came back to the Chateau to die. "The moment the breath was out of his body," we read, "every one fled from Versailles. The remains were burriedly enclosed in a double coffin of lead, which hardly sufficed to smother the strong odor of the pestilence, and the few priests who kept watch in the chapelle-ardente were alone compelled not to abandon the corpse of the king. Two days later it was taken to SaintDenis and the funeral procession was more like a train laden with rubbish which must be speedily gotten rid of, than the last rites of a monarch." (Bezenval). At midnight, escorted by grooms, the infected vehicle was driven swiftly over the road. The gleaming torches roused the curiosity of a few observers, who broke out into jeers and insults.

Such was the funeral chant which accompanied to Saint-Denis all that remained of Louis the Well-Beloved.

At the palace, as we learn from a sight of the accounts, there were bargainings and white-washings, and a purification of all the rooms which might be supposed infected. There was, in fact, a general cleaning out of the places and things associated with the late reign. The Du Barry was packed off to the Bernadines of Portaux-Dames, and her whole followingd'Anguillon, Maupeou, Terray-was ig nominiously expelled. Will honesty and respectability really become the mode, once more? Popular expectation quite throbs, in the healthful breeze which has been set blowing through Versailles. What may not be expected from our young Dauphin with his excellent disposition and dignified manners, and from the adorable young Dauphiness, who wins all hearts? real Queen, at last, instead of those vile favorites! No more the victimized wife, whose type seems to have become fixed among us-a forlorn foreigner, the mere sullen perpetuator of a dynasty,

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"by whom the King has had ten children without ever having addressed her as many words"! No more a tiresome feature of royal etiquette, but a sovereign lady, loving and beloved, who will wear the diadem with grace, resume the power so long usurped by courtesans, and use it generously and beneficently. New rulers, for a new age! For the age has indeed undergone a brisk transformation. None save the very oldest habitués of Versailles hold out against the change in public sentiment, wrought by that wonderful magician Rousseau. At his bidding the heart now carries it over the intellect, sensibility over gallantry, the joys of nature over the fascinations of society. He has even pieced up a code of morals, of a certain kind, not very gratifying to the theologians, but still, a system of ethics-almost a religion. The strong breeze of this revival has penetrated even the palace, where Jean Jacques never set foot. Let us hasten into the Hall of Louis XVI. Everything leads us to suppose that we shall find it radiant with the light of a new dawn.

Alas, how quickly is the illusion dispelled! It was only a twilight glimmer after all! The past weighs too heavily upon the youthful Court. It is too late for a renaissance, too late for anything -even for a blundering kind of honesty, and a goodness which borders on weakness. In vain do the new currents of thought uplift and carry away the outside world. All they can do at Versailles is to arouse a superficial enthusiasm, and slightly to modify the style of dress, the amusements and pageants in vogue, the menus and the operamusic. They are powerless to change the hearts and brains once fashioned in the debasing mould of this royal abode. Abandon the hope of comprehending the world as it is, and the lives of other men, all ye who have been born here! There should have been carved on the

Before proceeding to an examination of the portraits let us take a look at the genre pictures. Olivier in 1766 represented the favorite princely diversions with a precision of detail which enables us completely to reproduce the gay life in which those amiable triflers were brought up. Here we have their supper:-a supper given to the Comedians of the Temple by the Prince de Conti. The great folks are seated at the first table, on a platform raised two or three feet above the general level of the floor. Around the lower table, which is laden with fruit and sparkling with crystal, the young women of the Comedy chatter and twang harpstrings. Another banquet is given by the same Prince de Conti in the park of the Isle-Adam to a young foreigner of distinction, who chances to be none other than the Duke of Brunswick, the future Generalissimo of the Coalition. Fair ladies are seated upon the green turf round about, lavishing their smiles. A few years later Brunswick will be returning these courtesies at Coblentz. It is the fatal supper of Cazotte which ought to have been depicted in this hall. Here is one of the guests, invited to that banquet.

The Duc d'Orléans, Philippe, Egalita, in the grand robe of the Saint-Esprit, embroidered with tongues of flame. The splendor of his costume, and his generally magnificent air cannot disguise the essential baseness of the per

vention, looks as though it had been shaved by a blow of the axe. The smiling youthful figure, with the prominent nose, is that of the Duc de Bourbon-who will one day be cut down from the window-fastening where he had hanged himself. Near him is the Duc d'Angoulême-the utterly insignificant shadow that he will always remain,-a creature so pitiful that misfortune will not even deign to assign him a rôle in the tragedies to be enacted by his comrades. Next comes a pretty boy, in a pink waistcoat and pale green coat. There is a look of astonishment in his big eyes. Have they then pierced the ceiling, and caught a vision of the coming days? For, in the room above this there is a picture representing a bed with blood-stained sheets, and a family weeping about a fatally stricken man-all the horror of the night of February 13th, 1820. The pretty boy is the little Duc de Berry. Do you see the spot on the light-green coat where the knife of Louvel will go in? The mark of an evil destiny is also plain to be seen on that other childish head with its aureole of melancholy grace, painted after the manner of Greuze in ashen gray. It is the Duc d'Enghien-wanted at Vincennes.

