could have lacked.

It was worth a pilgrimage to see. Everything is on so gigantic a scale.

Nothing is small--nothing is cheap. The statues are all large; the

palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are

interminable. All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles

are vast. I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and

these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more

beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be. I know

now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and

that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it

is in reality. I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred

millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so

scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now. He took a

tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this

park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris. He kept 36,000

men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used

to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night. The wife of a

nobleman of the time speaks of this as an "inconvenience," but naively

remarks that "it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of

tranquillity we now enjoy."

I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into

pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and

when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to

feel dissatisfied. But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom

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The Innocents Abroad