They were nearer Paris than they thought; it bristled and shone through its haze, some miles away on the plain: westward, the high woods of Marly showed faint through the edges of two broad sunbeams, as through a veil, with bluer distinctness between, here a spire, there smoke; the waves of forest verdure undulating round, began to burn and blaze towards sunset; all was spotted with towns, sprinkled rich-red and white with villages, flushed with orchards, and in the barer spaces embroidered like a carpet that blended with the dark suburbs of the city on the horizon. Here and there appeared a soft misty glitter of the circuitous Seine in the level, with some faint white sails; the distant azure of some hills could be seen; it was all like one mighty map made real. Yet greatest of all to their eyes, even greater than the dusky grimness of Paris in the sun, showing its domes so helmet-like, and its pinnacles so like weapons—was where, with one accord looking back, they could perceive the silvered slates of one large town among the avenues they had turned from that forenoon, its steeples shining, its windows sparkling—and through that transparent French air, some lustrous snowy glimpses between embosoming bowers, of long level palace-roofs, embossed, and fringed, and tipped with undistinguishable ornament. Palaces, indeed, seemed to be visible in every direction; but they thickened towards _it_; all that way the landscape was but one mass of park-woods, and with those alleys, gardens, terraces, that long road at intervals perceived, it could be nothing but Versailles! Charles himself could not but look. The rainbow flashing of the fountains, and gleam of statues—the grand stairs of the terrace—they could almost fancy they distinguished. It was he who first broke the thread of their interest. Well, he shouldn’t care to have seen King Louis XVI.; he had once seen George III. It was easy enough to see him, in fact; if you only but knew it was he. He had seen a boy at Eton, fag to a friend of his, who was once spoken to a good while at a turnstile in Windsor Park by an elderly gentleman in drab gaiters, a nankeen waistcoat, and a blue coat with bright buttons; and when a ranger came up afterwards from behind, and told him it was the king, he nearly fainted. He could never learn anything after that, and always turned pale at the sight of a gold sovereign, so he had to be sent to sea.