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Title: Royal Palaces and Parks of France

Author: M. F. Mansfield

Illustrator: Blanche McManus

Release date: June 19, 2008 [eBook #25842]

Language: English

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Terrace of Henri IV, Saint Germain (See page 286)

Royal Palaces and Parks of France

By Francis Miltoun
Author of "Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine," "Castles
and Chateaux of Old Burgundy," "Rambles in Normandy,"
"Italian Highways and Byways
from a Motor-Car," etc.

With Many Illustrations
Reproduced from paintings made on the spot

By Blanche McManus

BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
1910

Copyright, 1910.
By L. C. Page & Company.
(INCORPORATED)

All rights reserved
First Impression, November, 1910
Printed by
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U. S. A.

WORKS OF
FRANCIS MILTOUN
Rambles on the Riviera $2.50
Rambles in Normandy 2.50
Rambles in Brittany 2.50
The Cathedrals and Churches of the
2.50
Rhine
The Cathedrals of Northern France 2.50
The Cathedrals of Southern France 2.50
In the Land of Mosques and Minarets 3.00
Royal Palaces and Parks of France 3.00
Castles and Chateaux of Old Touraine
3.00
and the Loire Country
Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre
3.00
and the Basque Provinces
Castles and Chateaux of Old
3.00
Burgundy and the Border Provinces
Italian Highways and Byways from a
3.00
Motor Car
The Automobilist Abroad net 3.00
(Postage
Extra)

L. C. Page and Company 53 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.

Preface
"A thousand years ago, by the rim of a tiny spring, a monk who had
avowed himself to the cult of Saint Saturnin, robed, cowled and
sandalled, knelt down to say a prayer to his beloved patron saint.
Again he came, this time followed by more of his kind, and a
wooden cross was planted by the side of the "Fontaine Belle Eau,"
by this time become a place of pious pilgrimage. After the monk
came a king, the latter to hunt in the neighbouring forest."
It was this old account of fact, or legend, that led the author and illustrator of
this book to a full realization of the wealth of historic and romantic incidents
connected with the French royal parks and palaces, incidents which the makers
of guidebooks have passed over in favour of the, presumably, more important,
well authenticated facts of history which are often the bare recitals of political
rises and falls and dull chronologies of building up and tearing down.
Much of the history of France was made in the great national forests and the
royal country-houses of the kingdom, but usually it has been only the events of
the capital which have been passed in review. To a great extent this history was
of the gallant, daring kind, often written in blood, the sword replacing the pen.
At times gayety reigned supreme, and at times it was sadness; but always the
pageant was imposing.
The day of pageants has passed, the day when lords and ladies moved through
stately halls, when royal equipages hunted deer or boar on royal preserves,
when gay cavalcades of solemn cortèges thronged the great French highways to
the uttermost frontiers and ofttimes beyond. Those days have passed; but, to one
who knows the real France, a ready-made setting is ever at hand if he would
depart a little from the beaten paths worn smooth by railway and automobile
tourists who follow only the lines of conventional travel.
France, even to-day, the city and the country alike, is the paradise of European
monarchs on a holiday. One may be met at Biarritz on the shores of the Gascon
gulf; another may be taking the waters at Aix or Vichy, shooting pigeons under
the shadow of the Tete de Chien, or hunting at Rambouillet. This is modern

France, the most cosmopolitan meeting place and playground of royalty in the
world.
French royal parks and palaces, those of the kings and queens of mediæval, as
well as later, times, differ greatly from those of other lands. This is perhaps not
so much in their degree of splendour and luxury as in the sentiment which
attaches itself to them. In France there has ever been a spirit of gayety and
spontaneity unknown elsewhere. It was this which inspired the construction and
maintenance of such magnificent royal residences as the palaces of Saint
Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Compiègne, Rambouillet, etc.,
quite different from the motives which caused the erection of the Louvre, the
Tuileries or the Palais Cardinal at Paris.
Nowhere else does there exist the equal of these inspired royal country-houses
of France, and, when it comes to a consideration of their surrounding parks and
gardens, or those royal hunting preserves in the vicinity of the Ile de France, or
of those still further afield, at Rambouillet or in the Loire country, their
superiority to similar domains beyond the frontiers is even more marked.
In plan this book is a series of itineraries, at least the chapters are arranged, to a
great extent in a topographical sequence; and, if the scope is not as wide as all
France, it is because of the prominence already given to the parks and palaces of
Touraine and elsewhere in the old French provinces in other works in which the
artist and author have collaborated. It is for this reason that so little
consideration has been given to Chambord, Amboise or Chenonceaux, which
were as truly royal as any of that magnificent group of suburban Paris palaces
which begins with Conflans and ends with Marly and Versailles.
Going still further afield, there is in the Pyrenees that chateau, royal from all
points of view, in which was born the gallant Henri of France and Navarre, but a
consideration of that, too, has already been included in another volume.
The present survey includes the royal dwellings of the capital, those of the
faubourgs and the outlying districts far enough from town to be recognized as in
the country, and still others as remote as Rambouillet, Chantilly and
Compiègne. All, however, were intimately connected with the life of the capital
in the mediæval and Renaissance days, and together form a class distinct from
any other monumental edifices which exist, or ever have existed, in France.
Mere historic fact has been subordinated as far as possible to a recital of such
picturesque incidents of the life of contemporary times as the old writers have

handed down to us, and a complete chronological review has in no manner been
attempted.

CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introductory 13
II. The Evolution of French Gardens 14
III. The Royal Hunt in France 43
The Palais de la Cité and
IV. 61
Tournelles
V. The Old Louvre and Its History 75
The Louvre of Francis I and Its
VI. 85
Successors
VII. The Tuileries and Its Gardens 106
The Palais Cardinal and the Palais
VIII. 131
Royal
The Luxembourg, the Elysée and the
IX. 151
Palais Bourbon
X. Vincennes and Conflans 168
XI. Fontainebleau and Its Forest 180

XII. By the Banks of the Seine 203
XIII. Malmaison and Marly 215
XIV. Saint Cloud and Its Park 229
XV. Versailles: The Glory of France 244
The Gardens of Versailles and the
XVI. 260
Trianons
XVII. Saint Germain-en-Laye 279
XVIII. Maintenon 296
XIX. Rambouillet and Its Forest 309
XX. Chantilly 324
XXI. Compiègne and Its Forest 342
Index 363

Terrace of Henri IV, Saint Germain Frontispiece
The Louvre, the Tuileries and the
12
Palais Royal of To-day
"Jardin Français—Jardin Anglais" 15
Henri IV in an Old French Garden 20

Parterre de Diane, Chenonceaux 27
Plan of Sunken Garden (Jardin
30
Creux)
A Parterre 32
Bassin de la Couronne, Vaux-le-
42
Vicomte
A "Curée aux Flambeaux" 46
An Imperial Hunt at Fontainebleau 52
Rendezvous de Chasse, Rambouillet 56
Bird's Eye View of Old Paris (Map) 74
The XIV Century Louvre 82
The Louvre 90
Original Plan of the Tuileries
106
(Diagram)
Salle des Marechaux, Tuileries 116
The Galleries of the Palais Royal 146
Bourbon-Orleans Descendants of
146
Louis Philippe (Diagram)
Palais du Luxembourg 154
Door in Throne Room, Luxembourg 156
The Petit Luxembourg 156
The Luxembourg Gardens 158
The Throne of the Palais Bourbon 161
Vincennes Under Charles V 168
Chateau de Vincennes 172
A Hunt under the Walls of
174
Vincennes
Conflans 176
Original Plan of Fontainebleau 180
From Paris to Fontainebleau (Map) 180
Palais de Fontainebleau 186
Salle du Throne, Fontainebleau 190
Fragments from Fontainebleau 192
Cheminée de la Reine, Fontainebleau 194
Monument to Rousseau and Millet
200
at Barbison

Chateau de Bagatelle 204
Chateau de Malmaison 218
The Gardens of Saint Cloud 236
The Cascades at Saint Cloud 240
Cour de Marbre, Versailles 264
The Potager du Roy, Versailles 270
The Bassin de Latone, Versailles 272
The Fountain of Neptune, Versailles 274
Petit Trianon 276
Laiterie de la Reine, Petit Trianon 277
Saint Germain (Diagram) 280
The Valley of the Seine, from the
288
Terrace at Saint Germain
Fauteuil of Mme. de Maintenon 297
Chateau de Maintenon 300
Aqueduct of Louis XIV at
306
Maintenon
Chateau de Rambouillet (Diagram) 309
Laiterie de la Reine, Rambouillet 312
Chateau de Rambouillet 316
Chantilly (Diagram) 325
Statue of Le Notre, Chantilly 326
Chateau de Chantilly 336
Compiègne (Diagram) 343
Napoleon's Bedchamber, Compiègne 352
Cours de Compiègne 356

Royal Palaces and Parks of France

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

The modern traveller sees something beyond mere facts. Historical material as
identified with the life of some great architectural glory is something more than
a mere repetition of chronologies; the sidelights and the co-related incidents,
though indeed many of them may be but hearsay, are quite as interesting, quite
as necessary, in fact, for the proper appreciation of a famous palace or chateau
as long columns of dates, or an evolved genealogical tree which attempts to
make plain that which could be better left unexplained. The glamour of history
would be considerably dimmed if everything was explained, and a very seamy
block of marble may be chiselled into a very acceptable statue if the workman
but knows how to avoid the doubtful parts.
An itinerary that follows not only the ridges, but occasionally plunges down
into the hollows and turns up or down such crossroads as may have chanced to
look inviting, is perhaps more interesting than one laid out on conventional
lines. A shadowy something, which for a better name may be called sentiment,
if given full play encourages these side-steps, and since they are generally found
fruitful, and often not too fatiguing, the procedure should be given every
encouragement.
Not all the interesting royal palaces and chateaux of France are those with the
best known names. Not all front on Paris streets and quays, no more than the
best glimpses of ancient or modern France are to be had from the benches of a
sight-seeing automobile.
Versailles, and even Fontainebleau, are too frequently considered as but the end
of a half-day pilgrimage for the tripper. It were better that one should approach
them more slowly, and by easy stages, and leave them less hurriedly. As for
those architectural monuments of kings, which were tuned in a minor key, they,
at all events, need to be hunted down on the spot, the enthusiast being
forearmed with such scraps of historic fact as he can gather beforehand,
otherwise he will see nothing at Conflans, Marly or Bourg-la-Reine which will
suggest that royalty ever had the slightest concern therewith.

Dealing first with Paris it is evident it is there that the pilgrim to French shrines
must make his most profound obeisance. This applies as well to palaces as to
churches. In all cases one goes back into the past to make a start, and old Paris,
what there is left of it, is still old Paris, though one has to leave the grand
boulevards to find this out.
Colberts and Haussmanns do not live to-day, or if they do they have become so
"practical" that a drainage canal or an overhead or underground railway is more
of a civic improvement than the laying out of a public park, like the gardens of
the Tuileries, or the building and embellishment of a public edifice—at least
with due regard for the best traditions. When the monarchs of old called in men
of taste and culture instead of "business men" they builded in the most
agreeable fashion. We have not improved things with our "systems" and our
committees of "hommes d'affaires."
It is the fashion to-day to decry the cavaliers and the wearers of "love-locks,"
but they had a pretty taste in art and an eye for artistic surroundings, those old
fellows of the sword and cloak; a much more pretty taste than their descendants,
the steam-heat and running-water partisans of to-day. Louis XV and Empire
drawing and dining-rooms are everywhere advertised as the attractions of the
great palace hotels, and some of them are very good copies of their
predecessors, though one cannot help but feel that the clientele as a whole is
more insistent on telephones in the bedrooms and auto-taxis always on tap than
with regard to the sentiment of good taste and good cheer which is to be evoked
by eating even a hurried meal in a room which reproduces some historically
famous Salle des Gardes or the Chambre of the Œil de Bœuf of the Louvre, if,
indeed, most of the hungry folk know what their surroundings are supposed to
represent.
Any chronicle which attempts to set down a record of the comings and goings
of French monarchs is saved from being a mere dull chronology of dates and
résumé of facts by its obligatory references to the architects and builders who
made possible the splendid settings amid which these picturesque rulers passed
their lives.
The castle builders of France, the garden designers, the architects, decorators
and craftsmen of all ranks produced not a medley, but a coherent, cohesive
whole, which stands apart from, and far ahead of, most of the contemporary
work of its kind in other lands. Castles and keeps were of one sort in England
and Scotland, of still another along the Rhine, and if the Renaissance palaces

and chateaux first came into being in Italy it is certain they never grew to the
flowering luxuriance there that they did in France.
Thus does France establish itself as leader in new movements once again. It was
so in the olden time with the arts of the architect, the landscape gardener and the
painter; it is so to-day with respect to such mundane, less sentimental things as
automobiles and aeroplanes.
Another chapter, in a story long since started, is a repetition, or review, of the
outdoor life of the French monarchs and their followers. Not only did
Frenchmen of Gothic and Renaissance times have a taste for travelling far
afield, pursuing the arts of peace or war as their conscience or conditions
dictated; but they loved, too, the open country and the open road at home; they
loved also la chasse, as they did tournaments, fêtes-champêtres and outdoor
spectacles of all kinds. Add these stage settings to the splendid costuming and
the flamboyant architectural accessories of Renaissance times in France and we
have what is assuredly not to be found in other lands, a spectacular and
imposing pageant of mediæval and Renaissance life and manners which is
superlative from all points of view.
This is perhaps hard, sometimes, to reconcile with the French attitude towards
outdoor life to-day, when la chasse means the hunting of tame foxes (a sport
which has been imported from across the channel), "sport" means a prize fight,
and a garden party or a fête-champêtre a mere gossiping rendezvous over a cup
of badly made tea. In the France of the olden time they did things differently—
and better.
Not all French history was made, or written, within palace walls; much of it
came into being in the open air, like the two famous meetings by the Bidassoa,
Napoleon's first sight of Marie Louise on the highroad leading out from Senlis,
or his making the Pope a prisoner at the Croix de Saint Héram, in the Forest of
Fontainebleau.
It is this change of scene that makes French history so appealing to those who
might otherwise let it remain in shut-up and dry-as-dust books on library
shelves.
The French monarchs of old were indeed great travellers, and it is by virtue of
the fact that affairs of state were often promulgated and consummated en
voyage that a royal stamp came to be acquired by many a chateau or country-
house which to-day would hardly otherwise be considered as of royal rank.

Throughout France, notably in the neighbourhood of Paris, are certain chateaux
—palaces only by lack of name—of the nobility where royalties were often as
much at home as under their own royal standards. One cannot attempt to
confine the limits where these chateaux are to be found, for they actually
covered the length and breadth of France.
Journeying afield in those romantic times was probably as comfortably
accomplished, by monarchs at least, as it is to-day. What was lacking was
speed, but they lodged at night under roofs as hospitable as those of the white
and gold caravanserai (and some more humble) which perforce come to be
temporary abiding places of royalties en tour to-day. The writer has seen the
Dowager Queen of Italy lunching at a neighbouring table at a roadside trattoria
in Piedmont which would have no class distinction whatever as compared with
the average suburban road-house across the Atlantic. At Biarritz, too, the
automobiling monarch, Alphonse XIII, has been known to take "tea" on the
terrace of the great tourist-peopled hotel in company with mere be-goggled
commoners. Le temps va! Were monarchs so democratic in the olden time, one
wonders.
The court chronicles of all ages, and all ranks, have proved a gold mine for the
makers of books of all sorts and conditions. Not only court chroniclers but
pamphleteers, even troubadours and players, have contributed much to the
records of the life of mediæval France. All history was not made by political
intrigue or presumption; a good deal of it was born of the gentler passions, and
a chap-book maker would put often into print many accounts which the recorder
of mere history did not dare use. History is often enough sorry stuff when it
comes to human interest, and it needs editing only too often.
Courtiers and the fashionable world of France, ever since the days of the poetry-
making and ballad-singing Francis and Marguerite, and before, for that matter,
made of literature—at least the written and spoken chronicle of some sort—a
diversion and an accomplishment. Royal or official patronage given these
mediæval story-tellers did not always produce the truest tales. Then, as now,
writer folk were wont to exaggerate, but most of their work made interesting
reading.
These courtiers of the itching pen did not often write for money. Royal favour,
or that of some fair lady, or ladies, was their chief return in many more cases
than those for which their accounts were settled by mere dross. It is in the work
of such chroniclers as these that one finds a fund of unrepeated historic lore.

The dramatists came on the scene with their plots ready-made (and have been
coming ever since, if one recalls the large number of French costume plays of
recent years), and whether they introduced errors of fact, or not, there was
usually so much truth about their work that the very historians more than once
were obliged to have recourse to the productions of their colleagues. The
dramatists' early days in France, as in England, were their golden days. The
mere literary man, or chronicler, was often flayed alive, but the dramatist, even
though he dished up the foibles of a king, and without any dressing at that, was
fêted and made as much of as a record piano player of to-day.
One hears a lot about the deathbed scribblers in England in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, but there was not much of that sort of thing in France. No
one here penned bitter jibes and lascivious verses merely to keep out of jail, as
did Nash and Marlowe in England. In short, one must give due credit to the
court chroniclers and ballad-singers of France as being something more than
mere pilfering, blackmailing hacks.
All the French court and its followers in the sixteenth century shouted epigrams
and affected being greater poets than they really were. It was a good sign, and it
left its impress on French literature. Following in the footsteps of Francis I and
the two Marguerites nobles vied with each other in their efforts to produce some
epoch-making work of poesy or prose, and while they did not often publish for
profit they were glad enough to see themselves in print. Then there were also
the professional men of letters, as distinct from the courtiers with literary
ambitions, the churchmen and courtly attachés of all ranks with the literary bee
humming in their bonnets. They, too, left behind them an imposing record,
which has been very useful to others coming after who were concerned with
getting a local colour of a brand which should look natural.
It is with such guiding lights as are suggested by the foregoing résumé that one
seeks his clues for the repicturing of the circumstances under which French
royal palaces were erected, as well as for the truthful repetition of the
ceremonies and functions of the times, for the court life of old, whether in city
palace or country chateau, was a very different thing from that of the
Republican régime of to-day.
Not only were the royal Paris dwellings, from the earliest times, of a profound
luxuriance of design and execution, but the private hotels, the palaces, one may
well say, of the nobility were of the same superlative order, and kings and
queens alike did not disdain to lodge therein on such occasions as suited their

convenience. The suggestive comparison is made because of the close liens
with which royalty and the higher nobility were bound.
It is sufficient to recall, among others of this class, the celebrated Hotel de
Beauvais which will illustrate the reference. Not only was this magnificent town
house of palatial dimensions, but it was the envy of the monarchs themselves,
because of its refined elegance of construction. This edifice exists to-day, in
part, at No. 68 Rue François Miron, and the visitor may judge for himself as to
its former elegance.
Loret, in his "Gazette" in verse, recounts a visit made to the Hotel de Beauvais
in 1663 by Marie Thérèse, the Queen of Louis XIV.
Mercredi, notre auguste Reine,
Cette charmante souveraine,
Fut chez Madame de Beauvais
Pour de son amiable palais
Voir les merveilles étonnantes
Et les raretés surprenantes.
Times have changed, for the worse or for the better. The sedan-chair and the
coach have given way to the automobile and the engine, and the wood fire to a
stale calorifer, or perhaps a gas-log.

