Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge

IV.—A Visit to Versailles

"WHAT!" said the man from Kansas, looking up from his asparagus, "do you mean to say that you have never seen the Palace of Versailles?"

"No," I said very firmly, "I have not."

"Nor the fountains in the gardens?"

"No."

"Nor the battle pictures?"

"No."

"And the Hall of Mirrors,"—added the fat lady from Georgia.

"And Madame du Barry's bed"—said her husband.

"Her which," I asked, with some interest.

"Her bed."

"All right," I said, "I'll go."

I knew, of course, that I had to. Every tourist in Paris has got to go and see Versailles. Otherwise the superiority of the others becomes insufferable, with foreigners it is different. If they worry one about palaces and cathedrals and such—the Château at Versailles, and the Kaiserhof and the Duomo at Milan—I answer them in kind. I ask them if they have ever seen the Schlitzerhof at Milwaukee and the Anheuserbusch at St. Louis, and the Dammo at Niagara, and the Toboggo at Montreal. That quiets them wonderfully.

But, as I say, I had to go.

You get to Versailles—as the best of various ways of transport—by means of a contrivance something between a train and a street car. It has a little puffing steam-engine and two cars—double deckers—with the top deck open to the air and covered with a wooden roof on rods. The lower part inside is called the first-class and a seat in it costs ten cents extra. Otherwise nobody would care to ride in it. The engine is a quaint little thing and wears a skirt, painted green, all around it, so that you can just see the tips of its wheels peeping modestly out below. It was a great relief to me to see this engine. It showed that there is such a thing as French delicacy after all. There are so many sights along the boulevards that bring the carmine blush to the face of the tourist (from the twisting of his neck in trying to avoid seeing them), that it is well to know that the French draw the line somewhere. The sight of the bare wheels of an engine is too much for them.

The little train whirls its way out of Paris, past the great embankment and the fortifications, and goes rocking along among green trees whose branches sweep its sides, and trim villas 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 Château, 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 Château 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 ago. The palace of the Kings has become the playground of the democracy.

The palace—or the Château, 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 Château 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 Château. 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, and other furniture of solid silver. The whole inner side of the room is formed by seventeen enormous mirrors set in spaces to correspond in shape to the window opposite, and fitted in between with polished marble. Above them runs a cornice of glittering gilt, and over that again the ceiling curves in a great arch, each panel of it bearing some picture to recall the victories of the Grand Monarch. Ungrateful posterity has somewhat forgotten the tremendous military achievements of Louis XIV—the hardships of his campaign in the Netherlands in which the staff of the royal cuisine was cut down to one hundred cooks—the passage of the Rhine, in which the King actually crossed the river from one side to the other, and so on. But the student of history can live again the triumphs of Louis in this Hall of Mirrors. It is an irony of history that in this room, after the conquest of 1871, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor by his subjects and his allies.

But if one wants to see battle pictures, one has but to turn to the north wing of the Château. There you have them, room after room—twenty, thirty, fifty roomsful—I don't know how many—the famous gallery of battles, depicting the whole military history of France from the days of King Clovis till the French Revolution. They run in historical order. The pictures begin with battles of early barbarians—men with long hair wielding huge battle-axes with their eyes blazing, while other barbarians prod at them with pikes or take a sweep at them with a two-handed club. After that there are rooms full of crusade pictures—crusaders fighting the Arabs, crusaders investing Jerusalem, crusaders raising the siege of Malta and others raising the siege of Rhodes; all very picturesque, with the blue Mediterranean, the yellow sand of the desert, prancing steeds in nickel-plated armour and knights plumed and caparisoned, or whatever it is, and wearing as many crosses as an ambulance emergency staff. All of these battles were apparently quite harmless, that is the strange thing about these battle pictures: the whole thing, as depicted for the royal eye, is wonderfully full of colour and picturesque, but, as far as one can see, quite harmless. Nobody seems to be getting hurt, wild-looking men are swinging maces round, but you can see that they won't hit anybody. A battle-axe is being brought down with terrific force, but somebody is thrusting up a steel shield just in time to meet it. There are no signs of blood or injury. Everybody seems to be getting along finely and to be having the most invigorating physical exercise. Here and here, perhaps, the artist depicts somebody jammed down under a beam or lying under the feet of a horse; but if you look close you see that the beam isn't really pressing on him, and that the horse is not really stepping on his stomach. In fact the man is perfectly comfortable, and is, at the moment, taking aim at somebody else with a two-string crossbow, which would have deadly effect if he wasn't ass enough to aim right at the middle of a cowhide shield.

