THE LADY OF THE HAMEAU

Taranaki Daily News, 2 April 1934, Page 14

THE LADY OF THE HAMEAU

Elisabeth Kyle.)

A TRADITION OF FRANCE. TALE OF AN UNHAPPY QUEEN.

(By.

Not far from the great palace of Versailles there is a tiny eighteenth-cen-tury village grouped round a little trodden grass and weedy' duck-pond. As the visitor approaches it, the air seems unnaturally quiet, the sky seems overcast,. and the atmosphere quivers as though he looked not directly at the tumbledown mass of thatch and plaster, but. at its reflection. in a pool of water obscured apd ruffled by the wind. Even the most ribald party of tourists, fresh from the oppression of the vast Salons of Versailles, is struck to a silence by the ominous quiet of the place. It is not a natural village somehow.

But then no country folk ever lived in it. The cottages were inhabited for a few casual , hours stolen from Court life by noblemen and women of the old regime, who hastily doffing their fine clothes, came here to play at being rustics at the behest of a Queen choked by Court etiquette. The village stood for a plaything, a means of escape from the crudities of life, and aping those crudities, was overtaken- by the storm whioh brought the. . French monarchy ■ to an abrupt and terrible close.

Only recently hag France decided to tidy up Le Hameau, before the sticks and. stones of it crumble altogether. A storm of controversy has broken out as to the best way of doing this. One eminent architect wishes to restore the place wholesale, so that it looks exactly as- it did when Marie Antoinette came here to play at being a milk-maid. Another, wishes'to preserve its sad, brooding atmosphere, merely touching it. up here and there. But that is not the problem which agitates the minds of the older residents of the district round about.' As one old lady who lives near by said to me; “What will she think of the change?”

For at Versailles to-day there is something more than a tradition that the unhappy Queen still wanders i about the Hameau where her: happiest hours were spent. The French are not an imaginative nation, but more than one of the inhabitants . claim to have caught a glimpse of a woman with fair powdered hair, who, clad in the costume of two centuries ago, sits sketching, or flits in and out of the deserted buildings. Two Englishwomen, Oxford graduates, neither, psychic, saw her clearly some years ago, and published their adventure in the press; . -... '• So, while architects wrangle, the quietliving inhabitants of the stucco-houses round, about Lave this question, seldom spoken, in their hearts. If Le Hameau is ’ spring-cleaned too thoroughly, will Marie Antoinette leave for ever the one spot to which her unquiet spirit seems drawn?