View larger image
The comparisons are odious; there is no question as to this; but it is by contrast
that the subject is made the more interesting.
From the old Palais des Thermes (now a part of the Musée de Cluny) of the
Roman emperors down through the Palais de la Cité (where lodged the kings of
the first and second races) to the modern installations of the Louvre is a matter
of twelve centuries. The record is by no means a consecutive one, but a record
exists which embraces a dozen, at least, of the Paris abodes of royalty, where
indeed they lived according to many varying scales of comfort and luxury.
Not all the succeeding French monarchs had the abilities or the inclinations that
enabled them to keep up to the traditions of the art-loving Francis I, but almost
all of their number did something creditable in building or decoration, or
commanded it to be done.
Louis XIV, though he delayed the adjustment of Europe for two centuries, was
the first real beautifier of Paris since Philippe Auguste. Privately his taste in art
and architecture was rather ridiculous, but publicly he and his architects
achieved great things in the general scheme.
Napoleon I, in turn, caught up with things in a political sense, in truth he ran
ahead of them, but he in no way neglected the embellishments of the capital,
and added a new wing to the Louvre, and filled Musées with stolen loot, which

remorse, or popular clamour, induced him, for the most part, to return at a later
day.
In a decade Napoleon made much history, and he likewise did much for the
royal palaces of France. After him a gap supervened until the advent of
Napoleon III, who, weakling that he was, had the perspicacity to give the Baron
Haussmann a chance to play his part in the making of modern Paris, and if the
Tuileries and Saint Cloud had not disappeared as a result of his indiscretion the
period of the Second Empire would not have been at all discreditable, as far as
the impress it left on Paris was concerned.

CHAPTER II
THE EVOLUTION OF FRENCH GARDENS

The French garden was a creation of all epochs from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth centuries, and, for the most part, those of to-day and of later
decades of the nineteenth century, are adaptations and restorations of the classic
accepted forms.
From the modest jardinet of the moyen-age to the ample gardens and parterres
of the Renaissance was a wide range. In their highest expression these early
French gardens, with their broderies and carreaux may well be compared as
works of art with contemporary structures in stone or wood or stuffs in woven
tapestries, which latter they greatly resembled.
Under Louis XIV and Louis XV the elaborateness of the French garden was
even more an accentuated epitome of the tastes of the period. Near the end of
the eighteenth century a marked deterioration was noticeable and a separation of
the tastes which ordained the arrangement of contemporary dwellings and their
gardens was very apparent. Under the Empire the antique style of furniture and
decoration was used too, but there was no contemporary expression with regard
to garden making.

View larger image
In the second half of the nineteenth century, under the Second Empire, the
symmetrical lines of the old-time parterres came again into being, and to them
were attached composite elements or motives, which more closely resembled
details of the conventional English garden than anything distinctly French.
The English garden was, for the most part, pure affectation in France, or, at best,
it was treated as a frank exotic. Even to-day, in modern France, where an old
dwelling of the period of Henri IV, François I, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, or Louis
XV still exists with its garden, the latter is more often than not on the classically
pure French lines, while that of a modern cottage, villa or chateau is often a
poor, variegated thing, fantastic to distraction.
Turning back the pages of history one finds that each people, each century,
possessed its own specious variety of garden; a species which responded
sufficiently to the tastes and necessities of the people, to their habits and their
aspirations.
Garden-making, like the art of the architect, differed greatly in succeeding
centuries, and it is for this reason that the garden of the moyen-age, of the epoch

of the Crusades, for example, did not bear the least resemblance to the more
ample parterres of the Renaissance. Civilization was making great progress,
and it was necessary that the gardens should be in keeping with a less
restrained, more luxurious method of life.
If the gardens of the Renaissance marked a progress over the preaux and
jardinets of mediævalism, those of Le Notre were a blossoming forth of the
Renaissance seed. Regretfully, one cannot say as much for the garden plots of
the eighteenth century, and it was only with the mid-nineteenth century that the
general outlines took on a real charm and attractiveness again, and this was only
achieved by going back to original principles.
The first gardens were the vergers and preaux, little checker-board squares of a
painful primitiveness as compared with later standards. These squares, or
carreaux, were often laid out in foliage and blossoming plants as suggestive as
possible of their being made of carpeting or marble. When these miniature
enclosures came to be surrounded with trellises and walls the Renaissance in
garden-making may be considered as having been in full sway.
Under Louis XIV a certain affluence was noticeable in garden plots, and with
Louis XV an even more notable symmetry was apparent in the disposition of
the general outlines. By this time, the garden in France had become a frame
which set off the architectural charms of the dwelling rather than remaining a
mere accessory, but it was only with the replacing of the castle-fortress by the
more domesticated chateau that a really generous garden space became a
definite attribute of a great house.
The first gardens surrounding the French chateaux were developments, or
adaptations, of Italian gardens, such as were designed across the Alps by
Mercogliano, during the feudal period.
Later, and during the time of the Crusades, the garden question hardly entered
into French life. Gardens, like all other luxuries, were given little thought when
the graver questions of peace and security were to be considered, and, for this
reason, there is little or nothing to say of French gardens previous to the twelfth
century.
An important species of the gardens of the moyen-age was that which was
found as an adjunct to the great monastic institutions, the preaux, which were
usually surrounded by the cloister colonnade. One of the most important of
these, of which history makes mention, was that of the Abbaye de Saint Gall, of

which Charlemagne was capitular. It was he who selected the plants and
vegetables which the dwellers therein should cultivate.
Of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is an abundant literary record, and,
in a way, a pictorial record as well. From these one can make a very good
deduction of what the garden of that day was like; still restrained, but yet
something more than rudimentary. From now on French gardens were divided
specifically into the potager and verger.
The potager was virtually a vegetable garden within the walls which
surrounded the seigneurial dwelling, and was of necessity of very limited
extent, chiefly laid out in tiny carreaux, or beds, bordered by tiles or bricks,
much as a small city garden is arranged to-day. Here were cultivated the
commonest vegetables, a few flowers and a liberal assortment of herbs, such as
rue, mint, parsley, sage, lavender, etc.
The verger, or viridarium, was practically a fruit garden, as it is to-day, with
perhaps a generous sprinkling of flowers and aromatic plants. The verger was
always outside the walls, but not far from the entrance or the drawbridge
crossing the moat and leading to the chateau.
It was to the verger, or orchard, curiously enough, that in times of peace the
seigneur and his family retired after luncheon for diversion or repose.
"D illocques vieng en cest vergier
Eascuns jour pour s'esbanoier."
Thus ran a couplet of the "Roman de Thèbes"; and of the hundred or more tales
of chivalry in verse, which are recognized as classic, nearly all make mention of
the verger.
It was here that young men and maidens came in springtime for the fête of
flowers, when they wove chaplets and garlands, for the moyen-age had
preserved the antique custom of the coiffure of flowers, that is to say hats of
natural flowers, as we might call them to-day, except that modern hats
seemingly call for most of the products of the barnyard and the farm in their
decoration, as well as the flowers of the field.

Henri IV in an Old French Garden
The rose was queen among all these flowers and then came the lily and the
carnation, chiefly in their simple, savage state, not the highly cultivated product
of to-day. From the ballads and the love songs, one gathers that there were also
violets, eglantine, daisies, pansies, forget-me-nots, and the marguerite, or
consoude, was one of the most loved of all.
The carnation, or œillet, was called armerie; the pansy was particularly in
favour with the ladies, who embroidered it on their handkerchiefs and their
girdles. Still other flowers found a place in this early horticultural catalogue, the
marigold, gladiolus, stocks, lily-of-the-valley and buttercups.

Frequently the verger was surrounded by a protecting wall, of more or less
architectural pretense, with towers and accessories conforming to the style of
the period, and decorative and utilitarian fountains, benches and seats were also
common accessories.
The old prints, which reproduced these early French gardens, are most curious
to study, amusing even; but their point of view was often distorted as to
perspective. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perspective was almost
wholly ignored in pictorial records. There was often no scale, and no depth;
everything was out of proportion with everything else, and for this reason it is
difficult to judge of the exact proportions of many of these early French
gardens.
The origin of garden-making in France, in the best accepted sense of the term,
properly began with the later years of the thirteenth century and the early years
of the fourteenth; continuing the tradition, remained distinctly French until the
mid-fifteenth century, for the Italian influence did not begin to make itself felt
until after the Italian wars and travels of Charles VIII, Louis XI and Francis I.
The earliest traces of the work of the first two of these monarchs are to be seen
at Blois and, for a time henceforth, it is to be presumed that all royal gardens in
France were largely conceived under the inspiration of Italian influences.
Before, as there were primitives in the art of painting in France, there were
certainly French gardeners in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One of
these, whoever he may have been, was the designer of the preaux and the
treilles of the Louvre of Charles V, of which a pictorial record exists, and he, or
they, did work of a like nature for the powerful house of Bourgogne, and for
René d'Anjou, whom we know was a great amateur gardener.
The archives of these princely houses often recount the expenses in detail, and
so numerous are certain of them that it would not be difficult to picture anew as
to just what they referred.
Debanes, the gardener of the Chateau d'Angers, on a certain occasion, gave an
accounting for "X Sols" for repairing the grass-plots and for making a petit
preau. Again: "XI Sols" for the employ of six gardeners to trim the vines and
clean up the alleys of the grand and petit jardin.
Luxury in all things settled down upon all France to a greater degree than
hitherto in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and almost without exception
princely houses set out to rival one another in the splendour of their

surroundings. Now came in the ornamental garden as distinct from the verger,
and the preau became a greensward accessory, at once practical and decorative,
the precursor of the pelouse and the parterre of Le Notre.
The preau (in old French prael) was a symmetrical square or rectangular grass-
grown garden plot. From the Latin pratum, or pratellum, the words preau, pré
and prairie were evolved naturally enough, and came thus early to be applied in
France to that portion of the pleasure garden set out as a grassy lawn. The word
is very ancient, and has come down to us through the monkish vocabulary of
the cloister.
Some celebrated verse of Christine de Pisan, who wrote "The Life of Charles
V," thus describes the cloister at Poissy.
"Du cloistre grand large et especieux
Que est carré, et, afin qu'il soit mieulx
A un prael, ou milieu, gracieux
Vert sans grappin
Ou a planté en my un très hault pin."
It was at this period, that of Saint Louis and the apotheosis of Gothic
architecture, that France was at the head of European civilization, therefore in
no way can her preëminence in garden-making be questioned.
The gardens of the Gothic era seldom surpassed the enclos with a rivulet
passing through it, a spring, a pine tree giving a welcome shade, some simple
flowers and a verger of fruit trees.
The neighbours of France were often warring among themselves but the Grand
Seigneur here was settling down to beautifying his surroundings and framing
his chateaux, manors and country-seats in dignified and most appealing
pictures. Grass-plots appeared in dooryards, flowers climbed up along castle
walls and shrubs and trees came to play a genuinely esthetic rôle in the life of
the times.
An illustrious stranger, banished from Italy, one Brunetto Latini, the master of
Dante, who had sought a refuge in France, wrote his views on the matter, which
in substance were as above.
About this time originated the progenitors of the gloriettes, which became so
greatly the vogue in the eighteenth century. Practically the gloriette, a word in
common use in northern France and in Flanders, was a logette de plaisance. The

Spaniards, too, in their glorietta, a pavilion in a garden, had practically the same
signification of the word.
In the fourteenth century French garden the gloriette was a sort of arbour, or
trellis-like summer-house, garnished with vines and often perched upon a
natural or artificial eminence. Other fast developing details of the French garden
were tree-bordered alleys and the planting of more or less regularly set-out beds
of flowering plants.
Vine trellises and vine-clad pavilions and groves were a speedy development of
these details, and played parts of considerable importance in gardening under
the French Renaissance.
In this same connection there is a very precise record in an account of the
gardens of the Louvre under Charles V concerning the contribution of one, Jean
Baril, maker of Arlors, to this form of the landscape architect's art.
"Ornamental birds—peacocks, pheasants and swans now came in as adjuncts to
the French land and water garden." This was the way a certain pertinent
comment was made by a writer of the fifteenth century. From the "Ménagier de
Paris," a work of the end of the fourteenth century, one learns that behind a
dwelling of a prince or noble of the time was usually to be found a "beau jardin
tout planté d'arbres à fruits, de legumes, de rosiers, orné de volières et tapisé de
gazon sur lesquels se promènent les paons."
French gardens of various epochs are readily distinguished by the width of their
alleys. In the moyen-age the paths which separated the garden plots were very
narrow; in the early Renaissance period they were somewhat wider, taking on a
supreme maximum in the gardens of Le Notre.
Trimmed trees entered into the general scheme in France towards the end of the
fifteenth century. Under Henri IV and under Louis XII trees were often trimmed
in ungainly, fantastic forms, but with the advent of Le Notre the good taste
which he propagated so widely promptly rejected these grotesques, which, for a
fact, were an importation from Flanders, like the gloriettes. Not by the remotest
suggestion could a clipped yew in the form of a peacock or a giraffe be called
French. Le Notre eliminated the menagerie and the aviary, but kept certain
geometrical forms, particularly with respect to hedges, where niches were
frequently trimmed out for the placing of statues, columns surmounted with
golden balls, etc.

The most famous of the frankly Renaissance gardens developed as a result of
the migrations of the French monarchs in Italy were those surrounding such
palaces and chateaux as Fontainebleau, Amboise, and Blois. Often these
manifestly French gardens, though of Italian inspiration in the first instance,
were actually the work of Italian craftsmen. Pucello Marceliano at four hundred
livres and Edme Marceliano at two hundred livres were in the employ of Henri
II. It was the former who laid out the magnificent Parterre de Diane at
Chenonceaux, where Catherine de Médici later, being smitten with the skill of
the Florentines, gave the further commission of the Jardin Vert, which was
intended to complete this parterre, to Henri le Calabrese and Jean Collo.

"Parterre de Diane," Chenonceaux
The later Renaissance gardens divided themselves into various classes, jardins
de plaisir, jardins de plaisance, jardins de propreté, etc. Parterres now became
of two sorts, parterres à compartiments and parterres de broderies, names
sufficiently explicit not to need further comment.
It is difficult to determine just how garden broderies came into being. They may
have been indirectly due to woman's love of embroidery and the garden alike.
The making of these garden broderies was a highly cultivated art. Pierre Vallet,
embroiderer to Henri IV, created much in his line of distinction and note, and
acquired an extensive clientele for his flowers and models. Often these gardens,
with their parterres and broderies were mere additions to an already existing

architectural scheme, but with respect to the gardens of the Luxembourg and
Saint Germain-en-Laye they came into being with the edifices themselves, or at
least those portions which they were supposed to embellish. Harmony was then
first struck between the works of the horticulturist—the garden-maker—and
those of the architect—the builder in stone and wood. This was the prelude to
those majestic ensembles of which Le Notre was to be the composer.
Of the celebrated French palace and chateau gardens which are not centered
upon the actual edifices with which they are more or less intimately connected,
but are distinct and apart from the gardens which in most cases actually
surround a dwelling, may be mentioned those of Montargis, Saint Germain,
Amboise, Villers-Cotterets and Fontainebleau. These are rather parks, like the
"home-parks," so called, in England, which, while adjuncts to the dwellings, are
complete in themselves and are possessed of a separate identity, or reason for
being. Chiefly these, and indeed most French gardens of the same epoch, differ
greatly from contemporary works in Italy in that the latter were often built and
terraced up and down the hillsides, whereas the French garden was laid out, in
the majority of instances, on the level, though each made use of interpolated
architectural accessories such as balustrades, statuary, fountains, etc.
Mollet was one of the most famous gardeners of the time of Louis XIV. He was
the gardener of the Duc d'Aumale, who built the gardens of the Chateau d'Anet
while it was occupied by Diane de Poitiers, and for their time they were
considered the most celebrated in France for their upkeep and the profusion and
variety of their flowers. This was the highest development of the French garden
up to this time.
It is possible that this Claude Mollet was the creator of the parterres and
broderies so largely used in his time, and after. Mollet's formula was derived
chiefly from flower and plant forms, resembling in design oriental
embroideries. He made equal use of the labyrinth and the sunken garden. His
idea was to develop the simple parquet into the elaborate parterre. He began his
career under Henri III and ultimately became the gardener of Henri IV. His
elaborate work "Theatre des Plans et Jardinage" was written towards 1610-
1612, but was only published a half a century later. It was only in the sixteenth
century that gardens in Paris were planned and developed on a scale which was
the equal of many which had previously been designed in the provinces.

View larger image
The chief names in French gardening—before the days of Le Notre—were
those of the two Mollets, the brothers Boyceau, de la Barauderie and Jacques de
Menours, and all successively held the post of Superintendent of the Garden of
the King.
In these royal gardens there was always a distinctly notable feature, the grand
roiales, the principal avenues, or alleys, which were here found on a more
ambitious scale than in any of the private gardens of the nobility. The central
avenue was always of the most generous proportions, the nomenclature coming

from royal—the grand roial being the equivalent of Allée Royale, that is,
Avenue Royal.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Garden of the Tuileries, which was later
to be entirely transformed by Le Notre, offered an interesting aspect of the
parquet at its best. In "Paris à Travers les Ages" one reads that from the
windows of the palace the garden resembled a great checker-board containing
more than a hundred uniform carreaux. There were six wide longitudinal alleys
or avenues cut across by eight or ten smaller alleys which produced this
rectangular effect. Within some of the squares were single, or grouped trees; in
others the conventional quincunx; others were mere expanses of lawn, and still
others had flowers arranged in symmetrical patterns. In one of these squares
was a design which showed the escutcheons of the arms of France and those of
the Médici. These gardens of the Tuileries were first modified by a project of
Bernard Palissy, the porcelainiste. He let his fancy have full sway and the criss-
cross alleys and avenues were set out at their junctures with moulded
ornaments, enamelled miniatures, turtles in faience and frogs in porcelain. It
was this, perhaps, which gave the impetus to the French for their fondness to-
day for similar effects, but Bernard Palissy doubtless never went so far as
plaster cats on a ridgepole, as one may see to-day on many a pretty villa in
northern France. This certainly lent an element of picturesqueness to the
Renaissance Garden of the Louvre, a development of the same spirit which
inspired this artist in his collaboration at Chenonceaux. This was the formula
which produced the jardin délectable, an exaggeration of the taste of the epoch,
but still critical of its time.

