It was, as life goes, a tolerably dark hour. I was on the borderland
between young manhood and early middle age. For some years I had been
losing my sight, on top of which came one of those troubles with the
thyroid gland which medical science still finds obscure. For reasons
which I need not go into I was spending an autumn at Versailles in
France, unoccupied and alone.

If you know Versailles you know that it combines all that civilisation
has to offer of beauty, magnificence, and mournfulness. A day's visit
from Paris will give you an inkling of this, but only an inkling. To get
it all you must live there, to be interpenetrated by its glory of decay.
It is always the autumn of the spirit at Versailles, even in summer,
even in spring; but in the autumn of the year the autumnal emotion of
the soul is poignant beyond expression. Sad gardens stretch into sad
parks; sad parks into storied and haunting forests. Long avenues lead to
forgotten chateaux mellowing into ruin. Ghostly white statues astonish
you far in the depths of woods where the wild things are now the most
frequent visitors. A Temple of Love--pillared, Corinthian, lovely--lost
in a glade to which lovers have probably not come in a hundred
years--will remind you that there were once happy people where now the
friendliest sound is that of the wood-chopper's axe or the horn of some
far-away hunt. All the old tales of passion, ambition, feud, hatred,
violence, lust, and intrigue are softened here to an aching sense of
pity. At night you will hear the castle clock, which is said never once
to have failed to strike the hour since Louis the Fourteenth put it in
its place, tolling away your life as it has tolled away epochs.

Amid these surroundings a man ill, lonely, threatened with blindness,
can easily feel what I may call the spiritual challenge of the ages. He
must either be strong and rule; or he must be weak and go down. He must