The entire nine hundred apartments of the palace are not open for inspection, but at twelve o’clock daily a guide gathers up the waiting visitors and drives them like a flock of sheep through the apartments, many of them beautiful and sumptuous in adornment, and some neglected and forlorn. We entered by the Court of the White Horse, or the Court of Adieux, as it has been called since the time when Napoleon I there bade farewell to the remnant of his old guard before his departure for Elba. His bed-room, said to be in the same state as when he left it, and the table on which he signed his abdication, naturally claim the attention of all strollers through these halls. Within there is the jargon of the chattering people, who feel of the draperies as they pass warily over the slippery floors, the autocratic twang of the guide who means to hold us to his story until he gets us safely through and out at the door with our francs snugly stored away in his pocket. Outside there are lovely gardens and grounds, but cabmen beset us to drive in the forest, and once there, produce a new waterfall, or a high rock, or a rustic bridge, anything, everything, that a sixty-mile forest can afford for which a _pour boire_ can be extracted. On the whole, we are ready on the second afternoon to return to Paris, and equally ready on the very next day to take the train for Versailles. It is only a little journey; we are there almost before we seem started, and in company with many other strangers, a few French families out for a day’s holiday, and many earnest talking deputies _en route_ to the Assembly, we go up in the omnibus through the town, which now fairly hugs the palace gates, to the entrance of the great court, and before us lies the enormous but not imposing pile of the Palace of Versailles. Everybody who has never seen it knows it through pictures. We need not even quote the guide-books, and say that the great palace is over a quarter of a mile long, and cost France in money two hundred millions of dollars, to say nothing of what it cost in after-suffering to the nation and to the descendants of the king who built it as a magnificent monument to his vanity and ambition. We all know what part the Revolution played in it, and also that no government since the Revolution could take the enormous expense of using it as a royal residence. Hence, in the time of Louis Phillipe it became a grand museum, and to-day the visitor, after exhausting himself in the effort to traverse some of the miles of walks to see the grounds, traverses miles of corridors and apartments lined with pictures, principally of French battles, and dedicated to all the glories of France. To Marie Antoinette the place of most tragic interest, to Louis Phillipe and Louis Napoleon it was simply a museum, and to France it has come to be, after the humiliation of seeing the German emperor encamped here, the seat of her new government and the stronghold of the power of the Republic.