A Parterre

View larger image
The gardens of the Renaissance readily divided themselves into two classes,
those of the parterres à compartiments and those of the parterres de broderies.
The former, under Francis I and Henri II, were divided into geometrical
compartments thoroughly in the taste of the Renaissance, but bordered
frequently with representations of designs taken from Venetian lace and various
other contemporary stuffs. There were other parterres, where the compartments
were planned on a more utilitarian scale; in other words, they were the potagers
which rendered the garden, said Olivier de Serres, one of "profitable beauty."
Some of the compartments were devoted entirely to herbs and medicinal plants
while others were entirely given over to flowers. In general the compartments
were renewed twice a year, in May and August.
The Grand Parterre at Fontainebleau, called in other days the Parterre de
Tiber, offered as remarkable an example of the terrace garden as was to be
found in France, the terraces rising a metre or more above the actual garden plot
and enclosing a sort of horticultural arena.
It was in the sixteenth century that architectural motives came to be
incorporated into the gardens in the form of square, round or octagonal
pavilions, and here and there were added considerable areas of tiled pavements,

features which were found at their best in the gardens of the Chateau de Gaillon
and at Langeais.
One special and distinct feature of the French Renaissance garden was the
labyrinth, of which three forms were known. The first was composed of merely
low borders, the second of hedges shoulder high, or even taller, and the third
was practically a roofed-over grove. The latter invention was due, it is said, to
the discreet Louis XIV. In the Tuileries garden, in the time of Catherine de
Médici, there was a labyrinth greatly in vogue with the Parisian nobles who
"found much pleasure in amusing themselves therein."
In that garden the labyrinth was sometimes called the "Road of Jerusalem" and
it was presumably of eastern origin.
In the seventeenth century grottos came to be added to the garden, though this is
seemingly an Italian tradition of much earlier date. Among the notable grottos
of this time were that of the Jardin des Pins at Fontainebleau, and that of the
Chateau de Meudon, built by Philibert Delorme, of which Ronsard celebrated
its beauties in verse. The art was not confined to the gardens of royalties and the
nobility, for the bourgeoisie speedily took up with the puerile idea (said to have
come from Holland, by the way), and built themselves grottos of shells, plaster
and boulders. It was then that the chiens de faience, which the smug Paris
suburbanite of to-day so loves, were born.
By the seventeenth century the equalized carreaux of the early geometrically
disposed gardens were often replaced with the oblongs, circles and, somewhat
timidly introduced, more bizarre forms, the idea being to give variety to the
ensemble. There was less fear for the artistic effect of great open spaces than
had formerly existed, and the avenues and alleys were considerably enlarged,
and such architectural and sculptural accessories as fountains, balustrades and
perrons were designed on a more extensive scale. Basins and canals and other
restrained surfaces of water began to appear on a larger scale, and greater
insistence was put upon their proportions with regard to the decorative part
which they were to play in the ensemble.
This was the preparatory period of the coming into being of the works of Le
Notre and Mansart.
The Grand Siècle lent a profound majesty to royal and noble dwellings, and its
effect is no less to be remarked upon than the character of their gardens. The
moving spirit which ordained all these things was the will of the Roi Soleil.

Parterres and broderies were designed on even a grander scale than before.
They were frequently grouped into four equal parts with a circular basin in the
centre, and mirror-like basins of water sprang up on all sides.
Close to the royal dwelling was the fore-court, as often dressed out with flowers
and lawn as with tiles and flags. From it radiated long alleys and avenues,
stretching out almost to infinity. At this time the grass-plots were developed to
high order, and there were groves, rest-houses, bowers, and theatres de verdure
at each turning. Tennis-courts came to be a regularly installed accessory, and the
basins and "mirrors" of water were frequently supplemented by cascades, and
some of the canals were so large that barges of state floated thereon. Over some
of the canals bridges were built as fantastic in design as those of the Japanese,
and again others as monumental as the Pont Neuf.
In their majestic regularity the French gardens of the seventeenth century
possessed an admirable solemnity, albeit their amplitude and majesty give rise
to justifiable criticism. It is this criticism that qualifies the values of such
gardens as those of Versailles and Vaux, but one must admit that the scale on
which they were planned has much to do with this, and certainly if they had
been attached to less majestic edifices the comment would have been even more
justifiable. As it is, the criticism must be qualified.
The aspect of the garden by this time had been greatly modified. Aside from
such great ensembles as those of Versailles was now to be considered a taste for
something smaller, but often overcrowded with accessories of the same nature,
which compared so well with the vastness of Versailles, but which, on the other
hand, looked so out of place in miniature.
It was not long now before the "style pompadour" began to make itself shown
with regard to garden design—the exaggeration of an undeniable grace by an
affected mannerism. All the rococco details which had been applied to
architecture now began to find their duplication in the garden rockeries—weird
fantasies built of plaster and even shells of the sea.
By later years of the eighteenth century there came on the scene as a designer of
gardens one, De Neufforge. His work was a prelude to the classicism of the
style of Louis XVI which was to come. There was, too, at this time a disposition
towards the English garden, but only a slight tendency, though towards 1780 the
conventional French garden had been practically abandoned. The revolution in
the art of garden-making therefore preceded that of the world of politics by
some years.

There are three or four works which give specific details on these questions.
They are "De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance," by Blondel (1773), his
"Cours d'Architecture" of the same date, and Panseron's volume entitled
"Recueil de Jardinage," published in 1783.
The following brief résumé shows the various steps through which the French
formal garden passed. In the moyen-age the garden was a thing quite apart from
the dwelling, and was but a diminutive dooryard sort of a garden. The garden of
the Renaissance amplified the regular lines which existed in the moyen-age, but
was often quite as little in accord with the dwelling that it surrounded as its
predecessor.
The union of the garden and the dwelling and its dependencies was clearly
marked under Louis XIV, while the gardens of Louis XV tended somewhat to
modify the grand lines and the majestic presence of those of his elder. These
gardens of Louis XV were more fantastic, and followed less the lines of
traditional good taste. Shapes and forms were complicated and indeed
inexplicably mixed into a mélange that one could hardly recognize for one thing
or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have
lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most
dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens
of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not
uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but as a whole an aggravation.
Finally the reaction came for something more simple and more in harmony with
rational taste.
The best example remaining of the Louis XV garden is that which surrounds the
Pavillon de Musique of the Petit Trianon, an addition to the garden which Louis
XIV had given to the Grand Trianon. By comparison with the big garden of Le
Notre this latter conception is as a boudoir to a reception hall.
The garden of Louis XVI was a composite, with interpolations from across the
Rhine, from Holland and Belgium and from England even; features which got
no great hold, however, but which, for a time, gave it an air less French than
anything which had gone before.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century the formal garden was practically
abandoned in France. It was the period of the real decadence of the formal
garden. This came not from one cause alone but from many. To the straight lines
and gentle curves of former generations upon generations of French gardens

were added sinuosities as varied and complicated as those of the Vale of
Cashmere, and again, with tiny stars and crescents and what not, the ground
resembled an ornamental ceiling more than it did a garden. The sentimentalism
of the epoch did its part, and accentuated the desire to carry out personal tastes
rather than build on traditionally accepted lines. The taste for the English garden
grew apace in France, and many a noble plantation was remodelled on these
lines, or rooted up altogether. Immediately neighbouring upon the dwelling the
garden still bore some resemblance to its former outlines, but, as it drew farther
away, it became a park, a wildwood or a preserve.
Isabey Père, a miniaturist, under Napoleonic stimulus, designed a number of
French gardens in the early years of the nineteenth century, following more or
less the conventional lines of the best work of the seventeenth century, and
succeeded admirably in a small way in resuscitating the fallen taste. Isabey's
gardens may have lacked much that was remarkable in the best work of Le
Notre, but they were considerably better than anything of a similar nature, so far
as indicating a commendable desire to return to better ideals.
Under the Second Empire a great impulse was given to garden design and
making in Paris itself. It was then that the parks and squares came really to enter
into the artistic conception of what a city beautiful should be.
Leaving the gardens of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg out of the question,
the Parc Monceau and that of the Buttes Chaumont of to-day, the descendants of
these first Paris gardens show plainly how thoroughly good they were in design
and execution.
The majority of professional gardeners of renown in France made their first
successes with the gardens of the city of Paris, reproducing the best of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century work, which had endured without
the competition of later years having dulled its beauty, though perhaps the
parterres of to-day are rather more warm in colouring, even cruder, than those
of a former time.
The jardin fleuriste and the parterre horticole of the nineteenth century
appealed however quite as much in their general arrangement and the
modification of their details and their rainbow colours, as any since the time of
Louis XVI. According to the expert definition the jardin fleuriste was a "garden
reserved exclusively to the culture and ornamental disposition of plants giving
forth rich leaves and beautiful flowers." The above quoted description is
decidedly apt.

The seventeenth century French garden formed a superb framing for the
animated fêtes and reunions in which took part such a brilliant array of lords
and ladies of the court as may have been invited to taste the delicacies of a fête
amid such luxurious appointments.
The fashionable and courtly life of the day, so far as its open-air aspect was
concerned, centered around these gardens and parks of the great houses of
royalty and the nobility. The costume of the folk of the time, with cloak and
sword and robes of silk and velvet and gilded carriages and chaises-à-porteurs,
had little in common with the out-of-door garden-party life of to-day, where the
guests arrive in automobiles, be-rugged and be-goggled and somewhat the
worse for a dusty journey. It is for this reason that Versailles and Vaux-le-
Vicomte, in spite of the suggestion of sumptuousness which they still retain, are,
from all points of view, more or less out of scale with the life of our times.

Bassin de la Couronne, Vaux-le-Vicomte
The modern garden, whether laid out in regular lines, or on an ornamental scale,
as a flower garden purely, or in a composite style, is usually but an adjunct to
the modern chateau, villa or cottage. It is more intimate than the vast, more
theatrically disposed area of old, and is more nearly an indication of the
personal tastes of the owner because of its restrained proportions.

CHAPTER III
THE ROYAL HUNT IN FRANCE

Just how great a part the royal hunt played in the open-air life of the French
court all who know their French history and have any familiarity with the great
forests of France well recognize.
The echo of French country architecture as evinced in the "maisons de
plaisance" and "rendezvous de chasse" scattered up and down the France of
monarchial times lives until to-day, scarcely fainter than when the note was
originally sounded. Often these establishments were something more than a
mere hunting-lodge, or shooting-box, indeed they generally aspired to the
proportions of what may readily be accepted as a country-house. They
established a specious type of architecture which in many cases grew, in later
years, into a chateau or palace of manifestly magnificent appointments.
At the great hunting exposition recently held at Vienna the clou of the display
was a French royal hunting-lodge in the style of Louis XVI, hung with veritable
Gobelin tapestries, loaned by the French government and picturing "The Hunt
in France." It was called by the critics a unique painting in a beautiful frame.
In the days of Francis I and his sons, the royal hunt was given a great impetus
by Catherine de Médici, wife of Henri II.
Francis, in company with his sons, had gone to Marseilles to meet the Médici
bride, who was on her way to make her home at the Paris Louvre, and when he
found her possessed of so lively manners and such great intelligence he became
so charmed with her that, it is said, he danced with her all of the first evening.
What pleased the monarch even more, and perhaps not less his sons, was that
she shot with an arquebuse like a sharpshooter, and could ride to hounds like a
natural-born Amazon. She was more than a rival, as it afterwards proved, of that
arch-huntress, Diane de Poitiers.
History recounts in detail that last royal hunt of Francis I at Rambouillet, when
he was lying near to death, the guest of his old friend, d'Angennes.

The old manor, half hunting-lodge, half fortress, and very nearly royal in all its
appointments, proved a comfortable enough rest-house, and on the day after his
arrival, in March, 1547, the monarch commanded the preparations for a royal
hunt to commence at daybreak in the neighbouring forest.
The equipage started forth in full ceremonial on the quest of stag and boar. The
bugles blew and a sort of stimulated courage once more entered the king's
breast, courage born of the excitement around him, the baying of the hounds
and the tramping and neighing of impatient horses. He had forced himself from
his bed and on horseback and started off with the rest, defying the better counsel
of his retainers.
His strength proved to be born of a fictitious enthusiasm, and, speedily losing
interest, he was brought back to the manor where he had his apartments, and put
speechless and half dead to bed, actually dying the next day from this last over-
exertion, scarce half a century of the span of his life accomplished.
Henri de Navarre also was a true lover of the open. Born in a mountain town in
the Pyrenees he would rather camp on a bed of pine needles in the forest than
lie on a tuft of down. He preferred his beloved Bayonne ham, spiced with garlic,
to a sumptuous dinner in Jarnet house, a famous Paris tavern of the day; and
had rather quench his thirst with a quaff of the wine of Jurançon than the finest
cru in Paris cellars.

A "Curée aux Flambeaux"
He hated the parade of courts, was dirty, unkempt and careless, a genuine son of
the soil, heedless of fate, and an excellent huntsman.
Up to the seventeenth century the ladies of the French court showed a keener
interest for falconry than for the hunt by horse and hounds.
The heroines of the Fronde, and the generation which followed, seemed to lose
interest in this form of sport, and gave their favour to packs of hounds, and
followed with equal interest the hunt for deer, wolves, boars, foxes and hares as
they were tracked through forests and over arid wastes.

The old hunting horn, the winding horn of romance, still exists at the hunts of
France, a relic of the days of Louis XIV. It sounds the conventional comings
and goings of the huntsmen in the same classic phraseology as of old—the
lancer, the bien allée, the vue, the changement de forêt, the accompagné, the
bat l'eau, the hallali par terre, and the curée.
The "Curée aux Flambeaux" was one of the most picturesque ceremonies
connected with the royal hunt in France. It began in the gallant days, and lived
even until the time of the Second Empire.
The curée, that is the giving up to the hounds the remains of an animal slain in
chase, does not always take place at night, but when it does the torches play the
part of impressive and picturesque accessories. When a curée takes place at the
spot where the animal is actually killed the French sporting term for the
ceremony is "forcé et abattu." This, however, is usually preceded by another
called "le pied," which consists in cutting off one of the feet of the dead animal
and offering it to the person in whose honor the hunt was held.
When the curée takes place by torchlight the body of the animal is carried
beneath the windows of the chateau, a circle is formed by the "piqueurs," or
head hunters, and all who have participated in the pursuit; and, to the sound of a
trumpet, loaned by the sportsmen, one of the valets de venérie cuts up the stag.
The meutes, that is to say, the hounds which are let slip last of all, and which
terminates the chase—are then brought by the valet des chiens, who has great
difficulty in keeping them from breaking loose. When the entrails have been cut
away the valet sits astride the animal, holding up the nappe, or head and neck,
shaking it at the already furious hounds. It is the care of the valet during this
interval to conceal the pieces of flesh which are still under the body. The hounds
are then loosened, but are kept within bounds by the whips of the piqueurs and
the valet des chiens. When the dogs are sufficiently exasperated the brutes are
allowed to rush upon the remains of their victim; only, however, to be driven
back again by whipping. When their docility has thus been proven the definite
signal, "lachez tout," is given, and the hounds rush towards the stag.
The curée then presents a savage spectacle: the air is filled with growling,
barking and yelling, while the ground is covered with scrambling dogs, their
mouths reeking with blood.
The feminine costume for the hunt in the time of Louis XIII was of broadcloth
or velvet, with a great feather-ornamented "picture" hat. Only now and again a

lady on horseback after 1650 dared borrow doublet and jacket, and mount
astride.
The ladies followed the hunt of Louis XIV on horseback, seldom, if ever, in the
older manner of sitting behind their cavalier on the same steed. From the time of
Catherine de Médici, indeed, the Italian side-saddle had become the fashion for
women.
Under Louis XV the ladies sought a little more comfort, and followed the
equipage sitting in a sort of hamper-like, diminutive basket, hung from the
broad back of a sturdy quadruped. Dresses became more fanciful, both in
materials and colours. From this it was but a step to even more elaborate
toilettes which necessitated a conveyance of some sort on wheels, but the most
intrepid still clung to the traditionally classic methods. Marie Antoinette had her
equipage de chasse, and Madame Durfort was constantly abroad in the forests
of Montmorency and Boissy, directing the operation of eight or ten professional
huntsmen. Among her guests were frequently the ambassadors of Prussia,
Russia and Austria.
In the time of Louis XIV the Comtesse de Lude devoted herself to the hunt with
a frenzy born of an inordinate enthusiasm. At the head of a pack of hounds she
knew no obstacle, and, on one occasion, penetrated on horseback, followed by
her dogs, into the oratory of the nuns of the Convent of Estival.
By the end of the seventeenth century the hunt in France had become no more a
sport for ladies. Hunting was still a noble sport, but it was more for men than
for women. The court hunted not only in royal company, but accepted
invitations from any seigneur who possessed an ample preserve and who could
put up a good kill; magistrates, financiers and bishops, indeed all classes,
became followers of the hunt.
Montgaillard tells of a hunt in which he took part on the feast day of Saint
Bernard, with the monks of the Bernardin Convent in Languedoc. In the
episcopal domain of Saverne six hundred beaters were employed on one
occasion to provide sport for an assembled company of lords and ladies. These
were the days when the bishops were in truth Grand Seigneurs.
The women of the court, while they played the game, ceded nothing to the men
in bravery. Neither rain, hail nor snow frightened them. On the 28th of June,
1713, Louis XIV was hunting the deer at Rambouillet when a terrific, cyclonic
storm fell upon the equipage, but not a man nor woman in the monarch's party

quit. The Duchesse de Berry was "wet to the skin," but her ardour for the hunt
was not in the least cooled.
To-day at Fontainebleau or Rambouillet the echo is sounded from the hunting
horn of Labaudy, the sugar-king, who pulls off at least two "hunts," with his
spectacular equipage, each year, and it is a sight too; a French hunting party was
ever picturesque, and if to-day not as practical as the more blood-loving
Englishman's hunt, is at least traditionally sentimental, even artificial to the
extent, at any rate, that it seems stagy, even to the inclusion of the automobiles
which bring and carry away the participants. "Other days, other ways" never
had a more strict application than to la chasse a courre in France.
Two accounts are here given of two comparatively modern figures in the French
hunting field, which show the great store set by the sport in France.
In the annals of the Chateau de Grosbois, belonging to-day to the Prince de
Wagram, are the accounts of an early nineteenth century hunt, which shows that
the game cost dear. The "Grand Veneur" of the Napoleonic reign was a master
sportsman, indeed, and to-day, in a gallery of the chateau, are preserved the
guns of the master, his hunting crop and saddle, his "colours" and his hunting
horn.
From the registers of the chateau, under date of December 10, 1809, the
following, which concerned a hunting party given by the chatelain, is extracted
verbatim.

