Instead  of  taking  the  Trianon  side  of  the  park,  I  went
in  by  the  Basin  of  Neptune,  and  down  by  the  Basin
of  Ceres,  to  the  Tapis  Vert  (the  long  strip  of  lawn  leading
down,  between  avenues,  from  the  great  facade  of  the
palace  toward  the  large  Basin  of  Apollo,  beyond  which
is  the  Grand  Canal).  Numbers  of  soldiers  (French),
in  canoes,  were  disporting  themselves  upon  the  water,
and  seemed  very  cheerful,  taking  great  delight  in  splash-
ing one  another's  boats  unmercifully  with  their  oars.  .  ..
But   the   mosquitoes   were   ozvdacious.     (It   is    a   heavy,


John  Ayscough^s  Letters  to  his  Mother       185

hot  day.)  I  walked  as  far  as  the  star  I  have  marked  on
the  card  and  there  sat  down  on  a  bench  and  talked  to  a
French  artilleryman,  who  has  been  in  England  and  seems
very  proud  of  it.  The  Menagerie,  opposite  the  Grand
Trianon,  was  really  a  Menagerie  in  Louis  XIV's  time,
but  is  now  some  sort  of  barracks.
St.  Cyr  was  where  Madame  de  Maintenon  established
her  Institution  for  daughters  of  poor  nobles,  where  she
spent  all  the  time  she  could  spare  from  her  royal  husband.
Toward  the  end  of  her  thirty-two  years  of  being  his
wife  without  being  his  Queen,  she  seems  to  have  grown
very  weary  of  her  palace  life,  and  glad  to  get  away  from
it.  After  the  Revolution  St.  Cyr  became  a  military
school,  like  Woolwich  (and  it  is  so  still),  and  there  Napo-
leon I  received  his  later  training  as  a  soldier,  I  think.
Yesterday  afternoon  I  had  to  attend  the  funeral  of  an
English  officer,  an  aviator  killed  by  a  fall  of  the  machine.
