The terrace was inaugurated when Louis XIV. was in the height of his glory and with a splendour we can scarcely conceive, surely a contrast to the very democratic crowds which swarm its alleys and hang over its balustrade in this year, 1905. James II. of England and his Queen lived and died here and in this church to our right he lies buried. The sadness and misfortune of the fated Stuarts never forsook them for an instant even after death, for the bodies of Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I., and her daughter Henrietta were the first to be torn from their tombs in St. Denis and cast into the fosse. Before all this, St.-Germain witnessed the reception of the little Queen of Scotland and historic faces were clustered thickly around her fair head. One can picture that stately assemblage as it came from yonder portal to greet the very weary, tired out little girl, whose brows already ached with her Scottish crown; Henry II., the gay gallant; Catherine de Medici,--queen as yet in name only,--with the smouldering fires of ambition and the gleam of an indomitable will in her black, velvety, opaque eyes,--eyes which held no pupil yet saw all. One always pictures her as in her latter days, garbed in sweeping black with a long veil of sombre hue sweeping down from a black cap whose white frill comes to a point in the centre of her brow. But here she was clothed in brilliancy. Henry allowed no black in his court. In the throng came the boy princes whose short lives were to be so full of tragedies. Nostradamus also appeared with his prophecies of blood for the little princess. The head of the house of Guise and all who made history in those days together with the glittering courtiers,--poured in gorgeous array from yonder archway onto this square, crowded to-day with its plebeian humanity, and, as the eye wanders past the château and rests on the far-reaching terrace, the mental picture, shifting downward through the years is filled with a throng even far more brilliant. Masses of Watteau figures headed by Louis le Grand in his high red-heeled shoes and vast wig, and clothed with pomposity, advance out of the past; then the furies of the Revolution like a pack of great gaunt wolves sweep them away as though chaff, and passing onward give place to the beautiful if mock courts of the Napoléons, and then, the picture merges into this of to-day where the stage is the same, but how different the players thereon. Yonder, glittering in the sunshine lies the cauldron of Paris, which has produced and destroyed all who have performed on this stage of St.-Germain.