Note of the Maitre d'Hotel for collations 8,226
for the guests francs
1,080
Illuminations
francs
1,000
Gratifications to the beaters
francs
Eau de Cologne for the ladies 30 francs
148
Gun-bearers
francs
600
Helpers (150)
francs
315
Aids (200)
francs

An Imperial Hunt at Fontainebleau
Another hunt was given in 1811, in honour of Napoleon, when such items as
three thousand francs for an orchestra, a like sum for bouquets for the ladies, a
thousand or two for bonbons and fans, and twelve thousand for hired furniture,
etc., to say nothing of the expenses of the hunt itself, made the bag somewhat
costly. It was not always easy for the master of the hunt to get justice when it
came to paying for his supplies, and in these same records a mention of a dozen
leather breeches at a hundred and forty francs each was crossed off and a
marginal note, Non, added in the hand of Maréchal Berthier, Prince de Wagram,
himself.

The chief figure in the French hunting world of to-day is another descendant of
the Napoleonic portrait gallery, Prince Murat. At the age of twelve the young
Prince Joachim had already followed the hounds at Fontainebleau and
Compiègne. In his double quality of relative and companion of the Prince
Imperial he was one of the chiefs of the equipment of the Imperial Hunt. To-
day, though well past the span of life, he is as active and as enduring in his
participation in the strenuous sport as many a younger man and his knowledge
of the grand art of vénerie, and his ardour for being always ahead with the
hounds, is noted by all who may happen to see him while jaunting through the
Fôret de Compiègne, keeping well up with the traditions of his worthy elder, the
"Premier Cavalier" of the First Empire, the King of Naples.
He won his first stripes in the hunting field at Compiègne in 1868, at a hunt
given in honour of the Prince de Hohenzollern and the Princesse, who was the
sister of the King of Portugal. It was a most moving event, so much so that it
just escaped being turned into a drama, for one of the ladies of the court had a
leg broken, and the minister, Fould, was almost mortally injured. A "dix cors," a
stag with antlers of ten branches, had been run down at the Rond Royal where it
had taken refuge in a near-by copse, and after an hour's hard chase was finally
cornered in the courtyard of some farm buildings of the Hameau d'Orillets. A
troop of cows was entering the courtyard at the same moment, and a most
confused melée ensued. The Inspector of Forests saved the situation and the
cows of the farmer, and the stag fell to the carabine of Prince de la Moskowa,
with the young Prince Murat on his pony in the very front rank.
Thus early initiated in the chivalrous sport of the hunt the young man followed
every hunt, big or little, which was held in the environs of Paris for many years,
and by the time that he came to possess the epaulettes of an Officier de
Cuirassiers he was known to all the hunts from the Ardennes to Anjou.
For the past generation he has been retired to civil life by a Republican decree,
and since that time has lived in his suburban Paris property, devoting himself to
the raising of hunters. Here he lives almost on the borders of that great extent of
forest which occupies the northern section of the Ile de France, occasionally
organizing a hunt, which takes on not a little of the noble aspect of a former
time, the prince following always within sound of the hunting horn and the
baying of the hounds, if not actually always within sight of the quarry.
It is here, in his Villa Normande, near which Saint Ouen gave Dagobert that
famous counsel which has gone down in history, that the Prince and Princesse

Murat come to pass two or three months each year with their children, their
allied parents and the "great guns" of the old régime who still gather about the
master of the hunt as courtiers gather around their king.
At Chamblay there have been held magnificent gun shoots under the
organization of the prince and his equipage. His kennels contain forty-eight of
the finest bred hounds in France, and are guarded by three caretakers, the
goader, Carl, whose fame has reached every hunting court of Europe and a
couple of valets des chiens. The prince's colours are distributed as follows: a
huzzar jacket of blue, with collar, plaquettes, and vest of grenadine and
breeches of a darker blue.
Formerly Prince Murat hunted the roe-deer in the valley of the Oise, but many
enclosures of private property having made this exceedingly difficult in later
years he is to-day obliged to go farther afield. In the spring the equipage goes to
Rosny, near Mantes, and perhaps during the same season occasionally to
Rambouillet.
The hunts at Chamblay are the perfection of the practice of the art. Seldom is
the quarry wanting. The refrain of the Ode to Saint Hubert lauds the prowess of
this great "Maitre d'Equipage."
"Par Saint Hubert mon patron
C'est quelque due de haut renom
* * * *
Sonnez: écuyers et piqueux
Un Murat vien en ces lieux."
Chamblay fortunately being neither populous nor near a great town there is no
throng of curious spectators hovering about to get in the way and scare the
game and the hounds and their followers out of their wits. The Chasse de
Chamblay is the devotion of the vrais veneurs; the Prince Murat and his son, the
Prince Joachim, (to-day at the military school at Saint Cyr), the Prince Eugene
Murat, the Comte de Vallon, the Baron de Neuflize and a few famous veneurs in
gay uniforms come from afar to give éclat to the hunt of the master. And the
ladies: the following names are of those devoted to the prowess of the Prince
Murat—Madame la Princesse, la Princesse Marguerite Murat, Mademoiselle
d'Elchingen, the Duchesse and the Marquise d'Albufera, the Duchesse de
Camestra, and Madame Kraft.

Rendezvous de Chasse, Rambouillet
From this one sees that romance is not all smouldering. If other proof were
wanting a perusal of that most complete and interesting account of the hunt in
France in modern times, "Les Chasses de Rambouillet" (Ouvrage offert par
Monsieur Felix Faure) would soon establish it. This was not a work destined for
the public at large. The hunt was ever a sport of kings in France, and though
France has become Republican its Chasse Nationale at Rambouillet partakes
not a little of the aspect of those courtly days when there was less up-to-
dateness and more sentiment.
There were but one hundred copies of this work printed for the friends of the
late president of the Republic—"Other Sovereigns," as the dedication reads,
"Princes, Grand Dukes, Ambassadors."
Rambouillet was the theatre of the most splendid hunts of the sixteenth century,
and down through the ages it has ever held a preëminent place; holds it to-day
even. Louis XVI in the Revolutionary torment even regretted the cutting off of
his prerogative of the royal hunt, but he had no choice in the matter. In his
journal of 1789 one reads: "the cerf runs alone in the Parc en Bas"
(Rambouillet), and again in 1790: "Séance of the National Assembly at noon;
Audience of a deputation in the afternoon. The deer plentiful at Gambayseuil."

The Revolution felled many French institutions; low, great, ecclesiastical and
monarchial monuments, the trees of the forest, and the royal game, by a system
of poaching, had become greatly diminished in quantity.
The nineteenth century, so frankly democratic in its latter years, was less
favourable to the hunt than the monarchial days which had gone before. It had a
considerable prominence under Charles X, more perhaps than it ever had under
Napoleon, who in his infancy and laborious adolescence had few opportunities
of following it; and in the later years of his life he was too busy.
Napoleon III was not really a "good hunter," though he was something of a
marksman and took a considerable pride in his skill in that accomplishment.
Entering the democratic era, Jules Grévy seems to have been only a pot-hunter
of the bourgeoisie, who practiced the art only because he wanted a jugged hare
for his dinner, or again simply to kill time.
Sadi-Carnot was still less a hunter of the romantic school, but assisted
frequently at the ceremonial shootings which were arranged for visiting
monarchs. On one occasion he was put down on the record-sheet of a hunt at
Rambouillet as responsible only for the death of eighteen heads, whilst a
visiting Grand Duke pulled down a hundred and fifty.
It was notably during the presidency of Felix Faure that Rambouillet again took
on its animation of former times. The chateau had been furbished up once more
after a long sleep, and, to the great satisfaction of the inhabitants of the town,
there were more comings and goings than there had been for a quarter of a
century.
In the summer and autumn the president made Rambouillet his preferred
residence, and there received many visiting sovereigns and notables of all ranks.
In one year a score of "Official Hunts" were held, to which all the members of
the diplomatic corps were invited, while there were two or three affairs of an
"International" character in honour of visiting sovereigns.
All was under the control of the Grand Veneur of the Third Republic, the Comte
de Girardin, and while a truly royal flavour may have been lacking the general
aspect was much the same as it might have been in the days of the monarchy.
The Captain of the Hunt under Felix Faure was the Inspector of Forests, Leddet,
and the Premier Veneur was the Commandant Lagarenne.

The president himself was a marksman of the first rank, and never was there a
reckoning up of the tableau but that he was near the head of the list. So
accomplished was he with the rifle that on more than one occasion he was
obliged to practically efface himself in favour of some visiting monarch, as it
was said he did in the case of the King of Portugal in 1895, the Grand Ducs
Vladimir and Nicolas in 1896.
Huntsmen not royal by virtue of title, or alliance, the Republican president beat
to a stand-still. He had no pity nor favour for a mere ambassador, whether he
hailed from England or Germany, nor for members of the Institute, Senators nor
Deputies. With Prince Albert of Monaco he held himself equal, and for every
bird shot on the wing by the head of the house of Grimaldi the "longshoreman"
of Havre brought down another.
La chasse à courre before the law in France to-day may be practiced only under
strictly laid down conditions. The huntsman must legally have his dogs under
such control, and keep sufficiently close to them, as to be able to recover the
quarry immediately after it has been closed in upon by the hounds.
Like shooting, since the Decrée of 1844, hunting with hounds may only be
undertaken under authority of a permis de chasse, and in open season, during
the daytime, and with the consent of the owners over whose properties the hunt
is to be held.
The ceremony of the hunt in France now follows the traditions of the classic
hunt of the monarchy. The veneur decides on the rendezvous, whether the
quarry be stag or chevreuil, fox or hare. The piqueur follows close up with the
dogs, sets them on or calls them off, and recalls them if they go off on a false
scent.

CHAPTER IV
THE PALAIS DE LA CITÉ AND TOURNELLES

Not every one assumes the Paris Palais de Justice to ever have been the home of
kings and queens. It has not, however, always been a tilting ground for lawyers
and criminals, though, no doubt, when one comes to think of it, it is in that rôle
that it has acted its most thrilling episodes.
The Saint Chapelle, the Conciergerie and the great clock of the Tour de
l'Horloge mark the Palais de Justice down in the books of most folk as one of
the chief Paris "sights," but it was as a royal residence that it first came into
prominence.
This palace, not the conglomerate half-secular, half-religious pile of to-day, but
an edifice of some considerable importance, existed from the earliest days of the
Frankish invasion, and when occupied by Clotilde, the wife of Clovis, was
known as the Palais de la Cité.
Under the last of the kings of the First Race this palace took on really splendid
proportions. When Hugues Capet arrived on the throne he abandoned the kingly
residence formerly occupied by the Frankish rulers, the Palais des Thermes, and
installed his goods and chattels in this Palais de la Cité, which his son Robert
had rebuilt under the direction of Enguerrand de Marigny.
Up to the time of Francis I it remained the preferred residence of the French
monarchs, regardless of the grander, more luxuriously disposed Louvre, which
had come into being.
Philippe Auguste, by a contrary caprice, would transact no kingly business
elsewhere, and it was within the walls of this palace that he married Denmark's
daughter. His successors, Saint Louis, Philippe-le-Hardi, and Philippe-le-Bel
did their part in enlarging and beautifying the structure, and Saint Louis laid the
foundations of that peerless Gothic gem—La Saint Chapelle.
From the windows of the Palais de la Cité another Charles assisted at an official
massacre, differing little from that of Saint Bartholemew's, which was
conducted from the Louvre.

On the first floor of the Palais de Justice of to-day is the apartment paved in a
mosaic of black and white marble, with a painted and gilded wooden vaulting,
where Charles V received the Emperor Charles IV and the "Roi des Romains."
The three monarchs, accompanied by their families, here supped together
around a great round marble table, a secret supper prolific of an entente cordiale
which must have been the forerunner of recent ceremonies of a similar nature in
France.
Known as the Salle de Marbre, this great chamber came later to be the Tribunal
where the courts sat. It was only after the death of Charles VI, at the beginning
of the fifteenth century, that the Palais de la Cité was given over wholly to the
disciples of Saint Yves, the judges, advocates and notaries. It became also the
definite seat of the Parliament and took the nomenclature of Palais de Justice,
though still inhabited at intermittent intervals by French royalties. One such
notable occasion was that when Henry V of England was here married to
Catherine de France, and when Henry VI of England took up his temporary
residence here as king to the French.
In the fourteenth century the precincts of the Palais de la Cité—the open
courtyard one assumes is meant—were invaded by the stalls of small
shopkeepers, some of which actually took root in wood and stone and became
fixtures to such an extent that the courtyard was known as the Galerie des
Merciers.
The great marble chamber after becoming the meeting place of the Tribunal
played a part at times dignified and at others banal. An incident is recorded
where the clerks and minor court officials danced on the famous marble table
and "played farces" with the judicial bench serving as a stage. It was said that,
on account of the immoralities which they represented, the authorities were
obliged to suppress the performances by law, as they have in recent years the
flagrant freedom of the "Quat'z Arts."
Up to the times of Francis I but few events of importance unrolled themselves
within the Palais de la Cité, but in 1618 a violent conflagration broke out
leaving only the round towers of the Conciergerie, the tower and the church,
and that part of the main structure which housed the great Salle de Marbre,
unharmed. Apropos of this, a joyous rhymester of the time made the following
quatrain:
"Certes ce fut un triste jeu
Quand a Paris Dame Justice

Pour avoir mangé trop d'épice
Se mit le Palais tout en feu."
Jacques Debrosse was charged with rebuilding the edifice after the fire and
refitted first the Grand Salle, to-day the famous Salle des Pas Perdus, crowded
with the shuffling coming and going crowd of men and women whose business,
or no business at all, brings them to this central point for the dissemination of
legal gossip. It is a magnificent apartment, and, to no great extent, differs from
what it was before the conflagration.
This Salle consists of two parallel naves separated by a range of arcades and
lighted by two great circular openings with four round-headed windows at
either end. Its attributes are practically the same as they were in 1622. The
structure, take it as a whole, may be said to date only from the seventeenth
century, but certain it is that the old Palais de la Cité is incorporated therein,
every stone of it, and if its career was humdrum that was the fault of
circumstances rather than from any inherent faults of its own.
The Conciergerie, that inelegant, inconsistent architectural mixture of the
ancient and modern, considered apart, though it properly enough is usually
considered with the Palais de Justice, was formerly the dwelling or guardhouse
of the Concierge of the Palais de la Cité. His post was not merely that of the
keeper of the gates; he was a personage at court and was as autocratic as his
more plebeian contemporaries of to-day, for the Paris concierge, as we, who
have for years lived under their despotism well know, is a very dreadful person.
In addition to being the governor of the royal dwelling this concierge was the
guardian of the royal prisoners. In 1348 he was further invested with the official
title of Bailli and the post was, at times, occupied by the highest and the most
noble in the land, among others Philippe de Savoie, the friend of Charles VI,
and Juvenal des Oursins, the historian of this prince. The first to combine the
two functions, that of Bailli and Concierge, was Jacques Coictier, the doctor of
Louis XI.
As a virtual prison the Conciergerie only came to be transformed when Charles
V quitted the residence of the Palais de la Cité, and the Conciergerie, as such,
only figures on the Tournelles registers under date of 1391.
The fire of the latter part of the eighteenth century destroyed a large part of the
building, but enough remained to patch together the most serviceable of

Revolutionary prisons, for at one time it held at least twelve hundred poor souls,
of whom two hundred and eighty-eight were killed off at one fell blow.
But one woman among them all actually came to her death within the prison
walls. This was La Belle Bouquetière of the Palais Royal who, in an access of
jealous furor, horribly mutilated a royal guardsman, and for this met a most
cruel death by being transfixed to a post and submitting to a trial of "le fer et le
feu." In just what manner the punishment was applied one can best imagine for
himself.
The Revolutionary rôle of the Conciergerie is a thing apart from the purport of
this book, hence is not further referred to.
Going back to the time of Francis I, among the famous prisoners of state were
Louis de Berquin, the Comte de Mongomere, the regicides Ravaillac and
Damiens, the Maréchal d'Ancre, Cartouche, Mandrin and others. To-day, as a
prison, the Conciergerie still performs its functions acceptably, safeguarding
those up for the assizes, and those condemned to death before being sent on
their long journey.
The three great flanking towers of the Conciergerie are its chief architectural
distinction to-day. That of the left, the largest, is the Tour d'Argent, that of the
middle, the Tour Bonchet, and the third, the Tour de César or the Tour de
l'Horloge. This last is the only one which has preserved its mediæval crenulated
battlements aloft. The great clock has been commonly considered the largest
timepiece of its kind extant, but it is doubtful if this now holds good with
railways and insurance companies vying with each other to furnish the hour so
legibly that he who runs may read.
Across the Pont au Change, from the Palais de la Cité, by the Louvre and out
into the Faubourg Saint Antoine, one comes to the Place des Vosges, the old
Place Royale, which occupies almost the same area as was covered by the
courtyard of the Palais des Tournelles, so called from its many towers.
All around the Palais des Tournelles was located a series of splendid hotels
privés of the nobility. In one of these, the Hotel de Saint Pol, the king once
lodged twenty-two visiting princes of the quality of Dauphin (the eldest son of a
ruling monarch), their suites and domestics.
Charles V in his time amalgamated with his royal palace three of these
magnificent private dwellings, the Hotel du Petit Musc, the Hotel de l'Abbé de
Saint Maur and the Hotel du Comte d'Étampes.

