“It’s curious, isn’t it,” Marc remarked, “how our Christian monarch showed such a taste for comparing himself to pagan gods. He wasn’t called the Sun King for nothing.”

Here and there, Roland pointed out paintings and decorations, all by French artists like Rigaud and Le Brun, as they moved through the stately sequence of high, cold rooms. The culmination was the War Salon, a temple of green and red marble, massively ornamented with gold, and dominated by a huge oval relief of the godlike Sun King, mounted on a horse that was trampling upon his enemies.

“Everything depended upon the king,” Roland remarked. “His control was complete. The ritual was endless.” He gave Fox and Hadley an amused look. “Everything that the English and the American political systems wanted to avoid.”

And with that he led them through the doorway into the most famous room in France.

The Galerie des Glaces, the Hall of Mirrors. Nearly eighty yards long. Great windows down one side, gilded mirrors opposite, a tunnel-arched ceiling from which the massive row of crystal chandeliers hung in galactic splendor. The almost endless polished expanse of parquet floor gleamed like a lake under the sun.

“This is where everyone waited for the king to pass on his way to chapel,” Roland remarked.

“I’ve read that the court etiquette was pretty stifling,” Hadley said.

“It was. But I think the women had the worst of it,” Roland told him. “Somehow a fashion evolved where the women were supposed to take tiny steps very quickly—you couldn’t see it of course, under their long dresses—so that it seemed as if they were floating.” He turned to Marie. “What would you say to that, mademoiselle?”

A mischievous glint came into Marie’s demure eyes.

“Do you mean like this, monsieur?”

And then, to the astonishment of the four watching men, she set off up the Hall of Mirrors. Her dress was long enough so that one could not see her feet. And the effect was astonishing. It was, indeed, as if she were floating away up the gallery. With the pale light coming in through the windows, her floating form passed like a ghost from mirror to mirror so that one could almost have imagined she were passing into some other age until, turning some hundred feet away, she glided back to them and to the present.

Finally, when she stopped the gentlemen burst into a little round of applause.

“Where did you learn that?” asked Marc in amazement.

“I had a dancing teacher who could do it. She showed me how.”

“Formidable!” cried Roland enthusiastically. “More than that. Exquisite. You must have been at the court in another life.”

“A remarkable performance,” said Fox. “Wonderful.”

“It’s quite tiring,” said Marie with a laugh. “I’m glad I don’t have to do it every day.”

They moved into the Queen’s Apartment. Redecorated several times in the eighteenth century, these had a lighter air.

“Your family were at Versailles, Monsieur de Cygne?” Marie asked.