CHAPTER XV
ANDRÉ IS THRICE SURPRISEDThe great historical buildings in Paris bear witness with eloquence and beauty to the genius and ambition of the many royal rulers who during three centuries of a wonderfully dramatic history have led a nation itself gifted with genius and ambition. Versailles alone is the exception, for in Versailles even the most ignorant and cold-blooded of modern sightseers feels at every step that the years have vanished, that he breathes the air of the grand age, that he is face to face with the monument of one historic figure and one alone—Louis XIV. Gone is the bitter memory of 1870; gone is the tragedy of Marie Antoinette. Alike in the stately splendour of the Galerie des Glaces, in the cold loneliness of the chapel, in the ordered magnificence of these haughty
