But there are also less known places where the fates of nations met oddly, sharply, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes unfruitfully. For instance, just outside Montreuil, two coaches passed each other in the night--the one going north, the other going south. The one going south was that of the British envoy prepared for war with the French Republic in 1793; the one going north was that bearing the French envoy with orders to prevent war if possibly that could be done. Of those squares of land, one is not as famous as it should be. It is the land upon which stands the seventeenth-century palace of St. Germains, with the terrace just outside overlooking the plain of the Seine and the low grey line of Paris far beyond, and the distant, diminished towers of St. Denis. Had the Stuarts returned to the throne of England, that place would be famous enough. It would be counted as the point of their departure, as the rallying place of their cause, as the seed of a new time. It would be a place of national pilgrimage and sacred in English eyes; for there it was that James II., the rightful English king, came as an exile to meet his cousin of France. But the Stuarts did not return; and, therefore, the incident has been pushed away into the lumber-room. There is thought to be something futile about St. Germains. Even Culloden is more famous. Yet St. Germains has good material for a shrine. It remains just what it was. The past lives there. It is what it is, although success did not follow on the meeting it saw. It is precisely what it would have been had success followed that meeting. It is still itself. I could wish that the tragedy of that palace were better known. Mary of Modena had come over hurriedly with the child, the heir to the English throne. She had been housed in this palace by the gratitude, the courtesy, and the high policy of Louis XIV., King of France. She was the Queen of England, and the usurpers were (officially) of no account to Versailles. The fatigue of the journey, of the alarms, of the perils, had oppressed the young woman; she had taken to her bed. In a fine cradle, worthy of royalty, swinging in the same room, lay that little baby who was later to be James III., and never to reign.