With us, New Year’s Day was a quiet one.  A dozen miles distant, Paris was welcoming the advent of the new century in a burst of feverish excitement.  But despite temptations, we remained in drowsy Versailles, and spent several of the hours in the little room where two pallid Red-Cross knights, who were celebrating the occasion by sitting up for the first time, waited expectant of our coming as their one link with the outside world.

[Illustration:  The Presbytery]

It was with a sincere thrill of pity that at dejeuner we glanced round the salle-a-manger and found all the Ogams filling their accustomed solitary places.  Only Dunois the comparatively young, and presumably brave, was absent.  The others occupied their usual seats, eating with their unfailing air of introspective absorption.  Nobody had cared enough for these lonely old men to ask them to fill a corner at their tables, even on New Year’s Day.  To judge by their regular attendance at the hotel meals, these men—­all of whom, as shown by their wearing the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour, had merited distinction—­had little hospitality offered them.  Most probably they offered as little, for, throughout our stay, none ever had a friend to share his breakfast or dinner.

The bearing of the hotel guests suggested absolute ignorance of one another’s existence.  The Colonels, as I have said in a previous chapter, were exceptions, but even they held intercourse only without the hotel walls.  Day after day, month after month, year after year as we were told, these men had fed together, yet we never saw them betray even the most cursory interest in one another.  They entered and departed without revealing, by word or look, cognisance of another human being’s presence.  Could one imagine a dozen men of any other nationality thus maintaining the same indifference over even a short period?  I hope future experience will prove me wrong, but in the meantime my former conception of the French as a nation overflowing with bonhomie and camaraderie is rudely shaken.

The day of the year would have passed without anything to distinguish it from its fellows had not the proprietor, who, by the way, was a Swiss, endeavoured by sundry little attentions to reveal his goodwill.  Oysters usurped the place of the customary hors d’oeuvres at breakfast, and the meal ended with cafe noir and cognac handed round by the deferential Iorson as being “offered by the proprietor,” who, entering during the progress of the dejeuner, paid his personal respects to his clientele.

The afternoon brought us a charming discovery.  We had a boy guest with us at luncheon, a lonely boy left at school when his few compatriots—­save only the two Red-Cross prisoners—­had gone home on holiday.  The day was bright and balmy; and while strolling in the park beyond the Petit Trianon, we stumbled by accident upon the hameau, the little village of counterfeit rusticity wherein Marie Antoinette loved to play at country life.