more. For a quarter of an hour she kept
flinging pieces of bread into the water in order to see the fishes
skipping about.

Frederick had seated himself by her side under the linden-trees. He saw
in imagination all the personages who had haunted these walls--Charles
V., the Valois Kings, Henry IV., Peter the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
and "the fair mourners of the stage-boxes," Voltaire, Napoleon, Pius
VII., and Louis Philippe; and he felt himself environed, elbowed, by
these tumultuous dead people. He was stunned by such a confusion of
historic figures, even though he found a certain fascination in
contemplating them, nevertheless.

At length they descended into the flower-garden.

It is a vast rectangle, which presents to the spectator, at the first
glance, its wide yellow walks, its square grass-plots, its ribbons of
box-wood, its yew-trees shaped like pyramids, its low-lying green
swards, and its narrow borders, in which thinly-sown flowers make spots
on the grey soil. At the end of the garden may be seen a park through
whose entire length a canal makes its way.

Royal residences have attached to them a peculiar kind of melancholy,
due, no doubt, to their dimensions being much too large for the limited
number of guests entertained within them, to the silence which one feels
astonished to find in them after so many flourishes of trumpets, to the
immobility of their luxurious furniture, which attests by the aspect of
age and decay it gradually assumes the transitory character of
dynasties, the eternal wretchedness of all things; and this exhalation
of the centuries, enervating and funereal, like the perfume of a mummy,
makes itself felt even in untutored brains. Rosanette yawned
immoderately. They went back to the hotel.

After their breakfast an open carriage came round for them. They started
from Fontainebleau at a point where several roads diver