You notice this quality more and more in the pictures as the history moves on. After the invention of gunpowder, when the combatants didn't have to be locked together, but could be separated by fields, and little groves and quaint farm-houses, the battle seems to get quite lost in the scenery. It spreads out into the landscape until it becomes one of the prettiest, quietest scenes that heart could wish. I know nothing so drowsily comfortable as the pictures in this gallery that show the battles of the seventeenth century,—the Grand Monarch's own particular epoch. This is a wide, rolling landscape with here and there little clusters of soldiers to add a touch of colour to the foliage of the woods; there are woolly little puffs of smoke rising in places to show that the artillery is at its dreamy work on a hill side; near the foreground is a small group of generals standing about a tree and gazing through glasses at the dim purple of the background. There are sheep and cattle grazing in all the unused parts of the battle, the whole thing has a touch of quiet, rural feeling that goes right to the heart. I have seen people from the ranching district of the Middle West stand before these pictures in tears.

It is strange to compare this sort of thing with some of the modern French pictures. There is realism enough and to spare in them. In the Salon exhibition a year or two ago, for instance, there was one that represented lions turned loose into an arena to eat up Christians. I can imagine exactly how a Louis Quatorze artist would have dealt with the subject,—an arena, prettily sanded, with here and there gooseberry bushes and wild gilly flowers (not too wild, of course), lions with flowing manes, in noble attitudes, about to roar,—tigers, finely developed, about to spring,—Christians just going to pray,—and through it all a genial open-air feeling very soothing to the royal senses. Not so the artist of to-day. The picture in the Salon is of blood. There are torn limbs gnawed by crouching beasts, as a dog holds and gnaws a bone; there are faces being torn, still quivering, from the writhing body,—in fact, perhaps after all there is something to be said for the way the Grand Monarch arranged his gallery.

The battle pictures and the Hall of Mirrors, and the fountains and so on, are, I say, the things best worth seeing at Versailles. Everybody says so. I really wish now that I had seen them. But I am free to confess that I am a poor sightseer at the best. As soon as I get actually in reach of a thing it somehow dwindles in importance. I had a friend once, now a distinguished judge in the United States, who suffered much in this way. He travelled a thousand miles to reach the World's Fair, but as soon as he had arrived at a comfortable hotel in Chicago, he was unable to find the energy to go out to the Fair grounds. He went once to visit Niagara Falls, but failed to see the actual water, partly because it no longer seemed necessary, partly because his room in the hotel looked the other way.

Personally I plead guilty to something of the same spirit. Just where you alight from the steam tramway at Versailles, you will find close on your right, a little open-air café, with tables under a trellis of green vines. It is as cool a retreat of mingled sun and shadow as I know. There is red wine at two francs and long imported cigars of as soft a flavour as even Louis the Fourteenth could have desired. The idea of leaving a grotto like that to go trapesing all over a hot stuffy palace with a lot of fool tourists, seemed ridiculous. But I bought there a little illustrated book called the Château de Versailles, which interested me so extremely that I decided that, on some reasonable opportunity, I would go and visit the place.

V.—Paris at Night

"WHAT Ah'd like to do," says the Fat Lady from Georgia, settling back comfortably in her seat after her five-dollar dinner at the Café American, while her husband is figuring whether ten francs is enough to give to the waiter, "is to go and see something real wicked. Ah tell him (the word 'him' is used in Georgia to mean husband) that while we're here Ah just want to see everything that's going."

"All right," says the Man from Kansas who "knows" Paris, "I'll get a guide right here, and he'll take us round and show us the sights."

"Can you get him heah?" asks the gentleman from Georgia, looking round at the glittering mirrors and gold cornices of the restaurant.

Can you get a guide? Well, now! Can you keep away from them? All day from the dewy hour of breakfast till late at night they meet you in the street and sidle up with the enquiry, "Guide, sir?"

Where the Parisian guide comes from and how he graduates for his job I do not know. He is not French and, as a rule, he doesn't know Paris. He knows his way to the Louvre and to two or three American bars and to the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. But he doesn't need to know his way. For that he falls back on the taxi-driver. "Now, sir," says the guide briskly to the gentleman who has engaged his services, "where would you like to go?" "I should like to see Napoleon's tomb." "All right," says the guide, "get into the taxi." Then he turns to the driver. "Drive to Napoleon's tomb," he says. After they have looked at it the guide says, "What would you like to see next, sir?" "I am very anxious to see Victor Hugo's house, which I understand is now made open to the public." The guide turns to the taxi man. "Drive to Victor Hugo's house," he says.

After looking through the house the visitor says in a furtive way, "I was just wondering if I could get a drink anywhere in this part of the town?" "Certainly," says the guide. "Drive to an American bar."

