- 'Trip to Versailles
- from a Village on the Marne'
- by Mildred Aldrich
- from her book 'The Peak of the Load' 1918
An Outing to War-Time Paris
September 4, 1917
Since I last wrote, I have been travelling. I have been to Versailles for a week-end. I can hear you laughing. Well, I assure you that it was no laughing matter. The days have gone by when we used to just run out to Versailles for a few hours in the afternoon. It took me five hours and a half from my door to my destination, just at the entrance of the park, by the Grille de Neptune. It was a real voyage, and the first one I have made, — if you except those to Paris,— since the war broke out.
I went up to Paris by the five o'clock train, to escape the heat of mid-day. That train, which is the only one we have in these days which is not strictly a way-train, only makes two stops between Esbly, where I change to the main line, and Paris, instead of the seven the other trains make, and I expected, at the latest, to be in Paris by half-past six, with just time to get a bite, and take the twenty-five minutes past seven train for Versailles, and get there by half-past eight, before dark. No one likes to travel after dark if it can be avoided — dark trains, dimly lighted stations, no porters, and few cabs, you know.
From the beginning all my plans miscarried. The train to Paris stopped and was side- tracked three times. Once we waited fifteen minutes, so that it was half-past seven when I arrived, and I missed my train for Versailles, and had to wait until nearly nine o'clock. There were not half a dozen passengers in the train, and it was already nearly dark when it pulled out. The familiar little hour's ride was as strange as though I had never made it. The train stopped everywhere. All the stations were dark as possible, and therefore unrecognizable. It was a queer sensation to run along beside a platform in the still early darkness, see a door open from the ticket office, a woman, with a mobilization band round her left arm and a small cap on her head, come out in the narrow stream of light from the half opened door, and stand ready, while perhaps one person got out and no one got in, to blow her little whistle for the train to go ahead, while I strained my eyes to catch somewhere the name of the station, and never once did it.
If anyone had told me that anything so familiar could be so unfamiliar I would not have believed it.
The result was that instead of getting to Versailles at half-past eight, when I was expected, I got there at ten. There was no way of sending word — no telephonic communication is possible, and telegrams take often forty-eight hours for the shortest distances.
At Versailles the porter was a quarter of an hour finding a cab, so I arrived at my destination; a strange house, whose noble staircase was pitch-dark—and I had no electric lamp in my pocket — the concierge in bed, and very cross at being wakened, and I groped my way in the strange house up three flights of stairs to find my hostess lying awake and worrying. You see there is one thing to be said for these war times, — the very smallest effort one makes becomes an exciting adventure — else what would I have to write you about?
I never saw Versailles more beautiful.
The house in which I visited had a balcony overlooking the bassin de Neptune. The situation was ideal, not only for its beautiful outlook and its wonderful afternoon lights, but because of the ease with which one could, in five minutes, walk up to the top of that glorious terrace, on the park side of the palace, and look down that superb vista over the tapis vert to the glistening canal beyond, and also because I could sit on a balcony overlooking the street and that part of the park, and enjoy such a picturesque and changing scene as the Versailles of our days has never known.
The town was full of training camps, cantonnements, and cantines. Soldiers of all nations, all colours, all divisions, and all grades pass in and out the Park gates all day. The tower of Babel could have been nothing to what the Park of Versailles was that Sunday that I was there. There were Americans and British,—Canadians, Australians, Egyptians, Indians,—there were French and Senegalese, and Moroccans; there were Serbs and Italians; there were Portuguese and Belgians and Rastas, and alas! there were a few Russians, for there are millions of them just as ashamed of what is happening out in the east as we are, and just as sad over it. There were blacks and whites, yellows and reds and browns. There were chic officers, some of them on leave, still sporting their pantalons rouges, and much braided képis. There were slouching poilus in their baggy trousers and ill-fitting coats, and smart English Tommies, and broad-hatted Yanks, looking as if they wished they could go coat-less and roll up their sleeves — it was a hot day — instantly distinguishable from the wide-hatted Australians and Canadians. Nothing was handsomer than the Italians with their smart, half-high hats, or more amusing than the Belgians' little tassels of all colours jigging from the front of their head covering. All day that picturesque crowd passed in and out of the park, with crowds of women and children and all sorts of civilians.
