Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/16

 loaded with wild flowers, thickets dark with rank luxuriance of growth, while fresh streams, over which the blue kingfisher flitted like a dragon-fly, rippled merrily down towards the sea. Through teeming orchards, between waving cornfields, past convent-walls grown over with woodbine and lilac and laburnum, under stately churches, rearing Gothic spires, delicate as needlework, to heaven, and bringing with them a cool current of air, a sense of freedom and refreshment as they hurried past. Nay, even where the ripening sun beat fiercely on the vineyards, terraced tier upon tier, to concentrate his rays—where Macon and Côte-d'Or were already tinged with the first faint blush of their coming vintage, even amidst the grape-rows so orderly planted and so carefully trained, buxom peasant-girls could gather posies of wild flowers for their raven hair, to make their black eyes sparkle with merrier glances, and their dusky cheeks mantle in rich carnation, type of southern blood dancing through their veins.

But Versailles was not France, and at Versailles nothing seemed free but the birds and the children.

One of the alleys, commanded from the king's private apartments, was thickly crowded with loungers. Courtiers in silk stockings, laced coats, and embroidered waistcoats reaching to their thighs, wearing diamond hilts on their rapiers, and diamond buckles in their shoes, could not move a step without apology for catching in the spreading skirts of magnificent ladies—magnificent, be it understood, in gorgeousness of apparel rather than in beauty of face or symmetry of figure. The former, indeed, whatever might be its natural advantages, was usually coated with paint and spotted with patches, while the latter was so disguised by voluminous robes, looped-up skirts, falling laces, and such outworks and appendages, not to mention a superstructure of hair, ribbon, and other materials, towering so high above the head as to place a short woman's face somewhere about the middle of her whole altitude, that it must have been difficult even for the maid who dressed her to identify, in one of these imposing triumphs of art, the slender and insignificant little framework upon which the whole fabric had been raised. Devotion in woman is never more sublime than when sustaining the torture of dress.