Were they really mortal creatures who lived in this peerless dwelling? Were they real women who had just sat in those chairs, whose gracious contours had left on the cushions faint imprints which still breathed of indolence? Who knows? Behind those thick curtains, from the depths of some immense and brilliant gallery, perhaps there was going to appear a princess who had slept for a hundred years, a fairy in hoop petticoats, an Armida in spangles, or some hamadryad of the Court stepping out of a marble column, slipping through a gilded wainscoting!

Dazzled in spite of himself by all those fantasies, the chevalier, the better to dream, had thrown himself on a sofa, and maybe he would have remained there lost a long time if he had not recalled that he was a lover. What, during all this time, was Mademoiselle d’Annebault, his beloved, doing; she who was left behind in an old château?

‘Athénaïs!’ he cried all at once, ‘what am I doing losing my time here? Are my wits astray? Where am I, great heavens, and what is coming over me?’

He rose and continued on his road across this new country, and lost his way, that goes without saying. Two or three lackeys, speaking in an undertone, appeared at the far end of a gallery. He advanced towards them, and asked them the way he should go to the comedy.

‘If my lord marquis’, one of them answered (always using the same formula), ‘would be good enough to give himself the trouble of descending by that staircase, and following the gallery on the right, he will find at the end of it three steps to ascend: he should turn then to the left, and when he has crossed the drawing-room of Diana, that of Apollo, that of the Muses, and that of Spring, he should redescend six steps more: then, leaving the guard room on the right, as if making for the staircase of the ministers, he cannot fail to meet there other ushers who will show him the way.’

‘Much obliged,’ said the chevalier, ‘and with such fine directions it will certainly be my fault if I do not get there.’

He started out again courageously, stopping continually in spite of himself to gaze on one side or the other, then recalled his love afresh; finally at the end of a good quarter of an hour, as he had been informed, he found lackeys again.

‘My lord marquis has made a mistake,’ they said to him, ‘it is through the other wing of the château that he should have gone: but nothing is easier than to find the way again. My lord has only to go down that staircase, then he should cross the drawing-room of the Nymphs, that of Summer, that of—’

‘Thanks,’ said the chevalier.

‘And I am a fine fool’, he thought, moreover, ‘to go asking questions of servants like a booby. I bring dishonour on myself for no good at all, and even if it happens, by an impossible chance, that they are not making fun of me, what use to me is their nomenclature, and all the pompous designations of those drawing-rooms of which I don’t know a single one?’

He made up his mind to go straight before him, as far as that could be done.

‘For, after all,’ he said to himself, ‘this palace is very beautiful, it is very fine, but it has its limits, and even if it were more than three times as long as our rabbit warren, I’d have to see the end of it some time.’

But it isn’t easy in Versailles to go straight before one for a long time, and the rustic comparison of the royal dwelling with a rabbit warren maybe displeased the nymphs of the place, for they began again more cunningly than ever to mislead the poor lover, and, doubtless to punish him, they took pleasure in making him turn and return on his own steps, bringing him back incessantly to the same place, exactly like a countryman astray in a copse. And so they enveloped him in their marble and gold maze.