Versailles

By William Makepeace Thackeray


[Footnote: From "The Paris Sketch Book."]



You pass from the railroad station through a long, lonely suburb, with
dusty rows of stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable
beggars, idle boys, and ragged old women under them. Behind the trees are
gaunt, moldy houses; palaces once, where (in the days of the unbought
grace of life) the cheap defense of nations gambled, ogled, swindled,
intrigued; whence high-born duchesses used to issue, in old times, to act
as chambermaids to lovely Du Barri; and mighty princes rolled away, in
gilt caroches, hot for the honor of lighting his Majesty to bed, or of
presenting his stockings when he rose, or of holding his napkin when he
dined.

Tailors, chandlers, tinmen, wretched hucksters, and greengrocers, are now
established in the mansions of the old peers; small children are yelling
at the doors, with mouths besmeared with bread and treacle; damp rags are
hanging out of every one of the windows, steaming in the sun; oyster-
shells, cabbage-stalks, broken crockery, old papers, lie basking in the
same cheerful light. A solitary water-cart goes jingling down the wide
pavement, and spirts a feeble refreshment over the dusty, thirty stones.