This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ... the dwelling-place of the great King of all its distinctive features. The image of Napoleon is as much out of place at Versailles as the statue of Louis XIV. would be on the summit of the VendSme column. It must not be forgotten, however, if one desires to be just, that Louis-Philippe was far from being free to act in ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ... the dwelling-place of the great King of all its distinctive features. The image of Napoleon is as much out of place at Versailles as the statue of Louis XIV. would be on the summit of the VendSme column. It must not be forgotten, however, if one desires to be just, that Louis-Philippe was far from being free to act in the matter of the Versailles restorations. All Europe was pervaded by a revolutionary influence so violent that the restoration of the palace of Absolute Monarchy was a very difficult thing. At the moment when the work was undertaken, the time seemed to be drawing nigh when one might say with the poet: "The ruins themselves have perished." Etiam periere ruince. In his Grinie du Christianisme Chateaubriand had written apropos of Versailles: "This palace which is like a great city by itself, these marble stairways which seem to rise to the clouds, these statues, these reservoirs, these woods, are now either crumbling, or covered with moss, or withered, or overthrown." Count Alexandre de Laborde relates that a traveller who had seen Versailles in all its pomp in 1789, at the opening of the States General, was curi ous to return there after several years of absence. Hastening across the grass that was growing in the courts, he entered this dwelling of kings and found solitude, devastation, sick-beds in the gilded galleries, flocks pasturing in the gardens, statues thrown down and mutilated. Then plunging into the adjacent woods he climbed the hill of Satory, and as the last rays of the sun sadly illumined the majestic and melancholy edifice in the distance, he repeated this striking passage from the author of Les Ruines: "Here was the seat of a powerful empire; these places now so deserted were once animated by a living m...
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