What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter’s wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its hiding‐places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble Molière, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun’s warmth to the earth in spring‐time. But we are beginning at the end. Versailles is identified to us chiefly if not solely with Louis Quatorze and his age; but it was not so from the beginning. Once upon a time it was a marshy swamp, unhealthy and uncultivated; and, if we deny Louis the faculty of creating men of genius, we cannot refuse him that of having evolved an Eden from a wilderness. There is little indeed in the history of this early period to compensate the reader for keeping him waiting while we review it, still it is better to cast our glance back a little, not very far, a century or so, to see what were the antecedents of the site of one of the grandest historic monuments of France.