France -- Description and travel; France -- Social life and customs
I do not know the precise number of magnificent ante-chambers and saloons
through which we passed to reach this gallery, but there could not have
been less than eight; one of which, as a specimen of the scale on which
the palace is built, is near eighty feet long, and sixty wide. Continuing
our course along the suite, we passed, among others, a council-room that
looked more like state than business, and then came to the apartments of
the Queen. There were several drawing-rooms, and ball-rooms, and
card-rooms, and ante-rooms, and the change from the gorgeousness of the
state apartments, to the neat, tasteful, chaste, feminine, white and gold
of this part of the palace was agreeable, for I had got to be tired of
splendour, and was beginning to feel a disposition to "make game of the
people," by descending to rusticity.
The bed-room of Marie Antoinette is in the suite. It is a large chamber,
in the same style of ornament as the rest of her rooms, and the
dressing-rooms, bath, and other similar conveniences, were in that
exquisite French taste, which can only be equalled by imitation. The
chamber of the King looked upon the court, and was connected with that
of the Queen, by a winding and intricate communication of some length.
The door that entered the apartments of the latter opened into a
dressing-room, and both this door and that which communicated with the
bed-room form a part of the regular wall, being tapestried as such, so
as not to be immediately seen,--a style of finish that is quite usual in
French houses. It was owing to this circumstance that Marie Antoinette
made her escape, undetected, to the King's chamber, the night the palace
was entered by the fish-women.
We saw the rooms in which Louis XIV. and Louis XV. died. The latter, you
may remember, fell a victim to the small-pox, and the disgusting body,
that had so lately been almost worshipped, was deserted, the moment he
was dead. It was left for hours, without even the usual decent
observances. It was on the same occasion, we have been told, that his
grandchildren, including the heir, were assembled in a private
drawing-room, waiting the result, when they were startled by a hurried
trampling of feet. It was the courtiers, rushing in a crowd, to pay
their homage to the new monarch! All these things forced themselves
painfully on our minds, as we walked through the state rooms. Indeed
there are few things that can be more usefully studied, or which awaken
a greater source of profitable recollections, than a palace that has
been occupied by a great and historical court. Still they are not
poetical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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