The palace proper really faced on what is now the Rue Saint Antoine, opposite
the Hotel Saint Pol. Its historic and romantic memories of the sword and cloak
period of gallantry were many, but the edifice was demolished by the order of
Catherine de Médici.
In the palace Charles VI was confined, during the period of his insanity, by
order of the cruel Isabeau de Bavière. The Duke of Bedford, when regent for the
minor Henry VI, lodged here, and upon the expulsion of the English it became
the residence of Charles VII. Louis XI and Louis XII each inhabited it, and the
latter died within its walls.
The Palais des Tournelles will go down to history chiefly because of that
celebrated jousting bout held in its courtyard on the marriage day of the two
princesses, Elizabeth and Marguerite.
Henri II and the elder princes, his sons, were to ride forth in tournament and
break lances, if possible, with all comers. The court, including Catherine de
Médici and the princess Elizabeth, wife of Philippe II, the late husband of Mary
Tudor, the two Marguerites and other high personages were seated on a dais
upholstered in damascened silk and ornamented with many-coloured streamers.
The time was July and the morning. At a signal from Catherine music burst
forth and the bouts began.
The king rode forth at the head of his chevaliers, wearing a suit of golden
armour, his sword handle set with jewels, and, in spite of the presence of his
wife, his lance flying black and white streamers, the colours of Diane de
Poitiers, who had lately turned her affections from father unto son.
A herald proclaimed the opening of the combat, and before night the king had
broken the lances of the Ducs de Ferrare, de Guise, and de Nemours, and was
just about disarming when a masked knight approached from the Faubourg
Saint Antoine and challenged the king, who, in spite of being implored to desist
by his queen, entered the lists again and was ultimately wounded unto death by
the sable knight.
Henri II expired the same night in a bedchamber of the Palais des Tournelles,
whither he had been carried, at the age of forty-one, the victim of chance, or the
wile of the Sieur de Montgomeri, the ancestor of England's present Earl of
Eglinton. The captain of the Scotch Guards, Montgomeri, was not immediately
pursued (he meantime had fled the court), but Catherine de Médici harboured
for him a most bitter rancour. Pro and con ran his cause, for he had his

partisans, but the Maréchal de Matignon finally caught up with him in
Normandy and he was tortured and condemned to death for the crime of lèse
majesté—beating the king at his own game.
The widowed queen angrily ordered Diane de Poitiers from the court, and
caused the Palais des Tournelles to be razed. This was her only means of
showing her contempt for the woman who had played her royal spouse to his
death as the Romans played the gladiators of old; and Tournelles, as a palatial
monument of its time, blotted out the rest when it disappeared from view.
A forest of spirelets soared aloft from the gables and rooftrees of the Palais des
Tournelles. There was no spectacle of the time more imposing than this sky-line
silhouette of a Paris palace; not at Chambord nor Chenonceaux was the
spectacle more fine. It was like a fairy castle, albeit that it was in the heart of a
great city.
To the right of the Palais des Tournelles, beyond the Porte Saint Antoine, was
the ink-black, frowning donjon of the Bastille, its severity in strong contrast
with the more luxurious palaces of the princes which surrounded it not far away.
The charming Place des Vosges, which occupies the site of Tournelles to-day, is
another of Paris's breathing spaces. Well may it be called a royal garden—a park
virtually on a diminutive scale—since it was originally known as the Place
Royale, under Henri IV.
With the advent of the gascon Henri de Béarn this delightful little unspoiled
corner of old Paris took on the aspect which it now has. Within this enclosure
were the usual garden or park attributes, more or less artificially disposed, but
making an ideal open-air playground for the court, shut in from outside
surroundings by the outlines of the old palace walls, and not too far away from
the royal palace of the Louvre.
The first and greatest historic souvenir of this garden was a Carrousel given in
1612, by Marie de Médici, two years after the tragic death of Henri IV,
celebrating the alliance between France and Spain. Under Richelieu the square
became known as the Place des Vosges, and, in spite of the law against duelling,
which had by this time come into force, it became a celebrated meeting place
for duellists like Ivry, the "Grand' Roué" or the "Vel' Hiver" of to-day.
It was on May 12, 1627, that the Comte des Chappell killed Bussy d'Amboise
on this spot, and left a bloody souvenir, which was only forgotten by the

historians when they had to recount another meeting, this time between the
Catholic Duc de Guise and the Protestant Coligny d'Andelot.
"Monsieur," said the duke, "we will now proceed to settle that little account
between our illustrious houses," and with that he drew his sword and killed
Coligny, as if he were but stamping the life out of a caterpillar.
Now, with all this bloody memory behind, the Place became one of the most
elegant residential quarters of the capital, preferred above all by the nobility, the
Rohans, the Alègres and Rotroux.
At No. 21 lived Victor Hugo, just before the Coup d'État, in the house first
made famous as the habitation of the somewhat infamous Marion Delorme.
Among other illustrious names who have given a brilliance to these alleyed
walks and corridors are to be recalled Corneille, Condé, Saint Vincent de Paul,
Molière, Turenne, Madame de Longueville, De Thou, Cinq-Mars, Richelieu,
D'Ormesson, the Prince de Talmon, the Marquis de Tessé and the Comte de
Chabanne.
It is possible that this charming Paris square will remain as ever it has been, for
a recent attempt of the owner of one of the houses which borders upon it to
change the disposition of the façade brought about a law-suit which compelled
him to respect the procedure which obtained in 1605 when it was ordained the
Place Royale.
To prove their rights the civic authorities had recourse to the original plans still
preserved in the national archives. This is a demonstration of how carefully
European nations preserve the written records of their pasts.

BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF OLD PARIS

View larger image
The decision finally arrived at by the courts—that the Place des Vosges must be
kept intact as originally planned—gave joy to the hearts of all true Parisians and
archeologists alike.

CHAPTER V
THE OLD LOUVRE AND ITS HISTORY

A stroll by the banks of the Seine will review much of the history of the capital,
as much of it as was bound up with Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Palais de la
Cité (now the Palais de Justice), and that was a great deal, even in mediæval and
Renaissance times.
The life of the Louvre was Paris; the life of Paris that of the nation; and the life
of the nation that of the people. This even the Parisians of to-day will tell you. It
is scant acknowledgment of the provinces to be sure, but what would you? The
French capital is much more the capital of France than London is of England, or
Washington of America—leaving politics out of the question.
Paris before the conquest by the Franks was practically only the Seine-
surrounded isle known as Lutetia, and later as "La Cité," and the slight overflow
which crept up the slopes of the Montagne de la Sainte Genevieve. From the
Chatelet to the Louvre was a damp, murky swamp called, even in the moyen-
age, Les Champeaux, meaning the Little Fields, but swampy ones, as inferred
by studying the evolution of the name still further.
A rapid rivulet descended from Menilmontant and mingled with the Seine
somewhere near the Garden of the Tuileries.
Clovis and his Franks attacked the city opposite the isle, and, upon the actual
achievement of their conquest, threw up an entrenched camp on the approved
Roman plan in what is now the courtyard of the old Louvre, and filled the moat
with the waters of this rivulet. The ensemble was, according to certain
authorities, baptized the Louvre, or Lower, meaning a fortified camp. This
entrenchment was made necessary in order that the Franks might sustain
themselves against the Gallo-Roman occupants of Lutetia, and in time enabled
them to acquire the whole surrounding region for their own dominion. This the
Lower, or Louvre, made possible, and it is well deserved that its name should be
thus perpetuated, though actually the origin of the name is in debate, as will be
seen by a further explanation which follows.

Little by little this half-barbaric camp—in contradistinction to the more solid
works of the Romans—became a placefort, then a château, then a palace and,
finally, as the young lady tourist said, an art museum. Well, at any rate, it was a
dignified evolution.
Two Louvres disappeared before the crystallization of the present rather
irregularly cut gem. From the Merovingians dates the Louvre des Champs, the
hostile, militant Louvre, with its high wood and stone tower, familiar only in old
engravings. After this the moyen-age Louvre, attributable to Saint Louis and
Charles V, with its great tower, its thick walls of stone and its deep-dug moats,
came into being. With Francis I came a more sympathetic, a more subtle era of
architectural display, a softening of outlines and an interpolation of flowering
gables. It was thus that was born that noble monument known as the New
Louvre, which combined all the arts and graces of a fastidious ambition.
Nothing remains of the old Louverie (to which the name had become corrupted)
which Philippe Auguste early in the thirteenth century caused to be turned into
an ambitious quadrangular castle from a somewhat more humble establishment
which had evolved itself on the site of the Frankish camp, save the white marble
outline sunken in the pavement of the courtyard of the palace of to-day. By
destiny this palace, set down in the very heart of Paris, was to dominate
everything round about. From the date of its birth, and since that time, it has had
no rivals among Paris or suburban palaces. Its very situation compelled the
playing of an auspicious part, and the Seine flowing swiftly by its ramparts
added no small charm to the fêtes and ceremonies of both the Louvre and the
Tuileries.
Never was a great river so allied with the life of a royal capital; never a stream
so in harmony with other civic beauties as is the Seine with Paris. When Henri
II entered Paris after his Sacrament he contemplated a water-festival on the
Seine, which was to extend from the walls of the Louvre to the towers of Notre
Dame, a festival with such elaborate decorations as had never been known in
the French capital.
The kings of France after their Sacrament entered the Louvre by the quay-side
entrance, followed by their cortège of gayly caparisoned cavaliers and gilded
coaches with personages of all ranks in doublet and robe, cape and doublet. The
scintillating of gold lace and burnished coats gave a brilliance which rivalled
that of the sun.

No sooner had the cavalcade entered the gates of the Louvre than it came out
again to participate in the day and night festival, which had the bosom of the
Seine for its stage and its bridges and banks for the act drop and the wings.
The receptions of Ambassadors, the baptisms of royalties, royal marriages and
celebrations of victories, or treaties, were all fêted in the same manner.
Napoleon glorified the Peace of Amiens under similar conditions, and there is
scarce a chronicler of any reign but that recounts the part played by the Seine in
the ceremonies of the court of the New and Old Louvre.
It was amid a setting which lent itself so readily to all this that the Old Louvre,
which was rebuilt by Francis I, first came to its glory.
The origin of the name Louvre has still other interpretation from that previously
given. It seems to be a question of grave doubt among the savants, but because
the note is an interesting one it is here reproduced. The name may have been
derived as well from the word œuvre, from the Latin opus; it may have been
evolved from lupara, or louverie (place of wolves), which seems improbable. It
may have had its evolution from either one of these origins, or it may not.
Anglo-Saxons may be proud of the fact that certain French savants have
acknowledged that the name of the most celebrated of all Paris palaces is a
derivation from a word belonging to their tongue and meaning habitation. This,
then, is another version and one may choose that which is most to his liking, or
may go back and show his preference for lower, meaning a fortified place.
A palace—something more elaborate than a mere habitation—stood on the
same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of Philippe
Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid proportions, though
infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with the mass which all Paris
knows to-day under the inclusive appellation of "The Louvre."
The Paris of Philippe Auguste was already a city of a hundred and twenty
thousand inhabitants, with mean houses on every side and little pretense at even
primitive comforts or conveniences. This far-seeing monarch laid hand first on
the great citadel tower of the fortified lower, added to its flanking walls and
built a circling rampart around the capital itself. It is recounted that the
rumbling carts, sinking deep in mud and plowing through foot-deep dust
beneath the palace windows, annoyed the monarch so much that he instituted
what must have been the first city paving work on record, and commanded that
all the chief thoroughfares passing near the Louvre should be paved with

cobbles. This was real municipal improvement. He was a Solon among his kind
for, since that day, it has been a sine qua non that for the well-keeping of city
streets they must be paved, and, though cobblestones have since gone out of
fashion, it was this monarch who first showed us how to do it.
The Louvre of Philippe Auguste was the most imposing edifice of the Paris of
its time. To no little extent was this imposing outline due to its great central
tower, the maitresse, which was surrounded by twenty-three dames d'honneur,
without counting numberless tourelles. This hydra-towered giant palace was the
real guardian of the Paris of mediævalism, as its successor is indeed the real
centre of the Paris of to-day.
The city was but an immense mass of low-lying gable-roofed houses, whose
crowning apex was the sky-line of the Louvre, with that of Tournelles only less
prominent to the north, and that of La Cité hard by on the island where the
Palais de Justice and Notre Dame now stand.
Before the hand of Francis fell upon the Louvre it was but an isolated
stronghold—a combined castle, prison and palace, gloomy, foreboding and
surrounded by moats and ramparts almost impassable. Philippe Auguste built
well and made of it an admirable and imposing castle and a place of defence,
and a defence it was, and not much more.

For its time it was of great proportions and of an ideal situation from a strategic
point of view; far more so than the isolated Palais de la Cité in the middle of the
Seine.
Four gates led out from the inner courtyard of the Old Louvre: one to the Seine;
one to the south, facing Saint Germain l'Auxerrois; another towards the site of
the later Tuileries; and the other to about where the Rue Marengo cuts the Rue
de Rivoli of to-day.

With the endorsement given it by Philippe Auguste the Louvre now became the
official residence of the kings of the Capetian race, whereas previously they had
dwelt but intermittently at Paris, chiefly in the Palais de la Cité.
The monarch, as if to test the efficiency of his new residence as a stronghold,
made a dungeon tower, his greatest constructive achievement until he built the
castle of Gisors, and in the tower imprisoned the Comte de Flandre, whom he
had taken prisoner at Bouvines. Louis IX (Saint Louis), in his turn, built a
spacious annex to Philippe Auguste's Louvre, to which he attached his name.
Charles V totally changed the aspect of the palace from what it had formerly
been—half-fortress, half-residence—and made of it a veritable palace in truth as
well as in name, by the addition of numerous dependencies.
Within a tower which was built during the reign of this monarch, called the Tour
de la Librairie, he assembled his royal bibelots and founded what was
afterwards known as the Bibliothèque du Louvre, the egg from which was
hatched the present magnificently endowed Bibliothèque Nationale in the Rue
Richelieu.
It is related that in 1373 the valet-de-chambre of Charles V made a catalogue of
the nine hundred and ten volumes which formed this collection, an immense
number for the time when it is known that his predecessor, Jean-le-Bon,
possessed but seven volumes of history and four devotional books as his entire
literary treasure.
This seems to be a bibliographical note of interest which has hitherto been
overlooked. Charles V was evidently a man of taste, or he would not have built
so well, though all is hearsay, as not a fragment remains of the work upon which
he spent his talents and energies.
From the death of Charles V, in 1364, until 1557 the Louvre by some caprice
ceased to be a permanent royal residence. At the latter epoch the ambitious, art-
loving Francis I conceived the idea that here was a wealth of scaffolding upon
which to graft some of his Renaissance luxuries and, by a process of
"restoration" (perhaps an unfortunate word for him to have employed, since it
meant the razing of the fine tower built by Charles V), added somewhat to the
splendours thereof, though in a fickle moment, as was his wont, allowed a gap
of a dozen years to intervene between the outlining of his project and the
terrifically earnest work which finally resulted in the magnificent structure
accredited to him, though indeed it meant the demolition of the original edifice.

It was at this period that Charles V entered into the ambitious part which
Francis was to henceforth play in the Louvre, so perhaps the interruption was
pardonable.

CHAPTER VI
THE LOUVRE OF FRANCIS I AND ITS SUCCESSORS

One can attribute the demise of the Old Louvre to the coming of Charles V to
Paris in 1539. This royal residence, hastily put in order to receive his august
presence, seemed so coldly inconvenient and inhospitable to his host, Francis I,
that that monarch decided forthwith upon its complete reconstruction and
enlargement. Owing to various combinations of circumstances the actual work
of reconstruction was put off until 1546, thus the New Louvre as properly
belongs to the reign of Henri II as to that of his father.
Francis I, more than any other European monarch of his time, or, indeed, before
or since, left his mark as an architect of supreme tastes over every edifice with
which he came into personal contact. His mania was for building—when it was
not for affairs of the heart—and so daring was he that when he could not get an
old fabric to remodel he would brave all, as did Louis XIV at Versailles, and
erect a dream palace in the midst of a desert. This he did at Chambord in the
Sologne. At Paris his difficulties were perhaps no less, but he had his materials
and his workmen ready at hand.
Francis's repairs and embellishments to the Old Louvre were by no means
perfunctory, but he saw possibilities greater than he was able to perform with
the means at hand. He first razed the central tower, or donjon, and scarce before
the departure of his royal guest, was already dreaming of replacing the entire
fabric with another which should bear the same name. One has read of the
monarch's thoughts when he was awaiting the coming to Paris of his old enemy
in the peninsula; how he regretted the moment when he should sally out to meet
him and leave his new-found friend, the Duchesse d'Étampes, in spite of her
pleadings for him to remain by her. All this is mere historic incident, and has
little to do with Francis's art instincts and ambitions. He probably thought this
very thing himself when he replied to the importunate lady: "Duchesse, I must
tear myself away without more ado; I go to meet my brother monarch at
Amboise on the Loire."
It was Francis I, the passionate lover of art, who collected the first pictures
which formed the foundation of the present collections of the Musée National

du Louvre. He bought many in foreign parts, and many others were brought
from Italy by Italian artists, whom he had commanded to the capital:
Primaticcio brought with him, upon his arrival, more than a hundred antique
statues. These art objects were first assembled at Fontainebleau and ornamented
the apartments of the king. Among them were Da Vinci's "La Joconde" and
Raphael's "Holy Family and Saint Michael."
Henri II, Henri IV, and Louis XIII did little to enrich the art collections of the
palace, but Louis XIV charged his minister, Colbert, with numerous purchases.
In 1661 he bought the fine collection left by Cardinal Mazarin, and ten years
later purchased the contents of the celebrated gallery belonging to the banker
Jacob of Cologne. The state expended for these acquisitions nearly six hundred
thousand livres, and received for this sum six hundred paintings and six
thousand drawings.
It was at this period that the royal collections were transferred to Paris, a little
before the death of Colbert, when they were placed in the galleries of the
Louvre; though it was a hundred years later that a national museum was actually
created. This was virtually brought about from the fact that the royal collections
were transported in a great part to Versailles, only to be returned to Paris in
1750, transferred again to Versailles, and ultimately to be returned to Paris
under the sheltering wing of the grand old Louvre.
The Museum of the Louvre, the Museum National et Central des Arts, is the
outgrowth of a Decree of the Convention, dated July 27, 1793. It was aided and
enriched considerably under Napoleon I, that passionate lover of the beautiful,
who, none too scrupulously, would even seek to "make a campaign" in order to
acquire art works for the museum of his capital.
Many of these abducted art treasures (like the horses of Saint Marc, for
instance) were afterwards returned to their original owners, but the nucleus of
this unrivaled art museum was chiefly due to the consul and emperor.
As soon as Charles V had left the Louvre demolition was at once begun by
Francis, and in 1541 an Italian, Serlio, was bidden prepare a set of plans for the
Renaissance glory that was to be. Serlio, refusing, or debating the price, was
cast aside for the Frenchman, Lescot, whose plan was adopted.
The work can in no way be said to have suffered by the change of plans, for
though Pierre Lescot was as yet a name unknown in the world of architecture
his talents were sufficiently great, magistrate and parliamentary counsellor

though he was, to give to Paris what has ever been accounted its chief
Renaissance glory.
Work was begun at once, a work which was not interrupted by intrigues of
court, of love, of war, nor by the deaths of Francis I nor his successor, Henri II.
Although the work was begun in an energetic manner it was 1555 before the
western wing was ready for the hand of the sculptors, but from this time on,
judging from the interpolated monograms of Charles IX and Henri IV on the
south wing, work progressed less hurriedly. The two other constructions, which
were to enclose the quadrangle to the north and east, were completed under
such circumstances that there has never been a question as to their period.
For fifteen years the work went on, when suddenly it was abandoned as were
the plans of Lescot. A sole wing, that following the Seine and abutting at right
angles against the Pavilion de l'Horloge, had resulted.
The sculptures of its south façade, as well as certain of its interior decorations,
were entrusted to Jean Goujon (1520-1572), who became a victim of the
horrible night of Saint Bartholomew, planned in the same Louvre by the wily
Médici.

