It was worth a pilgrimage to see.  Everything is on so gigantic a scale.  Nothing is small—­nothing is cheap.  The statues are all large; the palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are interminable.  All the distances and all the dimensions about Versailles are vast.  I used to think the pictures exaggerated these distances and these dimensions beyond all reason, and that they made Versailles more beautiful than it was possible for any place in the world to be.  I know now that the pictures never came up to the subject in any respect, and that no painter could represent Versailles on canvas as beautiful as it is in reality.  I used to abuse Louis XIV for spending two hundred millions of dollars in creating this marvelous park, when bread was so scarce with some of his subjects; but I have forgiven him now.  He took a tract of land sixty miles in circumference and set to work to make this park and build this palace and a road to it from Paris.  He kept 36,000 men employed daily on it, and the labor was so unhealthy that they used to die and be hauled off by cartloads every night.  The wife of a nobleman of the time speaks of this as an “inconvenience,” but naively remarks that “it does not seem worthy of attention in the happy state of tranquillity we now enjoy.”

I always thought ill of people at home who trimmed their shrubbery into pyramids and squares and spires and all manner of unnatural shapes, and when I saw the same thing being practiced in this great park I began to feel dissatisfied.  But I soon saw the idea of the thing and the wisdom of it.  They seek the general effect.  We distort a dozen sickly trees into unaccustomed shapes in a little yard no bigger than a dining room, and then surely they look absurd enough.  But here they take two hundred thousand tall forest trees and set them in a double row; allow no sign of leaf or branch to grow on the trunk lower down than six feet above the ground; from that point the boughs begin to project, and very gradually they extend outward further and further till they meet overhead, and a faultless tunnel of foliage is formed.  The arch is mathematically precise.  The effect is then very fine.  They make trees take fifty different shapes, and so these quaint effects are infinitely varied and picturesque.  The trees in no two avenues are shaped alike, and consequently the eye is not fatigued with anything in the nature of monotonous uniformity.  I will drop this subject now, leaving it to others to determine how these people manage to make endless ranks of lofty forest trees grow to just a certain thickness of trunk (say a foot and two-thirds); how they make them spring to precisely the same height for miles; how they make them grow so close together; how they compel one huge limb to spring from the same identical spot on each tree and form the main sweep of the arch; and how all these things are kept exactly in the same condition and in the same exquisite shapeliness and symmetry month after month and year after year—­for I have tried to reason out the problem and have failed.