A Versailles Christmas-Tide | Page 7

sardines, pickled beet, and sliced sausage, when his host
entered, voluble and irrepressible as ever. The dignified Ogams
shuddered inwardly as his strident voice awoke the echoes of the room,
and their already stiff limbs became rigid with disapproval.
In winter, transient visitors but rarely occupied one or other of the
square centre tables, though not infrequently a proud father and mother
who had come to visit a soldier son at the barracks, brought him to the
hotel for a meal, and for a space the radiance of blue and scarlet and the

glint of steel cast a military glamour over the staid company.
An amusing little circumstance to us onlookers was that although the
supply of cooked food seemed equal to any demand, the arrival of even
a trio of unexpected guests to dinner invariably caused a dearth of
bread. For on their advent Iorson would dash out bareheaded into the
night, to reappear in an incredibly short time carrying a loaf nearly as
tall as himself.
One morning a stalwart young Briton brought to breakfast a pretty
English cousin, on leave of absence from her boarding-school. His
knowledge of French was limited. When anything was wanted he
shouted "Garçon!" in a lordly voice, but it was the pretty cousin who
gave the order. Déjeûner over, they departed in the direction of the
Château. And at sunset as we chanced to stroll along the Boulevard de
la Reine, we saw the pretty cousin, all the gaiety fled from her face,
bidding her escort farewell at the gate of a Pension pour Demoiselles.
The ball was over. Poor little Cinderella was perforce returning to the
dust and ashes of learning.
[Illustration: Juvenile Progress]
CHAPTER III
THE TOWN
The English-speaking traveller finds Versailles vastly more foreign
than the Antipodes. He may voyage for many weeks, and at each
distant stopping-place find his own tongue spoken around him, and his
conventions governing society. But let him leave London one night,
cross the Channel at its narrowest--and most turbulent--and sunrise will
find him an alien in a land whose denizens differ from him in language,
temperament, dress, food, manners, and customs.
Of a former visit to Versailles we had retained little more than the usual
tourist's recollection of a hurried run through a palace of fatiguing
magnificence, a confusing peep at the Trianons, a glance around the
gorgeous state equipages, an unsatisfactory meal at one of the open-air

cafés, and a scamper back to Paris. But our winter residence in the
quaint old town revealed to us the existence of a life that is all its
own--a life widely variant, in its calm repose, from the bustle and
gaiety of the capital, but one that is replete with charm, and abounding
in picturesque-interest.
[Illustration: Automoblesse Oblige]
Versailles is not ancient; it is old, completely old. Since the fall of the
Second Empire it has stood still. Most of the clocks have run down, as
though they realised the futility of trying to keep pace with the rest of
the world. The future merges into the present, the present fades into the
past, and still the clocks of Versailles point to the same long eventide.
[Illustration: Sable Garb]
The proximity of Paris is evinced only by the vividly tinted
automobiles that make Versailles their goal. Even they rarely tarry in
the old town, but, turning at the Château gates, lose no time in retracing
their impetuous flight towards a city whose usages accord better with
their creed of feverish hurry-scurry than do the conventions of
reposeful Versailles. And these fiery chariots of modernity, with their
ghoulish, fur-garbed, and hideously spectacled occupants, once their
raucous, cigale-like birr-r-r has died away in the distance, leave
infinitely less impression on the placid life of Versailles than do their
wheels on the roads they traverse. Under the grand trees of the wide
avenues the townsfolk move quietly about, busying themselves with
their own affairs and practising their little economies as they have been
doing any time during the last century.
Perhaps it was the emphatic and demonstrative nature of the mourning
worn that gave us the idea that the better-class female population of
Versailles consisted chiefly of widows. When walking abroad we
seemed incessantly to encounter widows: widows young and old, from
the aged to the absurdly immature. It was only after a period of
bewilderment that it dawned upon us that the sepulchral garb and heavy
crape veils reaching from head to heel were not necessarily the
emblems of widowhood, but might signify some state of minor

bereavement. In Britain a display of black such as is an everyday sight
at Versailles is undreamt of, and one saw more crape veils in a day in
Versailles than in London in a week. Little girls, though their legs
might be uncovered,