Cloud and spend the summer there. Certainly it was a new humiliation
for the king to receive permission to reside in his own summer
palace of St. Cloud. But the States-General called themselves the
pillars of the throne, and the king who sat upon this shaking throne
was very dependent upon its support.
In St. Cloud there was at least a little freedom, a little solitude
and stillness. The birds sang in the foliage, the sun lighted up the
broad halls of the palace, in which a few faithful ones gathered
around the queen and recalled at least a touch of the past happiness
to her brow. In St. Cloud she was again the queen, she held her
court there. But how different was this from the court of former
days.
No merry laughter, no cheerful singing resounded through these
spacious halls; no pleasant ladies, in light, airy, summer costume
swept through the fragrant apartments; M. d'Adhemar no longer sits
at the spinet, and sings with his rich voice the beautiful arias
from the opera "Richard of the Lion Heart," in which royalty had its
apotheosis, and in which the singer Garat had excited all Paris to
the wildest demonstrations of delight! And not all Paris, but
Versailles as well, and in Versailles the royal court!
Louis XVI. himself had been in rapture at the aria which Garat sang
with his flexible tenor voice in so enchanting a manner--"Oh,
Richard! oh, mon roi!"--an aria which had once procured him a
triumph in the very theatre.
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