But you are looking among his cousins for the baby-martyr, the little Dauphin, who will be known by Europe as Louis XVII. He is in the South Attic and I hope he will yet be brought back to his own apartment. He is there in the shape of a marble bust and there is not in the whole Museum a more affecting object. This bust, of which the nose and chin have been restored, was flung out of a window of the Tuileries during the sack of the tenth of August. One of the attacking party-a shoemakerpicked it up and carried it to his place: and to soothe his hatred of the Capet family he took a notion to hammer his leather upon the little marble head

which still retains the

scars inflicted by this process. Thus, while the living infant was being tortured to death by the shoe-maker Simon, with no previous collusion his image, or, as the old Egyptians would have said, his double, underwent the same brutalities in a cobbler's shop. Truly our most ingenious dramatists must own themselves vanquished by the great Historiographer who can devise coincidences like this!

An amateur discovered the little Dauphin's bust and, after various wanderings it found a resting-place in the Museum of Versailles. Happier than the original, it came back to its birthplace, where its wonderful adventures set the visitor a-dreaming.

Several of the young folk here represented will have a longer and less lugubrious course, though beset by sharp turns and many pitfalls. Here we have two portraits of the Comte de Provence; one by Drouais, the other by an unknown artist. "Take care!" the keen and crafty features appear always to say-especially to his sisterin-law, Marie Antoinette. Monsieur could ill dissimulate his hatred of an elder, who was able to knock him down, though vastly his inferior in intellectual gifts. He considered his brother non-compos, impotent, hardly fit to live. At the age of twenty, in a circle of princes mad for pleasure, his mature mind made its calculations, checked off possible accidents, eagerly coveted the throne. When Marie Antoinette became a mother his sly ambition seemed defeated. Monsieur, and his Piedmontise wife, enraged at the sterility of their own union, never forgave the Autrichienne that tardy accouchement which they had almost ceased to dread. Then what spite! What low trickery! The whole existence of this pair-or rather of this trio, for Balbi espoused all the grudges of his friend-became one cabal against

the Queen. The most virulent of the pamphlets which defamed her issued from Monsieur's own press. Patience! This headlong and indecent ambition was prophetic too. Thanks to the black draught of the executioner, François-Xavier will one day ascend the throne. But he will come down from it, kicked off by the heel of the returned Elban prisoner-an incident which is also commemorated in this marvellous Museum, upon a highly dramatic canvas of Baron Gros; and who would recognize the elegant youth depicted by Drouais, in the gouty monster, his legs all bandaged under their gold-buttoned gaiters, swept out of the Tuileries along with a torrent of other fugitives, by the quivering light of a few torches, on the night of March 19th, 1815?

Not far from the astute Provence, we recognize the light, frisky, fascinating head of his brother Artois, quite as dangerous to his fair sisterin-law, though in a different way, as that dagger-in-the-dark, his elder. The devotee of pleasure would have been much surprised, if that Cagliostro, who knew everything and whose portrait confronts his own, had addressed him like the witch in "Macbeth": "Hail to thee-who will be king hereafter!" The last King of his line! Up above, where the transformation scenes of the future are all set forth, there is a huge canvas by Gérard, representing the pompous coronation at Rheims. Good-natured Artois, now a white-haired old man, adjusts his crown, flanked by two Marshals of the Empire. And then Holyrood, and Goritz, and the pillow and the grave of an exile! We noticed in a former chamber, among the guests of Louis XV, two young Stuarts, handsome and pensive, expelled from their island home, and tossing in a shipwreck without end. The young folk we are now studying will be the Stuarts of

the next generation. The room where we are opens into a gallery, where the portrait of another young man cannot fail to give us pause. While the Court artists were busy with their great canvases at Versailles, the amateur pencil of a military comrade was roughly sketching, during a visit they were making at Tournon, the features of a youthful lieutenant from the garrison of Valence. The features are barely indicated-the thin, fine profile, with long locks of straight hair falling like sticks over the hollow cheeks-and the inscription "Mio caro amico Buonaparte Pontornini del. Tournone, 1785." This is the first portrait of Napoleon. He is merely waiting in the gallery until the princes go up into the Hall of the Revolution.

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Were we not right in saying that history should be studied from the life, on the spot where it was made, and among the images of its chief actors?

The mere juxtaposition of these images can move the heart more than the most eloquent orator, or the most inspired poet. The cicerone needs but to name these

portraits in passing: after that they will speak for themselves. You embrace them in one look, and the pageant of the old time is reviewed in its total magnificence, to the imagination of all who can conceive the connections, the contrasts, the mysterious entanglement of all these destinies. Even so, and before it exists for ourselves, may the spectacle of life universal present itself,I speak reverently,-at one glance and upon one plane, to the omniscient thought which designed the vast performance.