The Louvre
Henri II often dwelt over Lescot's plans and devices, and, on one occasion,
when the poet Ronsard was present, demanded of the architect the meaning of
the decorations surrounding a great œil-de-bœuf window, two kneeling figures,
one blowing a trumpet, and the other extending a palm branch. "Victory and
Fame," replied Lescot. And, in honour of the architect and his sentiment,
Ronsard composed his "Franciade." The detail was actually by Goujon, whose
design it was, under the oversight of the master architect. One may see this chef
d'œuvre to-day just above the courtyard portal to the west.
At the death of Henri II, Catherine de Médici came here to live alone, and built
the great extension, which stands to-day and joins the Old Louvre with that
portion along the banks of the Seine by the double arch, through which swing
the autobusses coming from the Rive Gauche with such a Juggernaut grind that
fears for the foundation of the palace are ever uppermost in the minds of those
responsible for its preservation.
It is in this Catherine de Médici portion of the Louvre (1578) that the present
Galerie des Antiques is installed, and which is usually thronged, in season and
out, with globe-trotting sight-seers who give seldom a thought to its
constructive elegance and its association with the Médici.
With the first years of the reign of Charles IX, there is to be remarked a notable
slowness of procedure with regard to the construction of the New Louvre. This
was brought about chiefly by the conception of the Tuileries and the work
which was actually begun thereon. Soon a gigantic idea radiated from the
ambitious mind of Catherine de Médici. In this connection it must be
remembered, however, that Catherine, so commonly reviled as "the Italian,"
was not all Italian; French blood flowed through her veins through that of her
mother, Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. She came first to France, landing at
Marseilles, whence she arrived from Leghorn, and forthwith commenced her
journey Parisward, arriving finally at the Louvre as the bride of Prince Henri in
the guise of a simple, clever girl, though indeed she was twenty years the elder.
Now she dreamed of uniting her chateau of the Tuileries with that of the king by
a long, connecting gallery. She put action to the thought and under Pierre (II)
Chambiges, a relative of the Chambiges of Fontainebleau and Saint Germain,
the Petite Galerie, a mere means of communication between the two chateaux,
and not the least to be likened to a defensive structure, was begun and work

thereon carried out between 1564 and 1571, though it remained for Thibaut
Metezeau, in 1595-1596, to carry it on a stage further under Henri IV.
This architect introduced the notorious mezzanine, which has so intrigued
historians of the Louvre because of the unequal elevations of the various floors,
a procedure which was unavoidable save by recourse to a substitution less to be
objected to than the existing fault. Actually the connection with the Tuileries
was made by the prolongation of this gallery by the Ducerceau brothers in 1595.
The work existing to-day, but only in its reconstructed form, is the same as that
completed by Napoleon III (1863-1868).
Charles IX and Henri III, though making the Louvre their residence, practically
had no hand in its embellishment. The former gave his energies and ideals full
play in the Saint Bartholomew massacres and shot at poor unfortunates who
fled beneath the windows of his apartments on the quay-side of the Louvre.
This, if not the chief incident of his association with the fabric, is at least the
best remembered one. Henri III, too, led a scandalous life within the walls of the
Louvre and fled on horseback, smuggled out a back door, as it were, on a
certain May evening in 1588, never more to return, for the Dominican monk
Jacques Clément killed him with a knife-thrust before he had got beyond Saint
Cloud.
The accepted tale of the part played by the famous window of the Louvre in the
drama of Saint Bartholomew's night is as follows: As the signal tolled from the
belfry of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois it was answered by another peal from the
great bell of the Palais de Justice, where, within a small apartment over the
watergate of the Louvre, the queen and her two sons were huddled together not
knowing what might happen next. The multitude streamed by on the quay
before the palace, and, finally, amid all the horror of Coligny's murder, and the
throwing of his body from a window of the Louvre to the street below, Charles
IX stood at his window regarding the fleeing Huguenots as so much small
game, shooting away at them with an arquebuse as they went by, and with an
unholy glee, even boasting that he had killed a score of heretics in a quarter of
an hour.
Historians of those exciting times were perhaps none too faithful chroniclers
and Charles's "excellent shots" in his "royal hunt," and hideous oaths and threats
such as: "We'll have them all, even the women and children," are not details as
well authenticated as we would like to have them. Like Rizzio's blood stains
they lack conviction.

The ambitious white-plumed Henri de Navarre, when he became Henri IV of
France, set about to connect the tentacle which stretched southward from the
Old Louvre with the Tuileries (a continuation of the project of Catherine de
Médici), and, by the end of the sixteenth century, had built a long façade under
the advice of the brothers Ducerceau. This work was added to on the courtyard
side under the Second Empire, when a reconstruction, more likely a
strengthening of underpinning and walls because of their proximity to the swift-
flowing waters of the Seine, of the work of Henri IV was undertaken.
Joining the Tuileries and this work of Ducerceau was the celebrated Pavilion de
Flore, a work of the Henri IV period rather than that of Catherine de Médici.
From the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Lesdiguières ran this long gallery
of the Ducerceau and numerous interstices and unfinished vaults and arches
leading towards the Old Louvre were, at this epoch, completed by Metezeau
and Dupaira. The chief apartment of this structure became known as the Galerie
Henri IV, and was completed in 1608.
At the death of Henri IV, Richelieu, who at times builded so well, and who at
others was a base destroyer of monuments, demolished that portion which
remained of the edifice of Charles V. The work of Pierre Lescot was preserved,
however, and to give symmetry and an additional extent of available space the
rectangle facing Saint Germain l'Auxerrois to-day was completed, thus
enclosing in one corner of its ample courtyard the foundations of the earlier
work whose outlines are plainly traced in the pavement that those who view
may build anew—if they can—the old structure of Philippe Auguste. In mere
magnitude the present quadrangle is something more than four times the extent
of the Louvre of the time of Charles V.
This courtyard of the Louvre is perhaps that spot in all Paris which presents the
greatest array of Renaissance art treasures. From ground to sky-line the façades
are embroidered by the works from the magic hand of the Siècle Italien. Jean
Goujon himself has left his brilliant souvenirs on all sides, caryatides, festoons,
bas-reliefs, statues and colonnades.
Enthusiasm and devotion knew no bounds among those old craftsmen, but all is
well-ordered, regular and correct. "He who mentions the Louvre to a
Frenchman gives a greater pleasure than that of Méhémet-Ali when one praises
the pyramids." In a way the Louvre is the most magnificent edifice in the
universe; "four palaces one piled up on another, une ville entière." And when
the Louvre was linked with the Tuileries in the real, what a splendour it must

have been for former generations to marvel at! "La plus belle et la plus grande
chose sous le soleil."
This work of aggrandizement of the quadrangle was carried out by the architect
Lemercier on the basis of a project adopted in 1642, and, to a great extent,
completed before the arrival of Anne d'Autriche, twenty years later.
This queenly personage had ideas of her own as to what sort of a residence she
would have in Paris, and beyond her personal needs little was done for the
moment towards actually linking up the various loose ends, each more or less
complete in itself, which now composed the Paris palace of the French
monarchs.
Her son, the king in person if not in power, was not likely to be endowed with
instincts which would put him in the rank of the traditional castle or palace
builders of his race; it was literature, music and painting which more
particularly flourished during his reign, and so the Austrian contented herself at
first with merely putting the former apartments of Catherine de Médici into
condition for her personal use and building a Salle-de-Spectacle, and—happy
thought—a Salle-des-Bains.
Louis XIV, as he found time, after the war of the Fronde, actually did bethink
himself of completing, in a way, the work of his elders, and charged the
architect Levau to finish off the north wing, which was done in 1660. A year
later the Galerie Henri IV was practically destroyed by fire and rebuilt by
Levau, who gave the commission for its interior decoration to Lebrun.
Soon the south wing was completed, leaving only the gap for the eastern façade
which was intended to be the chief entrance to the mass of buildings, which still
bore the comprehensive name of "The Louvre."
For the accomplishment of this façade, the demolition of certain dwellings of
the nobility which had clustered around the royal fabric was necessary, and the
Hotels du Petit Bourbon, de Villequier, de Chaumont, La Force, De Créquy, de
Longueville, and de Choisy fell before the picks of the house-breakers. Levau
commenced work on the façade at once, and made rapid progress until 1664,
when an abrupt order came for him to stop all work. Political conspiracy, graft,
if you like, was at work, and Colbert, little favourable towards Levau, made a
proposition to the king to open a competition for the design and execution of the
façade. Willingly enough, his mind doubtless more occupied with other things,
Louis XIV agreed, and a general call was sent out to all French architects to

enter the lists. Confusion reigned, and Levau was about to be recalled when
Colbert spied an unrolled parchment in the corner and pounced upon it eagerly
as the means of saving him from the dubious efforts of the former incumbent.
It was the "non-professional" plan submitted by a doctor in medicine, one
Charles Perrault. Jealous competitors made all sorts of criticisms and
objections, the chief contention being that if by any chance an architectural
design by a "pill-roller" proved pleasing to the eye it was bound to be
impracticable from an economic or constructive point of view, or both. This is
often enough true, and it proved to be so in this case, for in spite of a certain
amount of advice from an expert Italian builder, who had come to Paris to help
the good doctor with his difficult task (for he actually received a commission
for the work and completed it in 1674), the façade did not fit the rest of the
fabric with which it was intended to join up, and to-day it may be observed by
the curious as being several feet out of line with the structure which faces on the
Rue de Rivoli.
Louis XIV practically had no regard for the Louvre and its architectural
traditions; his palatial garden-city idea, worked out at Versailles, shows what an
innovator he was. He allowed the Louvre to be filled up with all sorts of riffraff,
who were often given a lodging there in place of a money payment for some
service rendered. The Louvre thus became a sort of genteel poor-house, while
king and court spent their time in the more ample country-house behind the
Meudon hills.
By 1750 the Louvre had become little more than an immense ruin, humbled and
desecrated; a veritable orphan. The Marquis de Marigny, Surintendant des
Batiments Royaux, obtained the authorization to chase out the parasites and
clean up the Augean stable and put things in order as best pleased his esthetic
fancy, but only with the early years of the nineteenth century did the Louvre
become a real palace again and worthy of its traditions.
From 1803 to 1813 the architects Fontaine and Percier were constantly engaged
in the work of repairs and additions, and built (for Napoleon I) the gallery
which extends from what is now the Place Jeanne d'Arc to the Pavillon de
Rohan, along the Rue de Rivoli. This detached portion (bound only to the
Tuileries) was finally joined to the seventeenth century work of Lemercier
under Louis Napoleon in 1852. This gallery, the work of "moderns," is no mean
example of palace-building, either. It was the work of Visconti and Lefuel, and
with the adoption of this plan was finally accomplished the interpolation of that

range of pavilions which gives the architecture of the Louvre one of its principal
distinctions. Named after the principal ministers of former administrations—
Donon, Mollien, Daru, Richelieu, Colbert, Turgot, etc., these pavilions break up
what would otherwise be monotonous, elongated façades.
The inauguration of this last built portion of the palace was held on August 14,
1857, the occasion being celebrated by a banquet given by Napoleon III to all
the architects, artists and labourers who had been engaged upon the work. In the
same Salle, two years later, which took the name of Salle des États, the emperor
gave a diner de gala to the generals returning from the Italian campaign.
Still further résumé of fact with regard to the main body of the Louvre, as well
as with respect to its individual components, will open never-ending vistas and
pageants. It is not possible in a chapter, a book or a five-foot shelf to limn all
that is even of cursory interest. The well-known, the little-known and the
comparatively unknown mingle in varying proportions, according to the
individual mood or attitude. To some the appeal will lie in the vastness of the
fabric, to others in the varied casts of characters which have played upon its
stage, still others will be impressed with the dramatic incidents, and many more
will retain only present-day memories of what they have themselves seen. The
Louvre is a study of a lifetime.
To resume a none too complete chronology, it is easy to recall the following
important events which have taken place in the Louvre since the days of Henri
III, the period at which only the barest beginnings of the present structure had
been projected.
In 1591 a ghastly procedure took place when four members of the Conseil des
Seize were hung in the Salle des Caryatides by orders of the Duc de Mayenne.
Like the horoscope which foretold the death of Henri III, another royal
prophecy was cast in 1610 that reminds one of that which perhaps had not a
little to do with the making away with the last of the Valois princes.
The Duc de Vendome, the son of Henri IV by Gabrielle d'Estrées, handed the
king a documentary horoscope signed by an astrologer calling himself La
Brosse, which warned the king that he would run a great danger on May 14 in
case he went abroad.
"La Brosse is an ass," cried the king, and crumpled the paper beneath his feet.

On the day in question the king started out to visit his minister, Sully, at the
Arsenal. It was then in turning from the Rue Saint Honoré into the Rue de la
Ferronière that the royal coach, frequently blocked by crowds, offered the
opportunity to the assassin Ravaillac, who, jumping upon the footboard, stabbed
the king twice in the breast.
After having been wounded the king was brought dying to the Louvre. His royal
coach drew up beneath the vault through which throngs all Paris to-day
searching for a "short cut" from the river to Saint Honoré. It was but a short,
brief journey to the royal apartments above in the Pavilion de l'Horloge, but it
must have been an interminable calvary to the gallant Henri de Navarre. The
body was received by Marie de Médici in tears, and the Ducs de Guise and
d'Epernon clattered out the courtyard on horseback to spread the false news that
the king had suffered no harm. Fearing the results of too precipitate publishing
of the disaster no other course was open.
A gruesome memory is that the Swiss Guard at the Louvre surreptitiously
acquired a "quartier" of the dismembered body of the regicide and roasted it in
a fire set alight beneath the balcony of Marie de Médici as an indication of their
faithfulness and loyalty.
It was Sully, the king's minister, who ran first up the stairs to acquaint the queen
of the tragedy—faithful ever to the interests of his royal master. In spite of this,
one of the first acts of Marie de Médici as regent was to drive the Baron de
Rosny and Duc de Sully away. Such is virtue's reward—sometimes.

"Lying on his bed, his face uncovered, clad in white satin and a bonnet of red
velvet embroidered with gold, was all that remained of Henri IV of France and
Navarre. Around the bed were nuns and monks from all the monasteries of Paris
to keep vigil of his soul."
So ends the chronicle closing the chapter of the relations of Henri IV with his
Paris palace.
No particularly tragic event took place here for some years. Henriette de France,
widow of Charles I of England, taking refuge in France from the troublous
revolt at home, lived in the Louvre in 1644. She had at first been graciously

received by Mazarin, but was finally accorded only the most strict necessities of
life, a mere lodging in the Louvre, a modest budget and a restricted entourage.
In 1662, under Louis XIV, Molière and his troup, in a theatre installed in the
Salle des Caryatides, gave the first "command" performance on record. The
plays produced were, "Nicodeme" and "Le Docteur Amoureux."
An "art note" of interest is that Sylvain Bailly, the first curator of the Musée du
Louvre, was born within its precincts in 1736.
In the dark days of July, 1830, the populace attempted to pillage and sack the
palace, but after a bloody reprisal retired, leaving hundreds of dead on the field.
The parterre beneath the famous colonnade was their burial place, though a
decade later the bodies were exhumed and again interred under the Colonne de
Juillet in the Place de la Bastille.
Le Notre, the gardener of kings, laid out the first horticultural embellishments
of the palace surroundings under Louis XIV, and with little change his scheme
of decoration lasted until the time of Louis Philippe, who made away with much
that was distinctive and excellent.
Napoleon III came to the front with an improved decorative scheme, but the
hard flags of to-day, the dusty gravel and the too sparse architectural
embellishments do not mark the gardens of the Louvre as being anything
remarkable save as a desirable breathing spot for Paris nursemaids and their
charges.
The iron gates of the north, south and east sides were put into place only in
1855, and at the Commune served their purpose fairly well in holding the rabble
at bay, a rabble to whose credit is the fact that it respected the artistic
inheritance enclosed by the Louvre's walls. No work of art in the museums was
stolen or destroyed, though the library disappeared.

CHAPTER VII
THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDENS

No more sentimental interest ever attached itself to a royal French palace than
that which surrounded the Tuileries from its inception by Charles IX in the mid-
sixteenth century to its extinction by the Commune in 1871.
The Palace of the Tuileries is no more, the Commune did for it as it did for the
Hotel de Ville and many another noble monument of the capital, and all that
remains are the gardens set about with a few marble columns and gilt balls—
themselves fragments of former decorative elements of the palace—to suggest
what once was the heritage bequeathed the French by the Médici who was the
queen of Saint Bartholomew's night.

