No incident in French history is more widely known. In talking of it in the bed-chamber and balcony, it was as if we heard it for the first time.
The “little apartments of the queen” were refreshment to our jaded senses and nerves. They are a succession of cozy nooks in a retired wing. Boudoirs, where were the soft lounges and low chairs, excluded by etiquette from the courtly _salons_; closets, fitted up with writing-desk, chair, and footstool; others, lined on all sides with books; still others, where the queen, whether it were Maria Lesczinski or Marie Antoinette, might sit, with a favorite maid of honor or two, at her embroidery. Through these apartments, all the “home” she had had in the palace, a terrified woman fled to gain a secret door of escape, while the marauders, the delegation from Paris, were yelling and raging for her blood in the corridors and state apartments.
If this row of snug resting and working rooms were the “Innermost” of her domestic life, the Petit Trianon was her play-ground. It is a pretty villa, not more than half as large as the Grand Trianon built for Madame de Maintenon by Louis XIV. Napoleon I. had a suite of small apartments in the Petit Trianon—study, salon, bath and dressing-rooms, and bed-chamber. They are furnished as he left them, even to the hard bed and round, uncompromising pillows. All are hung and upholstered with yellow satin brocade; the floors are polished and waxed, uncarpeted, save for a rug laid here and there. A door in the arras communicates with the Empress’ apartments. The villa was built by Louis XV. for the Du Barry, but interests us chiefly because of Marie Antoinette’s love for it. Her spinnet is in the salon where she received only personal and intimate friends. It is a common-looking affair, the case of inlaid woods ornamented with brass handles and corners. The keys are discolored—some of them silent; the others yielded discordant tinklings as we touched them with reverent fingers. Her work-table is in another room. Her bed is spread with an embroidered satin coverlet, once white. Her monogram and a crown were worked near the bottom. The stitches were cut out by revolutionary scissors, but their imprint remains, enabling one to trace clearly the design. In this room hang her portrait and that of her son, the lost Dauphin, a lovely little fellow, with large, dark-blue eyes like his mother’s, and chestnut hair, falling upon a wide lace collar. His coat is blue; a strap of livelier blue crosses his chest to meet a sword-belt; a star shines upon his left breast, and he carries a rapier jauntily under his arm. His countenance is sweet and ingenuous, but there is a shading of pensiveness or thought in the expression which is unchildlike. It was easy and pleasant to picture him running up and down the marble stairs, and filling the now uninhabited rooms with boyish talk and mirth. It was yet easier to reproduce in imagination the figures of mother and children in the avenues leading to the Swiss village, her favorite and latest toy.