Each time that I return to this palace I am charmed with the sonorous silence of my high esplanade and with the top of the crenellated wall surrounding it,--an artificial spot whence one commands an extended view of artificial landscape, the sight of which has always been forbidden, and which, until lately, no European has ever seen. Everything about the place is so Chinese that one feels as though it were the heart of the yellow country, the very quintessence of China. These high gardens were a favorite resort for the ultra-Chinese reveries of an uncompromising Empress who possibly dreamed of shutting her country off from the rest of the world, as in olden times, but who to-day sees her empire crumbling at her feet, rotten to the core, like her myriads of temples and gilded wooden gods. The magical hour here is when the enormous red ball, which the Chinese sun appears to be on autumn evenings, lights up the roofs of the Violet City before it disappears. I never fail to leave my kiosk at this hour to see once more these effects, unique in all the world. Compared to this, what barbaric ugliness is offered by a bird's-eye view of one of our European cities,--a mass of ugly gables, tiles, and dirty roofs full of chimneys and stove-pipes, and, as a last horror, electric wires forming a black network! In China, where they are all too scornful of pavements and sewers, everything which rises into the air, into the domain of the ever-watchful and protecting spirits, is always impeccable. And this immense Imperial retreat, empty to-day, now displays for me alone the splendor of its enamelled roofs. In spite of their age, these pyramids of yellow faience, carved with a grace unknown to us, are still brilliant under the red sun. At each of the corners of the topmost one the ornaments simulate great wings; lower down, toward the outside, are rows of monsters in poses which are copied and recopied, century after century, sacred and unchanging. These pyramids of yellow faience are brilliant. From far off, against the ashy blue sky, clouded by the everlasting dust, it looks like a city of gold; then, as the sun sinks, like a city of copper. First the silence of it all; then the croakings that begin the moment the ravens go to rest; then the death-like cold that wraps this magnificence of enamel as in a winding-sheet as soon as the sun goes down. To-night again, when we leave the Rotunda Palace, we pass the Palace of the North without stopping, and go on to Monsignor Favier's.