The line of predestined victims is continued by a beautiful portrait of the great financier Foullon. What complete satisfaction with life is expressed in that face! It fairly reeks

the superb content of great wealth and gratified vanity. Seated before a sumptuous desk, with a broad red ribbon across his chest-for he is secretary of the Order of Saint-Louis and wears the great cross-Foullon already saw himself Controller General, a post which Bezenval tells us he was dying to hold. Fate had reserved for him another sort of elevation, after a few years' delay. Pursued by popular fury to his Chateau of Morangis, he took refuge with his neighbor Sartines. But the peasants of Viry discovered the man who wanted to make them "eat grass," and haled him to Paris on a cart, with a necklace of nettles, a thistle in his button-hole, and a bundle of hay strapped to his shoulders. "Foullon à la lanterne!" His elegant bureaucratic head will traverse Paris on a pike, disheveled and disfigured. Chateaubriand saw it from the window of his hotel in the Rue Richelieu.

Is there such a thing as an epidemic of catastrophe, which is bound to attack all those who venture inside this hall? Here comes an odd-looking foreigner, the Comte du Nord, the future Emperor Paul of Russia. He speaks, he expatiates upon this admirable little canvas no less than in the great portrait by Mme. Le Brun, in the Hermitage at Saint Petersburg. One knows not whether to laugh or to tremble before this mis-shapen figure, with its wild and scornful air; a sort of polar Don Quixote, whose chivalrous aspirations will end in the blackest melancholy, varied by outbursts of maniacal fury. Already due in a mad-house, agitated every night by strange dreams which he related in the morning to his friend Rostopchine, he beheld himself in one of these carried up to heaven by an invisible and supernatural force. The night came when he awoke from his dreams under the sword of Benningsen and amid

the band of conspirators who despatched him in the dark.

Princes and private folk alike-all are overtaken by the same fell destiny. Whence came it? Can it have been from him of yon portrait stuck into the wall above all the rest and so seeming to dominate them, looking very like a spider in the midst of his web; from the large, crafty, impudent face, with its bulging eyes, which regard the august company with an indecipherable look? I have spoken of this portrait before. It is that of Count Cagliostro; enigmatical as its model; of no particular age; painted we know not when, or by whom. The necromancer must needs be here, still wielding over these men the occult power which bewildered all their brains, prolonging that fascination, which the Baroness d'Oberkirch has owned she could never resist.

Alchemist-else where did he get the gold which fairly ran in streams from his fingers? Prophet-as he certainly showed himself in his Letter to the French People and the predictions which were SO quickly verified by events. Healer, Charmer, Preacher of Free-masonry in the fashionable world-how did he so impose himself? Who was he? Whence came he? Historians and novelists alike have spent themselves in conjecture concerning the sphinx in question, but no one of them has wrung from him his secret. Goethe, who was at that time travelling in Sicily, says that he was the son of a Jew at Palermo; but there are gaps and obscurities even in Goethe's narrative. Even after the minute researches of M. Frantz Funck-Brentano, the cloud lies thick upon a career which appears ever more and more mythical. But how should we know who Cagliostro was, and what he did in 1784, in those lodges where they celebrated the Egyptian rite, when we are SO ill-informed even

about that latest incarnation of his which we ourselves have witnessed?

For the immortal Joseph Balsamo has reappeared among us, wearing on this occasion, a sober, scientific mask, adapted to the taste of the time. Once more we have seen him playing for millions, influencing the policy of the state, beguiling personages of the highest ranks, routing the great captains of science. Always armed with some occult power, his credit was good both on the Bourse, and in the Chancery-courts. The Bar lavished upon him its most envied distinctions. He subjugated the strongest; ordered them to speak, and they spoke; to be silent, and they were mum; to take their own lives, and they did so. These are no legends; they are simple facts: and there are others yet more surprising, known only to the initiated few who frequented the Count de Cagliostro in his new incarnation as Cornelius Herz. He lived among us, having set in motion the mightiest machinery, and no one ever knew either how he lived or how he died. Why should we marvel at the part he earlier played, in the disintegration of the ancient world?

Many folk helped on the disintegration of that diseased world, as if they had received a mandate to hurry it into the tomb. Everything conspired to increase the madness of its latest days. At every turn sprang up some new Prometheus, intent upon compelling his fellow-men to harbor blind hope in their souls. How many persons, in the secret assembly where we now find ourselves, could have sworn that they never helped form an electric chain round one of Mesmer's tubs? The age which laughed at so much took seriously only charlatans, theosophists and other illuminés. Some are carried away by Saint-Martin, and some by Swedenborg. The works of the Swedish mystic were