fur-garbed, and hideously spectacled occupants, once their raucous,
cigale-like birr-r-r has died away in the distance, leave infinitely
less impression on the placid life of Versailles than do their wheels on
the roads they traverse. Under the grand trees of the wide avenues the
townsfolk move quietly about, busying themselves with their own affairs
and practising their little economies as they have been doing any time
during the last century.

Perhaps it was the emphatic and demonstrative nature of the mourning
worn that gave us the idea that the better-class female population of
Versailles consisted chiefly of widows. When walking abroad we seemed
incessantly to encounter widows: widows young and old, from the aged to
the absurdly immature. It was only after a period of bewilderment that
it dawned upon us that the sepulchral garb and heavy crape veils
reaching from head to heel were not necessarily the emblems of
widowhood, but might signify some state of minor bereavement. In Britain
a display of black such as is an everyday sight at Versailles is
undreamt of, and one saw more crape veils in a day in Versailles than in
London in a week. Little girls, though their legs might be uncovered,
had their chubby features shrouded in disfiguring gauze and to our
unaccustomed foreign eyes a genuine widow represented nothing more
shapely than a more or less stubby pillar festooned with crape.

But for an inborn conviction that a frugal race like the French would
not invest in a plethora of mourning garb only to cast it aside after a
few months' wear, and that therefore the period of wearing the willow
must be greatly protracted, we would have been haunted by the idea that
the adult male mortality of Versailles was enormous.

"Do they wear such deep mourning for all relatives?" I asked our hotel