It was a palace of giddy gayety that drew its devotees to it only to destroy them.
"Crowned fools who wished to be called kings, and others." Even its stones
were chiselled as if with a certain malignancy and fatalism, for they have all
disappeared, and their history, even, has not been written as large as that of
those of many contemporary structures.
Of the last five kings to which the Tuileries gave shelter—not counting the
Second Emperor—only one went straightway to the tomb; one went to the
scaffold and three others to exile. A sorry dowry, this, for an inheritor of a
palace at once so noble and admirable in spite of its unluckiness.
With the court followers and the nobility of the last days of the monarchy it was
the same thing; the Tuileries was but a temporary shelter. The scaffold
accounted for many and banishment engulfed others to forgetfulness.
It was a commonplace at the time to repeat the warning: "O! Tuileries! O!
Tuileries! Mad indeed are those who enter thy walls, for like Louis XVI,
Napoleon, Charles X and Louis Philippe you shall make your exit by another
door."
The origin of the name Tuileries is somewhat ignominiously traced from that of
a tile factory which existed here in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine,
in the sixteenth century. The property, which comprised a manor-house as well
as the tile fields, was known by the name of La Sablonnière, and came to the
Marquis Neuville de Villeroy, Superintendent of Finances, who built on the spot
a sort of fortified chateau, which, if not of palatial dimensions, was of a palatial
prodigality of luxury.
Louise de Savoie, mother of Francis I, acquired the property in 1518 and nine
years later gave it to Jean Tiercelin, the Maitre d'Hotel of the dauphin, who later
was to become Henri II.
The lodge, or manor-house, had, by 1564, fallen into so ruinous a state that
Catherine de Médici, the widow of Henri II, set about to lay the foundations of
a new royal palace.
Catherine never resided in her projected palace, and in 1566 Charles IX, her
son, gave the commission to Philibert Delorme to build a palace, "neighbouring
upon the Louvre, but not to be connected therewith, on the site of the Tuileries."
On July 11, work was begun, and the central pavilion and the two extremes
were carried up two stories within a year. The central structure was a great

circular-domed edifice, enclosing a marvellous Escalier d'Honneur. The façade,
preceded by two terraced porticos, was on the courtyard, or garden, between the
edifice and the Louvre. It sat back to the present Rue des Tuileries.
The Tuileries did not become a royal residence for some time after its
completion, for Charles IX clung tenaciously to his well-guarded apartments in
the Louvre; for the central structure of the Tuileries, because of its lack of
comparative height, was hardly as much of a stronghold as he would have liked.
A contemporary note in connection with Charles IX and the Tuileries is found
in Ronsard's "Épitre à Charles IX."
"J'ay veu trop de maçons
Bastir les Tuileries,
Et en trop de façons
Faire les momeries."
Work on the edifice so auspiciously planned by Delorme was practically
discontinued during the reign of Henri III, owing to lack of funds.
The Renaissance of Delorme, Bullant, Lescot, each of whom had a hand in the
building of the Tuileries, expressed certain characteristic phases of architectural
art in the reigns of Francis I and Henri II. The reign of Charles IX was only
another phase of that long reign of Catherine de Médici, and architectural
influences continued to follow along the same reminiscent Italian lines,
particularly with reference to such edifices as the Médici herself caused to be
built. In the dedication of Philibert Delorme's "Traite d'Architecture" he
expressed himself thus with regard to the Tuileries:
"Madame, I see from day to day with an increasing pleasure the interest that
your Majesty takes in architecture. The palace which you have built at Paris
near the Pont Neuf and the Louvre is, according to its disposition, excellent and
admirable to the extent that it pleases me beyond measure."
After Delorme considerable changes were made and successfully carried out
under the architects Ducerceau, Duperac, Levau and Dorbay.
A distinct feature of the work of Delorme was his use of the column ornamented
throughout its length, which, as he says in his written works, he first employed
in the "Palais de la Majesté de la Royne-Mere à Paris."

Of the ability of Delorme there is no diversity of opinion to-day, nor was there
in his time. Besides the Tuileries he has to his credit the Chateau d'Anet, the
Chateau de Saint Maur, that of Meudon—built for the Cardinal de Lorraine,—
and his important additions to the Chateau de la Muette and the Chateaux of
Saint Germain, Madrid and Fontainebleau.
As might be supposed Catherine de Médici professed a great admiration for
Delorme and recompensed his talents with a royal generosity, even nominating
him as Abbé of the Convent of Saint Eloi de Noyon, a fact which caused the
poet Ronsard to evolve a political satire: "La Truelle Crossée."
At the same time that she was building the Tuileries Catherine de Médici caused
additions to be made to the Louvre; at least she undertook the completion of the
unfinished portion, which had been left for other hands to do.
The first historic souvenir which stands out prominently with regard to the
Palais des Tuileries is the fête given four days before the fateful Saint
Bartholomew's night. It was the marriage fête of the gallant Henri de Béarn,
King of Navarre, and the wise and witty Marguerite de Valois.
Henri IV, coming to the throne a quarter of a century after the admirable first
year's work on the Tuileries had been completed, found that little had been done
towards making it a really habitable place. It had been hurriedly finished off to
the second story, and had served well enough for a temporary residence, or as
an overflow establishment where balls and fêtes might be given without
crowding, but to the ambitious Henri IV nothing would do but that the pavilions
should be bound together with a more imposing ligature, and that the Pavillon
de Flore should in turn be linked up with the Louvre by a gallery.
Under Louis XIII this latter really came to a conclusion according to the plans
of the architect Ducerceau, but the inspiration of making the Louvre and the
Tuileries one was due to Henri IV.
Under Louis XIV and Louis XV the palace in its still attenuated form was
scarcely more than a rambling lodging, utterly lacking any of the noble
apartments with which it was afterwards endowed. The court at this time
practically made Versailles its headquarters. Neither of the above-mentioned
monarchs made aught but cursory visits to the Tuileries and left its occupancy
to officers of the household and ministers of state.
It was in the reign of Louis XV that the Florentine artist, Servandoni, who was
at the same time an eminent architect, a remarkable painter and a maestro of a

musician, organized in the Palais des Tuileries the Theatre des Machines, the
first installed at Paris, and there came the Comédie Française, the Opera and the
Bouffes (the Comédie Italienne) and gave command performances before the
court.
When the French resolved that Louis XVI should live in Paris, the Palais des
Tuileries was actually offered him, but it was a rather shabby place of royal
residence so far as its interior appointments were concerned, though in all ways
appealing when viewed from without. Considerable repairs and embellishments
were made, but warring factions did much to make difficult any real artistic
progress.
With the advent of Louis XVI there came a contrast to gayety and freedom from
care in royal hearts and heads. On October 5 Louis XVI and the royal family
hid themselves behind barred doors, the convention taking up its sittings under
the same roof and forthwith passing an act which allowed the completion of the
palace according to the plans of Vignon at an expense of three hundred
thousand livres. An almost entire transformation took place, the money being
seemingly well spent, and the structure now first took its proper place among
the monumental art treasures of the capital.
A dramatic incident took place at the great gate of the Tuileries, which faced the
courtyard, when, on May 28, 1795, the populace surged in waves against its
sturdy barrier. The Deputy Féraud met them at the steps. "You may enter only
over my dead body," he said. No reply was made but to crack his skull, behead
the trunk and carry the head aloft on a pike to the very Tribune where Boissy
d'Anglas was presiding.
The Salle de Spectacle of the Tuileries was, even at this period, the largest
auditorium of its kind in Europe, having eight thousand stalls and boxes, which
gave a seating capacity of considerably more than that number of persons.
In 1793 this playhouse, of which the parquet occupied the ground floor of the
Pavillon de Marsan, underwent a strange metamorphosis when it became the
legislative hall for the National Convention. All the names and emblems
showing forth in its decorations and indicative of its ancient rule were changed
into Republican devices and symbols. The Pavillon de Marsan was called the
Pavillon de l'Egalité, the Pavillon du Centre became the Pavillon de l'Unité and
the Pavillon de Flore the Pavillon de la Liberté, where was lodged the
Committee of Public Safety.

The Hall of the Convention, according to reports of the time, was an appalling
mixture of grandeur and effeminacy with respect to its architectural lines.
Surrounding that portion where the legislators actually sat was the great
amphitheatre which for three years was occupied by a curious, vociferous
public, more demonstrative, even, than those that had attended the former
theatrical representations in the same apartment.
From the opening of the National Convention to the reaction of "Thermidor" it
is estimated that more than three million people assisted at what they rightly, or
wrongly, considered as a "spectacle" staged only for their amusement.
By the time Napoleon had come into power the Tuileries was hardly habitable,
and before taking up his residence he was obliged to make immediate and
extensive transformations.
On February 19, 1800, Napoleon, still First Consul, left the Palais de
Luxembourg and took up his residence in the Tuileries, the Third Consul,
Lebrun, being lodged in the Pavillon de Flore, in the "Petite Appartement,"
which Marie Antoinette had fitted up for her temporary accommodation when in
town. Lebrun, however, gave up his lodging to the Pope when the Pontiff came
to Paris at Napoleon's orders. Consul Cambacères, however, refused to shelter
himself beneath the roof of the Tuileries, and indicated a preference for the
magnificent Hotel d'Elbœuf, which was accommodatingly put at his disposition.

Salle des Marechaux, Tuileries
Napoleon entered the Tuileries in state, preceded and followed by an imposing
cortège. At the gate of the Carrousel the consuls alighted from their carriages,
and were received by the Consular Guard. On their arrival the consuls read the
following inscription posted at the entrance: "On August 10th monarchy in
France was forever abolished; it will never be restored." By the 20th of
February the inscription had disappeared. Besides, orders were given to cut
down the two liberty trees which had been planted in the courtyard. On August
10 a large quantity of cannon shot had been lodged in the façade of the
Tuileries, and around the shot were written these words: "Tenth of August." The
cannon balls disappeared, as well as the inscriptions, when the Arc de Triomphe
was erected on the Place du Carrousel.

This alteration gave great satisfaction. It was important for the tranquillity of
France that the new government should inherit rather the sword of Charlemagne
than the guillotine of Marat.
The imperial court soon displayed its splendour and magnificence in the Palais
des Tuileries, as a foregone conclusion anticipated.
In a gorgeous and imposing Salle du Trone one might have seen in the deep
casement of the central window, standing up, their hats off, the group of the
Corps Diplomatique, the members of which, loaded with decorations, ensigns,
and diamonds, trembled in the presence of the Little Corporal of other days; on
the other side, the host of the Princes of the Rhine Confederation—all the
personages that Germany, Russia, Poland, Italy, Denmark, Spain, all Europe, in
one word, England excepted, had sent to Paris.
It is needless to say that the wedding reception of Napoleon and Marie Louise at
the Tuileries was celebrated with unusual magnificence. Another event, on
account of its peculiar moment, strongly excited the enthusiasm of the French.
On March 20, 1811, at seven o'clock in the morning, the first salute of cannon
announced that the empress had given birth to a child, the future Aiglon, the
King of Rome.
After Napoleon's occupancy of the Tuileries it again served the monarch under
the Empire, the Restoration, under Louis Philippe and under the Second
Empire. The palace of unhappy memory saw successively the fall of Napoleon,
the entry of Louis XVIII, the file-by of the Allies, the flight of Louis XVIII, of
Charles X, Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.
Up to the time of the Second Empire the Tuileries preserved, more or less, its
original interior arrangement, and, to a great extent, the decorations with which
it had been embellished under Louis XIV, Louis XVI, and Napoleon I.
The Pavilion de Flore, at the juncture of the Tuileries and the Louvre of Henri
IV, was practically rebuilt during the Second Empire, but it followed closely the
contemporary designs of the adjoining building. Here are quartered executive
offices of the Préfecture de la Seine. That portion facing the Pont Royal
contains a series of fine sculptures by Carpeaux, the sole modern
embellishments of this nature to be seen in or on a Paris palace.
As the Commune mob was fleeing before the army of Versailles a conflagration
broke out in the Tuileries and soon the whole edifice was in flames. Within

what may have been the briefest interval on record for a conflagration of its size
the Tuileries was but a smoking pile of half-calcined stones.
The Tuileries had another brief day of glory when the Prince President, Louis
Napoleon, entered its gates, coming straight from his inauguration at Notre
Dame.
The cannon at the Hotel des Invalides blazed out a welcome and every patriot
Republican shouted: "Vive Napoleon!" They little knew, little cared perhaps,
that he would some day become the Second Emperor.
The throng poured forth from the cathedral after the Domine Salvum and the
benediction, the clergy leading the way, followed by the president and his
attendants. The orchestra played a lively march, and the great bell in the tower
boomed forth a glorious peal.

The president's carriage drew up before the gates of the Tuileries and he entered
the great apartment where a reception was given to various public and military
bodies. Between seven and eight thousand naval and military officers paid their
respects, and about half a battalion of the army saluted, among them two
Mamelukes. While this ceremony was going on, the Place du Carrousel was
occupied by several squadrons of cavalry and the inner courtyards were
practically infantry camps. The government was taking no chances at the
beginning of its career. The reception lasted until well on towards evening,
when a banquet of four hundred covers was laid and partaken of by the invited
guests.
The last days of the Tuileries may be said to have commenced with that eventful
September 3, 1870, at five o'clock in the afternoon, when the Empress Eugenie
received a telegraphic despatch from Napoleon III announcing his captivity and
the defeat of Sedan. It was the overthrow.
The evening and the night were calm; the masses, as yet, were unaware of the
fatal news the journals would publish on the morrow. The following day was
Sunday; the weather superb; the disaster was finally announced and the masses
thronged from all parts to the Place de la Concorde, where a squadron of
Cuirassiers barred the bridge leading to the Palais Bourbon where the deputies
were in session.

On the arrival of the news the empress had called in General Trochu, the
Military Governor of Paris, and asked him if he could guarantee order. He
replied in the affirmative. Some hours later a group of deputies came to the
empress and counselled her to sign, not an abdication, but a momentary
renunciation of her powers as regent. Eugenie refused point-blank.
The throng, passing by the left bank, had arrived at the Chamber of Deputies,
and the formal sitting became a revolutionary one. At three o'clock the imperial
dynasty was proclaimed as at an end, and a provisionary government installed.
Henri Rochefort, the present editor of the "Intransingeant," was delivered from
the prison of Sainte Pélagie and made a member of the government.
By this time the mob which had invaded the Place de la Concorde became
menacing. The cry, "Aux Tuileries," first launched by the street gamins, soon
became the slogan of the crowd. To say it was to do it; the great iron gates were
closed, but in default of a protecting force of arms it was an easy matter to scale
them.
Behind the curtained windows of the palace the empress witnessed the assault
and murmured to her ladies-in-waiting: "It is then finished." She turned towards
the Prince de Metternich and the Chevalier Nigra, and, in the voice of a
suppliant, demanded: "Que me consillez vous?"
"You must leave at once, Madame; in a moment the palace will be invaded."
The empress became resigned and accompanied by Madame Le Breton,
Metternich and Nigra started for the Pavilion de Flore, passing through the
Galerie de Musée and the Galerie d'Apollon, finally leaving by the gate of the
Louvre, which is opposite Saint Germain l'Auxerrois.
The empress was at last out of the palace, but not yet out of danger. A band of
manifestants, making for the Hotel de Ville and shouting; "Vive la Republique,"
recognized the empress, but she mounted an empty fiacre with Madame Le
Breton, and giving the driver the first address that entered her mind thus
escaped further indignities, and perhaps danger. Finally she found a refuge with
Doctor Evans, the American dentist living in the Avenue Malakoff, from whose
house she left for England on the following day.
This is the Frenchman's point of view of one of the picturesque incidents of
history. It disposes of the legend that the empress left the Tuileries in the
carriage of Doctor Evans, but this cannot be helped, with due regard for the
consensus of French opinion. Doctor Evans was a family friend, besides being

the dentist who cared for the imperial teeth, and it is not going beyond the truth
to state that the fortunate American acquired not a little of his vogue and wealth
by his association with Napoleon III and his family.
By this time the populace had invaded the palace and cursed with indignities
unmentionable the marble halls, and the furnishings in general, and pillaged
such portable property as pleased the individual fancies of the spoilsmen.
After the signing of the Peace Treaty by the Bordeaux Assembly, which now
represented the governmental head, and Thiers had become president, that
worthy would do away with the cannon of which the National Guard still held
possession in their garrison on the Butte of Montmartre. The orders which he
sent forth came to be the signal for another outbreak on the part of the populace.
On March 18 the Commune was proclaimed and Citoyen Dardelle, an old
African hunter, was appointed military governor of the Tuileries. Whatever this
individual's military qualifications may have been, he delivered himself to the
enjoyment of a high and dissolute life in his luxurious apartments in the palace;
a fact which was speedily made note of by the still restless populace.
The Citoyen Rousselle, a member of the Communal Government, had the idea
of organizing a series of popular concerts in the gardens of the Tuileries for the
profit of the wounded in the late friction.
Hung on the walls, at the entrance of each apartment was a placard which read:
"Fellow men, the gold with which these walls were built was earned by your
sweat." "To-day you are coming to your own." "Remain faithful to your trust
and see to it that the tyrants enter never more."
During one of these public concerts a poem of Hégésippe Moreau was read
which terminated as follows, and set the populace aflame.
* * * * * *
"Et moi j'applaudirai; ma jeuneusse engourdie
Se réchauffera a ce grand incendie."
He referred to the burning of the former abode of emperors and kings as a sort
of sacrifice to the common good. The public had held itself in hand very well up
to this moment, but applauded the verses vociferously. The last of the concerts
was held on May 21, the same day as the Army of Versailles entered Paris.
Night came, and with it the raging, red flames springing skywards from the roof
of the Tuileries.

