“Madame,” said Ferminard, placing the dress on a chair, “we are both of an age. Calm yourself, and regard me as though I were not here. Besides, I am not a man; I am an artist, and, so far from molesting you, I have come to pay you the greatest compliment in my power by producing your portrait.” He drew a chair to the dressing-table, and proceeded to unroll the bundle, which contained bottles of pigment, some brushes and a host of other materials. The old woman on the bed lay watching him like a mesmerized fowl. Her portrait, at her time of life, and in her condition! What trick was this of the Dubarrys? She was soon to learn. CHAPTER VIII THE PRESENTATION The Versailles of to-day stands alone in desolation among all the other buildings left to us by the past. That vast courtyard through whose gates the dusty and travel-stained _berlines_ of the ambassadors used to pass; those thousand windows, vacant and cleaned by the municipality; those fountains and terraces, and statues and vistas—across all these lies written the word which is at once their motto and explanation: _Fuimus_—we have been. It is the palace of echoes. But it is more than this. It is France herself. Not the France of to-day—banker and bourgeois-ridden; nor the France of the Second Empire—vulgar and painted; nor the Napoleonic France—half a brothel, half a barrack. Across all these and the fumes of the Revolution, Versailles calls to us: “I am France. Before I was built I was born in the dreams of the Gallic people. I am the concretion in stone of all the opulence and splendour and licence of mind which found a focus in the reign of Le Roi Soleil; the Hôtel St. Pol and the Logis d’Angoulême foreshadowed me, and Chambord and all those châteaux that mirror themselves in the Loire. I am the wealth of Jacques Cœur, the bravery of Richelieu and Turenne, the laughter of Rabelais, the songs of Villon, the beauty of Marion de l’Orme, the licentiousness of Montpensier, the arrogance of Fouquet. Of all that splendour I remain, an echo and a dream.” But to-night, in the year of our Lord 1770, Versailles, living and splendid, a galaxy of lights that might have been seen from leagues away, the huge park filled with the sound of the wind in the trees and the waters of the fountains, the great courtyard ablaze with lamps and torches, and coloured with the uniforms of the Guards and the Swiss—to-night Versailles was drawing towards herself the whole world in the form of the ambassadors of Europe, the whole Court of France, and a majority of the population of Paris. The Place d’Armes was thronged, and the Paris road, a league from the gates; bourgeois and beggar, the hungry and well-fed, the maimed, the halt and the blind, apprentice and shop-girl—all were there, a seething mass attracted to the festivity as moths are attracted by a lamp, and all filled with one idea: the Dubarry.