Just opposite the balcony where we sat was a shop where they sold all sorts of souvenirs of the town — and post cards. From morning till night the crowd stopped there, and it seemed to me that pictures of Versailles must be going over the world, and surely to many places that had never heard of it before. I could not help thinking of the beginnings of culture that all these people must be unconsciously taking in at the pores, — at least I hoped there were. Many of the boys from the States, who in the ordinary course of normal life could never have hoped to see the place, and who are able to appreciate it and love it, will at least have that much to the good — among many other things — when they go home.
Of course the palace is hermetically closed. It has to be. All the same, I did wish that some of the American boys, who had never crossed the big pond before, could have seen it. However, for actual eye satisfaction the outside of the big palace and its parks is more important. I only regretted the interior because I longed for them to have it all.
It was wonderful how gay the crowd was, and how well the soldiers behaved, and how interested they all were in the children. The interest seemed mutual. I'll warrant there is not a child in Versailles who does not know every uniform on sight, or who does not recognize every nationality and every grade.
I only saw our boys at a distance as they came and went. But my hostess, who is living in Versailles for the summer and autumn, not only meets and talks with them on days when the park is not so thronged as it is on Sundays, she has them sitting by her fireside to drink tea. She tells me that some of them are terribly homesick. They miss their women-folks, and their young girl friends. That is perfectly natural, for the comrade- ship between young men and women in the States is a sort of relation which no other people have or understand. Even homesickness which will be forgotten as soon as they are actively "in it" is, I am told, doing them good. It may console all of you on the other side of the water to know that the boys speak of "home" as probably none of you ever heard them speak, and say "mother" in a tone quite new to them. So there is gain in all things.
I did not care to go into the park in the crowd. It was much more interesting to watch the moving throng from my high gallery seat, and to wander about the park in the early morning, when it was practically empty. That is a chance one rarely gets unless one is staying there. You have no idea how lovely it looks then, and one can wander at will, and every turn is a new picture, all the more beautiful for lacking fellow creatures in modern clothes. I never see it, as I saw it one breezy morning, when there seemed to be only us two about, without feeling a debt of gratitude to Louis XIV, great builder that he was. It is a debt that accumulates. Even Republican France can afford to be grateful to him, and forgive his faults for the sake of the grandeur he conferred on them, and which no republic can ever dare to imitate out of the country's purse.
I wish you, who know the park so well, could see it this year. There are no flowers. Some of the pines and cedars on the terraces are neglected — the number of gardeners is insufficient for all the work — and in some of the more primitive parts of the park the trees need trimming. Instead of flowers there are vegetables planted everywhere. All the flower beds surrounding the grass plots are planted with potatoes and beans and simple garden stuff. As the French gardener is incapable of doing anything ugly, these beds of vegetables are laid out just as carefully as if the choicest flowers from the serres were there; each bed has its label, carefully placed, to indicate the variety, bearing the words, "Planted for Ambulance No.------."
Isn't that a pretty idea?
Several of the fountains were being repaired the morning we walked there alone, and one of them was playing, just as if for us. It was delightful to be walking along a shady alley, with the thick carpet of dry leaves rustling under foot, and stirring all one's memories of the historic days of the ancient régime, and to see suddenly at the end of the vista a jet of water rise into the air, and the autumn breeze shake it into spray. Ordinarily on days when such a sight is possible, a great crowd prevents one from realizing that it is beautiful as well as spectacular, and the same crowd and its movement drives away the spectres of the past.
It was lucky I made this brief visit. If I had not, I don't know what I could have written to you about. It is the same old story of patient waiting, — of trying realization that we are all used to of the slow movement and the meagre results. The Allies are holding the beast by the throat out there, and it begins to look as if that were about all that could be done until the boys from the States are ready to go in and choke him. After all, it is a pretty big job — and the beast dies hard. I am afraid he does not yet realize that he is being choked. All I pray is that he does not get away, and make another bound. Not that it will matter except to make us all mad.
