SPLENDID SUITE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23083, 7 July 1938, Page 4

SPLENDID SUITE

ROYALTY IN PARIS PREPARATIONS IN HAND [FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT] LONDOX, June 4 Entirely new decorations, regal in their magnificence, have been completed at the residential wing of the Quai d'Orsay, where the King and Queen will stay during their visit to Paris next month. The King and Queen cross tho Channel irom Dover to Boulogne and return by Calais. ■

Gold-leaf workers are now giving last touches til the fittings. Silk looms at Lyons have spun hundreds of yards of rich, pale green .silk—tho Queen's favourite colour—to replace tho sombre dark red curtains in her apartments. Ihe King and Queen will have a complete set of apartments on the first floor.

A\i(h the exception ol the dining room those rooms are decorated in royal blue and gold. The King's private suite, with a special dressing room overlooking a beautiful rose garden, has an ante-room lor his lord-in-wait-mg, a bedroom and a bathroom in marble. 'J he bath and other fittings are in rich gold mosaic. ihe Queen's suite is slightly smaller, but equally luxurious. The great canopied bed in which Marie Antoinette oncc_ slept is to lie placed in an alcove within a few days. The bedroom has been decorated throughout in pale lemon. Ihe bathroom walls are in silver mosaic, decorated with white and dark green Venetian glasswork. The largo bath is ol silver and the floor is in on \ x stone, hmpire furniture has been specially assembled from State palaces and museums. As their train, painted in roval blue enters the miniature station in the Jsois de Boulogne, built for State visitors and disused since the visit of Kin-' George V. before the war, a salute o7 a hundred and one guns will be fired. I resident. Lehrun will be the first to greet the King and Queen, Then tliev will drive along the Avenue Foch and the Champs Elysees to the Quai d Orsay. Two squadrons of turbancd, redcoated North African Spahis, on small Arab horses, will escort them, together with the dare-devil motor-cycle police of Paris. On their first evening the King and Queen will be entertained at the Elysee, the two-storey palace of the French President. ,