Christmas
No project could have been less foreseen than was ours of wintering in France, though it must be confessed that for several months our thoughts had constantly strayed across the Channel. For the Boy was at school at Versailles, banished there by our desire to fulfil a parental...
The first dread days, when the Boy, heavy with fever, seemed scarcely to realise our presence, were swiftly followed by placid hours when he lay and smiled in blissful content,...
2. Chapter 2Our hotel was distinctively French, and immensely comfortable, in that it had gleaned, and still retained, the creature comforts of a century or two. Thus it combined the luxuri...
3. Chapter 3The English-speaking traveller finds Versailles vastly more foreign than the Antipodes. He may voyage for many weeks, and at each distant stopping-place find his own tongue spok...
7. Chapter 7The Château of Versailles, like the town, dozes through the winter, only half awakening on Sunday afternoons when the townsfolk make it their meeting-place. Then conscripts, in...
5. Chapter 5The closing days of 1900 had been unusually mild. Versailles townsfolk, watching the clear skies for sign of change, declared that it would be outside all precedent if Christmas...
4. Chapter 4It was not a noble specimen of a Christmas-tree. Looked at with cold, unimaginative eyes, it might have been considered lopsided; undersized it undoubtedly was. Yet a pathetic f...
1. Chapter 1No project could have been less foreseen than was ours of wintering in France, though it must be confessed that for several months our thoughts had constantly strayed across the...
8. Chapter 8Stereotyped sights are rarely the most engrossing. At the Palace of Versailles the _petits appartements de la Reine_, those tiny rooms whose grey old-world furniture might have...
6. Chapter 6Even in the last days of December rosebuds had been trying to open on the standard bushes in the sheltered rose-garden of the Palace. But with the early nights of January a sudd...