My Library

20 PREFACE.
attendants were occupying themselves very much as they might have been engaged more than a century since. The scenery, too, of the region into which they had strayed had undergone a change. The park had reverted to the state in which it was at the end of the eighteenth century. All this might be dis- missed as merely a clairvoyant vision of the past had it not been that the two English ladies, who were not clairvoyant, and who were in their ordinary everyday condition, spoke to the people whom they met, never suspecting that they were addressing mortals who had been dead and gone for a hundred years, and received from them audible answers in reply to their questions as to their way about the park, This intermingling of the past and the present, this superposition of the world of a hundred years ago upon the actual world of to-day, would in itself have called for no remark. Every object is a palimpsest upon which all past events are inscribed, the record of each successive generation being impressed upon the record of its predecessor. That of course. But the unusual, the inexplicable, feature of the Versailles story is that the people of the eighteenth century saw, heard, and spoke to the visitors of the twentieth