"Observe my dear mother," whispered the King, who was standing at the foot of her bed, to Mademoiselle de Beauvais, "I never saw her look more beautiful." Then she called her children round her, and solemnly blessed them. These four, her two sons and their wives, knelt by her bedside. They kissed her hands and shed tears of a common grief. The curtains were then closed, that the Queen might take a little rest. When they were undrawn, the film of death had gathered on her eyes. * * * * * Beautiful Saint-Cloud, enfolded in softly undulating hills, its sheeny lawns and majestic avenues descending to the Seine, whose clear waters dance and ripple below in the soft spring light;—Saint-Cloud, with its dimpling uplands and lofty summits, on whose topmost verge stands what was once a Roman watch-tower, looking towards Lutetia, the ancient Paris, now a Grecian temple called the Lanterne de Diogène; Saint-Cloud, dense, leafy, forest-like; yonder a deep glen, in which the morning shadows lie; above, grassy meads of finest greensward, where the primrose and the cowslip, the anemone and the foxglove blossom under scattered groups of noble trees, gay with every shade of green, oaks yellow with new leaves; delicate beech and the soft foliage of the tufted elm; all rising out of a sea of paler tinted copsewood. Midway on the hill-side, the ground suddenly falls; and the woods melt into sculptured terraces, on which the spray of many fountains catch and reflect the morning sun. These terraces are again broken by a magnificent cascade, which dashes downwards, to be presently engulfed by the overhanging trees, before it falls into the river. It is early summer. The air is full of perfume. The scent of new-made hay and the odour of dew-laden flowers are wafted from the terraces towards the palace, lying in the lowest lap of the hills, shut in by hanging gardens, its pillared portico basking in the sunshine.