the society, the display of a king.  Here and there, in corners and around it, are inns, stalls, taverns, hovels for laborers and for drudges, for dilapidated soldiers and accessory menials.  These tenements necessarily exist, since technicians are essential to the most magnificent apotheosis.  The rest, however, consists of sumptuous hotels and edifices, sculptured façades, cornices and balustrades, monumental stairways, seigniorial architecture, regularly spaced and disposed, as in a procession, around the vast and grandiose palace where all this terminates.  Here are the fixed abodes of the noblest families; to the right of the palace are the hôtels de Bourbon, d’Ecquervilly, de la Trémoille, de Condé, de Maurepas, de Bouillon, d’Eu, de Noailles, de Penthièvre, de Livry, du Comte de la Marche, de Broglie, du Prince de Tingry, d’Orléans, de Chatillon, de Villerry, d’Harcourt, de Monaco; on the left are the pavilions d’Orléans, d’Harcourt, the hôtels de Chevreuse, de Babelle, de l’Hôpital, d’Antin, de Dangeau, de Pontchartrain — no end to their enumeration.  Add to these those of Paris, all those which, ten leagues around.  At Sceaux, at Génevilliers, at Brunoy, at Ile-Adam, at Rancy, at Saint-Ouen, at Colombes, at Saint-Germain, at Marly, at Bellevue, in countless places, they form a crown of architectural flowers, from which daily issue as many gilded wasps to shine and buzz about Versailles, the center of all luster and affluence.  About a hundred of these are “presented each year, men and women, which makes about 2 or 3,000 in all;[4] this forms the king’s society, the ladies who courtesy before him, and the seigniors who accompany him in his carriage; their hotels are near by, or within reach, ready to fill his drawing room or his antechamber at all hours.

A drawing room like this calls for proportionate dependencies; the hotels and buildings at Versailles devoted to the private service of the king and his attendants count by hundreds.  No human existence since that of the Caesars has so spread itself out in the sunshine.  In the Rue des Reservoirs we have the old hotel and the new one of the governor of Versailles, the hotel of the tutor to the children of the Comte d’Artois, the ward-robe of the crown, the building for the dressing-rooms and green-rooms of the actors who perform at the palace, with the stables belonging to Monsieur. — In the Rue des Bon-Enfants are the hotel of the keeper of the wardrobe, the lodgings for the fountain-men, the hotel of the officers of the Comtesse de Provence.  In the Rue de la Pompe, the hotel of the grand-provost, the Duke of Orleans’s stables, the hotel of the Comte d’Artois’s guardsmen, the queen’s stables, the pavilion des Sources. — In the Rue Satory the Comtesse d’Artois’s stables, Monsieur’s English garden, the king’s ice-houses, the riding-hall of the king’s light-horse-guards, the garden belonging to the hotel of the treasurers of the buildings. — Judge of other streets by these four.