Isn't that simple? Can you imagine any more agreeable way of earning five dollars in three hours than that? Of course, what the guide says to the taxi man is said in the French language, or in something resembling it, and the gentleman in the cab doesn't understand it. Otherwise, after six or seven days of driving round in this way he begins to wonder what the guide is for. But of course, the guide's life, when you come to think of it, is one full of difficulty and danger. Just suppose that, while he was away off somewhere in Victor Hugo's house or at Napoleon's grave, the taxi-driver were to be struck by lightning. How on earth would he get home? He might, perhaps, be up in the Eiffel Tower and the taxi man get a stroke of paralysis, and then he'd starve to death trying to find his way back. After all, the guide has to have the kind of pluck and hardihood that ought to be well rewarded. Why, in other countries, like Switzerland, they have to use dogs for it, and in France, when these plucky fellows throw themselves into it, surely one wouldn't grudge the nominal fee of five dollars for which they risk their lives.

But I am forgetting about the Lady from Georgia and her husband. Off they go in due course from the glittering doors of the restaurant in a huge taxi with a guide in a peaked hat. The party is all animation. The lady's face is aglow with moral enthusiasm. The gentleman and his friend have their coats buttoned tight to their chins for fear that thieves might leap over the side of the taxi and steal their neckties.

So they go buzzing along the lighted boulevard looking for "something real wicked." What they want is to see something really and truly wicked; they don't know just what, but "something bad." They've got the idea that Paris is one of the wickedest places on earth, and they want to see it.

Strangely enough, in their own home, the Lady from Georgia is one of the leaders of the Social Purity movement, and her husband, whose skin at this moment is stretched as tight as a football with French brandy and soda, is one of the finest speakers on the Georgia temperance platform, with a reputation that reaches from Chattanooga to Chickamauga. They have a son at Yale College whom they are trying to keep from smoking cigarettes. But here in Paris, so they reckon it, everything is different. It doesn't occur to them that perhaps it is wicked to pay out a hundred dollars in an evening hiring other people to be wicked.

So off they go and are whirled along in the brilliant glare of the boulevards and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre. They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the Oriental Dances and the Café of Hell and the hundred and one other glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is pure—which is a beginning—and they go home more enthusiastic than ever in the Social Purity movement.

But the fact is that if you have about twenty-five thousand new visitors pouring into a great city every week with their pockets full of money and clamoring for "something wicked," you've got to do the best you can for them.

Hence it results that Paris—in appearance, anyway—is a mighty gay place at night. The sidewalks are crowded with the little tables of the coffee and liqueur drinkers. The music of a hundred orchestras bursts forth from the lighted windows. The air is soft with the fragrance of a June evening, tempered by the curling smoke of fifty thousand cigars. Through the noise and chatter of the crowd there sounds unending the wail of the motor horn.

The hours of Parisian gaiety are late. Ordinary dinner is eaten at about seven o'clock, but fashionable dinners begin at eight or eight thirty. Theatres open at a quarter to nine and really begin at nine o'clock. Special features and acts,—famous singers and vaudeville artists—are brought on at eleven o'clock so that dinner-party people may arrive in time to see them. The theatres come out at midnight. After that there are the night suppers which flourish till two or half past. But if you wish, you can go between the theater and supper to some such side-long place as the Moulin Rouge or the Bal Tabarin, which reach the height of their supposed merriment at about one in the morning.

At about two or two thirty the motors come whirling home, squawking louder than ever, with a speed limit of fifty miles an hour. Only the best of them can run faster than that. Quiet, conservative people in Paris like to get to bed at three o'clock; after all, what is the use of keeping late hours and ruining one's health and complexion? If you make it a strict rule to be in bed by three, you feel all the better for it in the long run—health better, nerves steadier, eyes clearer—and you're able to get up early—at half-past eleven—and feel fine.

Those who won't or don't go to bed at three wander about the town, eat a second supper in an all-night restaurant, circulate round with guides, and visit the slums of the Market, where gaunt-eyed wretches sleep in crowded alleys in the mephitic air of a summer night, and where the idle rich may feed their luxurious curiosity on the sufferings of the idle poor.

The dinners, the theaters, the boulevards, and the rest of it are all fun enough, at any rate for one visit in a lifetime. The "real wicked" part of it is practically fake—served up for the curious foreigner with money to throw away. The Moulin Rouge whirls the wide sails of its huge sign, crimson with electric bulbs, amid the false glaze of the Place Blanche. Inside of it there is more red—the full red of bad claret and the bright red of congested faces and painted cheeks. Part of the place is a theater with a vaudeville show much like any other. Another part is a vast "promenoir" where you may walk up and down or sit at a little table and drink bad brandy at one franc and a half. In a fenced off part are the Oriental Dances, a familiar feature of every Parisian Show. These dances—at twenty cents a turn—are supposed to represent all the languishing allurement of the Oriental houri—I think that is the word. The dancers in Paris—it is only fair to state—have never been nearer to the Orient than the Faubourg St. Antoine, where they were brought up and where they learned all the Orientalism that they know. Their "dance" is performed with their feet continuously on the ground—never lifted, I mean—and is done by gyrations of the stomach, beside which the paroxysms of an overdose of Paris green are child's play. In seeing these dances one realizes all the horrors of life in the East.