If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the great paved, semi-circular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of the courtyard, in the central one of the three diverging avenues (the broad road leading to Paris) the roof of a great barn-like building, a long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There was but little to hide it, for the ground about was only beginning to be built over; young trees, just planted, marked each side of the road upon which one end of this building abutted. Within this hall, ungainly, and oddly apparent above the lower roofs about it and the unfinished lower buildings of the quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected and, as some believe, destroyed the immemorial institution of personal government in Europe, and launched those experiments by which the French people in arms proposed to change the face of Christendom. Under the rain and in the cold air of that morning there was not much movement in Versailles. The great desert of hard paving-stones before the gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty save of troops, and these, not yet arrived in very great numbers, seemed to be doing the work of a police rather than of an army. They were drawn up in lines that cut the Paris road and its approaches guarding on all sides this hall of the Commons. The side streets which led past the back doors of that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the Street of the Works, had each their cordon of men. Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but watching, were distributed here and there. The eye caught in the glistening, empty spaces of that wet, gray morning the red of the Swiss Guard and the blue and white of the militia. Beyond these uniforms there was little else; no crowd was yet gathered. Nor was there as yet any parade or any standing to arms. The ear could no more judge Versailles that morning than the eye. The rain was too soft for any noise, the early life of the town too dulled under such weather to send up any echo from the streets. But there could still be distinguished from that quarter of a mile away the occasional sound of hammering where the workmen within the hall were finishing the last of its decorations for the ceremony that was to take place that day. It was a little before nine o’clock in the morning. That large hall had its main entrance upon the new wide, bare Avenue de Paris, with its sprigs of trees. Years before it had been built to house the rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of plays--all the material of the lesser pleasures of the court; for which reason it was still called the “Menus-Plaisirs,” that is, the “Petty Pleasures.” It had stood for some forty years, and the things to be warehoused had come in by its principal opening upon this great main road.