Outside of Paris, but not far away, there are some famous places which we must see. First among these are the palace and grounds of Versailles, a magnificent palace, built by Louis XIV. for a summer residence. This gentleman, who liked to be called _Le Grand Monarque_ had so high an idea of the sort of country place he wanted, that he spent upon this palace and its grounds the sum of two hundred millions of dollars.[A] The whole place is now open to the public, and the grand and magnificent apartments and halls, some of them nearly four hundred feet long, are filled with paintings and statuary, so that the palace is now a great art gallery. The park is splendidly laid out, having in it a wide canal nearly a mile long. The fountains here are considered the finest in the world, and when they play, which is not very often, thousands upon thousands of people come out from Paris to see them. In the grounds are two small palaces, once inhabited by French queens; and one of these, called the little Trianon, was the beautiful home of Marie Antoinette, whose last home on earth was the brick-paved room of the Conciergerie. The private garden attached to this little palace, which is more like a park than a garden, possesses much rural beauty. Here, on the margin of a lake, we may see the little thatched cottages which Marie Antoinette had built, that she and the ladies of her court might play at being milkmaids. These cottages stand just as they did when those noble ladies dressed themselves up like peasant girls, and milked cows, which, I have no doubt, were very gentle animals, while the royal milkmaids probably tried to make themselves believe that they could have the happiness of real milkmaids as well as that which belonged to their own lives of luxury and state. At Fontainebleau is another royal palace, to which is attached a magnificent forest of forty-two thousand acres. The kings of France did not like to feel cramped in their houses or grounds, and in this beautiful forest, which measures fifty miles around, there are twelve thousand four hundred miles of roads and foot-paths. On the borders of this forest is the village of Barbizon, where lived the artist, Millet, of whom you have read in ST. NICHOLAS.