a place for promenades and the exchange of polite salutations.  Those formal groves are walls and hangings; those shaven yews are vases and lyres.  The parterres are flowering carpets.  In those straight, rectilinear avenues the king, with his cane in his hand, groups around him his entire retinue.  Sixty ladies in brocade dresses, expanding into skirts measuring twenty-four feet in circumference, easily find room on the steps of the staircases.[7] Those verdant cabinets afford shade for a princely collation.  Under that circular portico, all the seigniors enjoying the privilege of entering it witness together the play of a new jet d’eau.  Their counterparts greet them even in the marble and bronze figures which people the paths and basins, in the dignified face of an Apollo, in the theatrical air of a Jupiter, in the worldly ease or studied nonchalance of a Diana or a Venus.  The stamp of the court, deepened through the joint efforts of society for a century, is so strong that it is graven on each detail as on the whole, and on material objects as on matters of the intellect.

II.  The King’s Household.

Its officials and expenses. — His military family, his stable, kennel, chapel, attendants, table, chamber, wardrobe, outhouses, furniture, journeys.

The foregoing is but the framework; before 1789 it was completely filled up.  “You have seen nothing,” says Châteaubriand, “if you have not seen the pomp of Versailles, even after the disbanding of the king’s household; Louis XIV was always there."[8] It is a swarm of liveries, uniforms, costumes and equipages as brilliant and as varied as in a picture.  I should be glad to have lived eight days in this society.  It was made expressly to be painted, being specially designed for the pleasure of the eye, like an operatic scene.  But how can we of to day imagine people for whom life was wholly operatic?  At that time a grandee was obliged to live in great state; his retinue and his trappings formed a part of his personality; he fails in doing himself justice if these are not as ample and as splendid as he can make them; he would be as much mortified at any blank in his household as we with a hole in our coats.  Should he make any curtailment he would decline in reputation; on Louis XVI undertaking reforms the court says that he acts like a bourgeois.  When a prince or princess becomes of age a household is formed for them; when a prince marries, a household is formed for his wife; and by a household it must be understood that it is a pompous display of fifteen or twenty distinct services:  stables, a hunting-train, a chapel, a surgery, the bedchamber and the wardrobe, a chamber for accounts, a table, pantry, kitchen, and wine-cellars, a fruitery, a fourrière, a common kitchen, a cabinet, a council;[9] she would feel that she was not a princess without all this.  There are 274 appointments in the household of the Duc d’Orléans, 210 in that of Mesdames, 68 in that of Madame Elisabeth,