United States or Lebanon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The world which Philip ruled from the foot of the Guadarrama has passed away. A new heaven and a new earth came in with the thunders of 1776 and 1789. There will be no more Pyramids, no more Versailles, no more Escoriais. The unpublished fiat has gone forth that man is worth more than the glory of princes.
The recent proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles an event that will be treated in a later chapter opened up a vista of great developments for the Fatherland, not unmixed with difficulties and dangers.
The whole city was threatened with total destruction. The authorities, in terror, sent to the conqueror imploring his clemency. The haughty King of France demanded that the Doge of Genoa, with four of his principal ministers, should repair to the palace of Versailles and humbly implore his pardon. The doge, utterly powerless, was compelled to submit to the humiliating terms.
We soon reached the water works of Marli, which supply the jets d'eau of Versailles. They are upon a vast scale, and appear to be very curious. A little further on we passed Mal Maison, the country, and chief residence of the first consul and his family. It is an ancient house, embosomed in beautiful woods and gardens.
Later he learned from the wife of his trainer, a Frenchwoman, that those employed in his stables at Versailles who had not gone to the front at the approach of the Germans had fled, and that for three weeks his string of twenty-two horses had been fed, groomed, and exercised by the trainer's wife and her two little girls.
"Done at Versailles the 29th of November, 1689. "Signed: Louis." The child, however, would forget himself, and relapse into his mad fits. When his preceptor was chiding him one day for a grave fault, he went so far as to say, "No, no, sir; I know who I am and what you are."
No sooner was the news of the king being attacked with small-pox publicly known, than a doctor Sulton, an English physician, the pretended professor of an infallible cure for this disease, presented himself at Versailles, and tendered his services.
When he found Charles advancing, he sent to Broglio for assistance, and was answered, that "he must have orders from Versailles." Such a desertion of his most powerful ally disconcerted him, but the battle was unavoidable. When the Prussians were returned to the camp, the king, hearing that an Austrian officer was brought in mortally wounded, had the condescension to visit him.
The Louvre and the palace of the Tuileries were alternately the residence of the kings of France, till Lewis XIV built that of Versailles, after which it was deserted till the minority of Lewis XV, who, when a little boy, was visited here by Peter the Great, but, in 1722, the court quitted Paris altogether for Versailles, where it continued fixed till the 5th of October 1789.
You will think that my pen has run away with me in following the fortunes of Louise de La Vallière from Blois to Paris and from Paris to Versailles; but Lydia and I have been reading a book about Blois which M. La Tour had sent to us from Paris.
Word Of The Day