In a few moments the flames had enveloped the entire building. All the forces
that it was possible to gather had been ordered upon the scene, but they were
unable to save the old palace, and by one o'clock in the morning it was but a
mass of smoking ruins. The Communards had done their work well. Before
leaving its precincts they had sprinkled coal oil over every square metre of
carpet, window-hangings and tapestries, and the slow-match was not long in
passing the fire to its inflammable timber. The library of the Louvre was
destroyed, but the museums, galleries and their famous collections fortunately
escaped.
For a dozen years the lamentable ruins of the old palace of the Tuileries reared
their singed walls, a witness and a reproach to the tempestuosity of a people.
Finally, in 1882, Monsieur Achille Picard undertook their removal for thirty-
three thousand francs, and within a year not a vestige, not an unturned stone
remained in its original place as a witness to this chapter of Paris history.
Two porticos of the Pavillon de l'Horloge, originally forming a part of the
Tuileries, have been re-erected on the terrace of the Orangerie, facing the Place
de la Concorde.
There remain but two survivors of the late imperial sway in France, the Empress
Eugenie who lives in England, and Emile Olivier, "l'homme au cœur lèger,"
who lives at Saint Tropez in the Midi.
A Paris journalist a year or more ago, while sitting among a little coterie of
literary and artistic folk at Lavenue's famous terrace-café, recounted the
following incident clothed in most discreet language, and since it bears upon the
Tuileries and its last occupants it is repeated here.
"Last night beneath the glamour of a September moon I saw a black shadow
silently creep out from beneath the gloom of the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli
just below the Hotel Continental. It crossed the pavement and passed within the
railings of the gardens opposite, one of the gates to which, by chance or
prearranged design, was still open. It moved slowly here and there upon the
gravelled walks and seated itself upon a solitary bench as if it were meditating
upon the splendid though sad hours that had passed. Was it a wraith; was it
Eugenie, late empress of the French?"
To have remembered such a dream of fancy for forty long years one must have
been endowed with superhuman courage, or an inexplicable conscience.

The Rue des Pyramides, which has been prolonged to the banks of the Seine,
will give those of the present generation who have never seen the Tuileries an
exact idea of its location. If it still existed the façade of the palace would front
upon this street.
The most moving history of the detailed horrors of the Commune, particularly
with reference to the part played by the Tuileries therein, is to be found in
Maxime Ducamp's "Les Derniers Convulsions de Paris."
One relic of the Tuileries left unharmed found a purchaser in a Roumanian
prince, at a public sale held as late as 1889. This was the ornately beautiful iron
gate which separated the Cour du Carrousel from the Cour des Tuileries.
Roumanian by birth, French at heart and Parisian by adoption, this wealthy
amateur, for a trifle over eight thousand francs, became the owner of a royal
souvenir which must have cost five hundred times that sum.
The eastern front of the Tuileries opened into a courtyard formed under the
direction of the first Napoleon. It was separated from the Place du Carrousel by
a handsome iron railing with gilt spear-heads extending the whole range of the
palace. From this court there were three entrances into the Place du Carrousel,
the central gate corresponding with the central pavilion of the palace, the other
two having their piers surmounted by colossal figures of victory, peace, history
and France. A gateway under each of the lateral galleries also communicated on
the north with the Rue de Rivoli, and on the south with the Quai du Louvre. The
Place du Carrousel was named in honour of a tournament held upon the spot by
Louis XIV in 1662. It communicated on the north with the Rue Richelieu and
the Rue de l'Echelle, and on the south with the Pont Royal and the Pont du
Carrousel. To-day in the square stands the triumphal arch erected by Napoleon
in 1806, after the designs of Percier and Fontaine.
The newly laid-out and furbished-up gardens make the Place du Carrousel even
more attractive than it was when set about with flagged areas, gravelled walks
and paved road ways, and, while the monumental and architectural accessories
excel the horticultural embellishments in quantity, the general effect is
incomparably finer at present than anything known before.
Plans for rebuilding the Place du Carrousel provide for a division into three
distinct parts, three grand pelouses, à boulingrins à la Français, or lawns of a
circumscribed area, according to the best traditions of Le Notre, a border of
flowers and a few decoratively disposed clumps of flowering shrubs, the whole
combined in such a way that the perspective and vista down the Champs

Elysées will in no manner suffer. The architect-landscapist, M. Redon, who has
been charged with the work, has drawn his inspiration from a series of
unexecuted designs of Le Notre which have recently been brought to light from
the innermost depths of the national archives. It was a safe way of avoiding an
anachronism, and this time a government architect has chosen well his plan of
execution.
In later years the question of the reëmbellishment of the Garden of the Tuileries
has ever been before the public, but little has actually been changed save the
remaking of certain garden plots, the planting of a few shrubs or the placing of a
few statues.
The Garden of the Tuileries has a superficial area of 232,632 square metres. It is
the most popular of all open spaces in the capital to the Parisian who would take
his walks abroad not too far from the centre of things. The chief curiosity of the
garden is the celebrated chestnut tree which burst into flower on the day of
Napoleon's arrival from Elba—March 20. The precocious tree has ever been
revered by the Bonapartists since, though the tree has never performed the trick
the second time.
Statues innumerable are scattered here and there through the garden and give a
certain sense of liveliness to the area. Some are by famous names, others by
those less renowned, but as a whole they make little impression on one, chiefly,
perhaps, because one does not come to the Garden of the Tuileries to see
statues.
To the left and right are the terraces, first laid out by the celebrated Le Notre.
Like the hanging gardens of Babylon, they overlook a lower level of parterres,
gravelled walks and ornamental waters. Along the Rue de Rivoli is the Terrasse
de l'Orangerie, and on the side of the river is the Terrasse de la Marine.
According to the original plans of Le Notre the garden was set down as five
hundred toises in length, and one hundred and sixty-eight toises in width, the
latter dimension corresponding to that of the façade of the palace.
Along the shady avenues of this admirable city garden of to-day an enterprising
concessionaire has won a fortune by renting out rush-bottomed chairs to
nursemaids, retired old gentlemen with red ribbons in their buttonholes, and
trippers from across the channel. It is a perfectly legitimate enterprise and a
profitable one it would seem, and has been in operation considerably more than
half a century.

It was from the Gardens of the Tuileries in 1784 that took place Blanchard's
celebrated ascension in Montgolfier's balloon and brought forth the encomium
from the British Royal Society that the body was not in the least surprised that a
Frenchman should have solved the problem of "volatability." The French
monarch, more practical, was so mightily pleased with the success of the
experiment that he bestowed upon the author the sum of four hundred thousand
francs from his treasury to be used for the perfection of the art.

CHAPTER VIII
THE PALAIS CARDINAL AND THE PALAIS ROYAL

With the Louvre and the Tuileries the Palais Royal shares the popular interest of
the traveller among all the monuments of Paris. No other edifice evokes more
vivid souvenirs of its historic past than this hybrid palace of Richelieu. One
dreams even to-day, of its sumptuousness, its legends, its amusing and
extravagant incidents which cast a halo of romantic interest over so many
illustrious personages. So thoroughly Parisian is the Palais Royal in all things
that it has been called "the Capital of Paris."
Not far from the walled and turreted stronghold of the old Louvre rose the
private palaces, only a little less royal, of the Rambouillets, the Mercœurs and
other nobles of the courtly train. They lived, too, in almost regal state until
Armand du Plessis de Richelieu came to humble their pride, by fair means or
foul, by buying up or destroying their sumptuous dwellings, levelling off a vast
area of land, and, in 1629, commencing work on that imposing pile which was
first known as the Palais Cardinal, later the Palais d'Orleans, then as the Palais
de la Revolution and finally as the Palais Royal.
It was near, yet far enough away from the royal residence of the Louvre not to
be overshadowed by it. The edifice enclosed a great square of ground laid out
with symmetrically planted trees and adorned with fountains and statues.
From the great central square four smaller courts opened out to each of the
principal points of the compass; there were also, besides the living rooms, a
chapel, two theatres, ballrooms, boudoirs and picture galleries, all of a luxury
never before dreamed of but by kings.
The main entrance was in the Rue Saint Honoré, and over its portal were the
graven arms of Richelieu, surmounted by the cardinal's hat and the inscription:
"Palais Cardinal." Like his English compeer, Wolsey, Richelieu's ardour for
building knew no restraint. He added block upon block of buildings and yard
upon yard to garden walls until all was a veritable labyrinth. Finally the usually
subservient Louis saw the condition of things; he liked it not that his minister
should dwell in marble halls more gorgeous than his own. As a matter of policy

the Cardinal ceased to build more and at his death, as if to atone, willed the
entire property to his king.
As the Palais Cardinal, the edifice was subjected to many impertinent railleries
from the public which, as a whole, was ever antagonistic to the "Homme
Rouge." They did not admit the right of an apostolic prelate of the church to
lodge himself so luxuriously when the very precepts of his religion
recommended modesty and humility. Richelieu's contemporaries did not
hesitate to admire wonderingly all this luxury of life and its accessories, and
Corneille, in the "Menteur" (1642), makes one of the principal characters say:
"Non, l'univers ne peut rien voir d'égal
Aux superbes dehors du Palais Cardinal;
Toute une ville entière avec pompe bâtie,
Semble d'un vieux fossé par miracle sortie,
Et nous fais présumer à ses superbes toits
Que tous ses habitants sont des dieux ou des rois."
The ground plan of the Palais Cardinal was something unique among city
palaces. In the beginning ground values were not what they are to-day in Paris.
There were acres upon acres of greensward set about and cut up with gravelled
walks, great alleyed rows of trees, groves without number and galleries and
colonnades innumerable. Without roared the traffic of a great city, a less noisy
traffic than that of to-day, perhaps, but still a contrasting maelstrom of bustle
and furor as compared with the tranquillity within.
After the edifice was finished it actually fell into disuse, except for the
periodical intervals when the Cardinal visited the capital. At other times it was
as quiet as a cemetery. Moss grew on the flags, grass on the gravelled walks and
tangled shrubbery killed off the budding flowers of the gardens.
Richelieu's last home-coming, after the execution of Cinq-Mars at Lyons, was a
tragic one. The despot of France, once again under his own rooftree, threw
himself upon his bed surrounded by his choicest pictures and tapestries, and
paid the price of his merciless arrogance towards all men—and women—by
folding his wan hands upon his breast and exclaiming, somewhat
unconvincingly: "Thus do I give myself to God." As if recalling himself to the
stern reality of things he added: "I have no enemies but those of State."
In a robe of purple silk, supported by pillows of the finest down and covered
with the rarest of laces, he rigidly straightened himself out and expired without

a shudder, with the feeling that he was well beyond the reach of invisible foes.
But before he died Richelieu received a visit from his king in person. This was
another token of his invincible power.
Thus the Palais Royal was evolved from the Palais Cardinal of Richelieu.
Richelieu gave the orders for its construction to Jacques Lemercier immediately
after he had dispossessed the Rambouillets and the Mercœurs, intending at first
to erect only a comparatively modest town dwelling with an ample garden.
Vanity, or some other passion, finally caused to grow up the magnificently
proportioned edifice which was called the Palais Cardinal instead of that which
was to be known more modestly as the Hotel de Richelieu.
Vast and imposing, but not without a certain graceful symmetry, the Palais
Royal of to-day is a composition of many separate edifices divided by a series
of courts and gardens and connected by arcaded galleries. The right wing
enclosed an elaborate Salle de Spectacle while that to the left enclosed an
equally imposing chamber with a ceiling by Philippe de Champaigne, known as
the Galerie des Hommes Illustrés, and further ornamented with portraits of most
of the court favourites of both sexes of the time. The architectural
ornamentation of this gallery was of the Doric order, most daringly interspersed
with moulded ships' prows, anchors, cables and what not of a marine
significance.
In 1636, divining the attitude of envy of many of the nobility who frequented
his palace, Richelieu—great man of politics that he was—made a present of the
entire lot of curios to Louis XIII, but undertaking to house them for him, which
he did until his death in 1642.
At the death of Louis XIII the Palais Cardinal, which had been left to him in its
entirety by the will of Richelieu, came to Anne d'Autriche, the regent, who, with
the infant Louis XIV and the royal family, installed herself therein, and from
now on (October 7, 1642), the edifice became known as the Palais Royal.
Now commenced the political rôle of this sumptuous palace which hitherto had
been but the Cardinal's caprice. Mazarin had succeeded Richelieu, and to escape
the anger of the Frondeurs, he, with the regent and the two princes, Louis XIV
and the Duc d'Anjou, fled to the refuge of Saint Germain-en-Laye.
In company with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who had been rudely
awakened from her slumbers in the Luxembourg, they took a coach in the dead

of night for Saint Germain. It was a long and weary ride; the Pavi du Roi was
then, as now, the most execrable suburban highroad in existence.
When calm was reëstablished Mazarin refused to allow the regent to take up her
residence again in the old abode of Richelieu and turned it over to Henriette de
France, the widow of Charles I, who had been banished from England by
Cromwell.
Thirty odd years later Louis XIV, when he was dreaming of his Versailles
project, made a gift of the property to his nephew, Philippe d'Orleans, Duc de
Chartres. Important reconstructions and rearrangements had been carried on
from time to time, but nothing so radical as to change the specious aspect of the
palace of the Cardinal's time, though it had been considerably enlarged by
extending it rearward and annexing the Hotel Danville in the present Rue
Richelieu. Mansart on one occasion was called in and built a new gallery that
Coypel decorated with fourteen compositions after the Ænid of Virgil.
Under the regency the Salon d'Entrée was redecorated by Oppenard, and a
series of magnificent fêtes was organized by the pleasure-loving queen from the
Austrian court. Richelieu's theatre was made into an opera-house, and masked
balls of an unparalleled magnificence were frequently given, not forgetting to
mention—without emphasis however—suppers of a Pantagruelian opulence and
lavish orgies at which the chronicles only hint.
In 1661, Monsieur, brother of the king, took up his official residence in the
palace, enlarged it in various directions and in many ways transformed and
improved it. Having become the sole proprietor of the edifice and its gardens,
by Letters Patent of February, 1692, the Duc d'Orleans left this superb property,
in 1701, to his son the too famous regent, Philippe d'Orleans, whose orgies and
extravagances rendered the Palais Royal notorious to the utmost corners of
Europe.
The first years of the eighteenth century were indeed notorious. It was then that
Palais Royal became the head-centre for debauch and abandon. It is from this
epoch, too, that date the actual structures which to-day form this vast square of
buildings, at all events their general outline is little changed to-day from what it
was at that time.
If the regent's policy was to carry the freedom and luxury of Richelieu's time to
excess, replacing even the edifices of the Cardinal with more elaborate

structures, his son Louis (1723-1752) sought in his turn to surround them with
an atmosphere more austere.
A disastrous fire in 1763 caused the Palais Royal to be rebuilt by order of Louis
Philippe d'Orleans, the future Philippe-Egalité, by the architect Moreau, who
carried out the old traditions as to form and outline, and considerably increased
the extent and number of the arcades from one hundred and eighty to two
hundred and seven. These the astute duke immediately rented out to
shopkeepers at an annual rental of more than ten millions. This section was
known characteristically enough as the Palais Marchand, and thus the garden
came to be surrounded by a monumental and classic arcade of shops which has
ever remained a distinct feature of the palace.
A second fire burned out the National Opera, which now sought shelter in the
Palais Royal, and in 1781 the Theatre des Varietés Amusantes was constructed,
and which has since been made over into the home of the Comédie Française.
The transformations imposed by Philippe-Egalité were considerable, and the
famous chestnut trees, which had been planted within the courtyard in the
seventeenth century by Richelieu, were cut down. He built also the three
transverse galleries which have cut the gardens of to-day into much smaller
plots than they were in Richelieu's time. In spite of this there is still that
pleasurable tranquillity to be had therein to-day, scarcely a stone's throw from
the rush and turmoil of the whirlpool of wheeled traffic which centres around
the junction of the Rue Richelieu with the Avenue de l'Opera. It is as an oasis in
a turbulent sandstorm, a beneficent shelf of rock in a whirlpool of rapids. The
only thing to be feared therein is that a toy aeroplane of some child will put an
eye out, or that the more devilish diabolo will crack one's skull.
Under the regency of the Duc Philippe d'Orleans the various apartments of the
palace were the scenes of scandalous goings-on, which were related at great
length in the chronicles of the time. It was a very mixed world which now
frequented the purlieus of the Palais Royal. Men and women about town jostled
with men of affairs, financiers, speculators and agitators of all ranks and of
questionable respectability. Milords, as strangers from across the Manche came
first to be known here, delivered themselves to questionable society and still
more questionable pleasures. It was at a little later period that the Duc de
Chartres authorized the establishment of the cafés and restaurants which for a
couple of generations became the most celebrated rendezvous in Paris—the
Café de Foy, the Café de la Paix, the Café Carrazzo and various other places of

reunion whose very names, to say nothing of the incidents connected therewith,
have come down to history.
It was the establishment of these public rendezvous which contributed so
largely to the events which unrolled themselves in the Palais Royal in 1789.
This "Eden de l'Enfer," as it was known, has in late years been entirely
reconstructed; the old haunts of the Empire have gone and nothing has come to
take their place.
Then came another class of establishments which burned brilliantly in the
second rank and were, in a way, political rendezvous also—the Café de Chartres
and the Café de Valois. Of all these Palais Royal cafés of the early nineteenth
century the most gorgeous and brilliant was the Café des Mille Colonnes,
though its popularity was seemingly due to the charms of the maitresse de la
maison, a Madame Romain, whose husband was a dried-up, dwarfed little man
of no account whatever. Madame Romain, however, lived well up to her
reputation as being "incontestablement la plus jolie femme de Paris." By 1824
the fame of the establishment had begun to wane and in 1826 it expired, though
the "Almanach des Gourmands" of the latter year said that the proprietor was
the Véry of limonadiers, that his ices were superb, his salons magnificent—and
his prices exorbitant. Perhaps it was the latter that did it!
Another establishment, founded in 1817, was domiciled here, the clients being
served by "odalisques en costume oriental, très seduisantes." This is quoted
from the advertisements of the day. The café was called the Café des
Circassiennes, and there was a sultane, who was the presiding genius of the
place. It met with but an indifferent success and soon closed its doors despite its
supposedly all-compelling attractions.
In the mid-nineteenth century a revolution came over the cafés of Paris.
Tobacco had invaded their precincts; previously one smoked only in the
estaminets. Three cafés of the Palais Royal resisted the innovation, the Café de
la Galerie d'Orleans, the Café de Foy and the Café de la Rotonde. To-day, well,
to-day things are different.
The Theatre du Palais Royal of to-day was the Theatre des Marionettes of the
Comte de Beaujolais, which had for contemporaries the Fantoches Italiens, the
Ombres Chinoises and the Musée Curtius, perhaps the first of the wax-works
shows that in later generations became so popular. The Palais Royal had now
become a vast amusement enterprise, with side-shows of all sorts, theatres,

concerts, cafés, restaurants, clubs, gambling-houses and what not—all paying
rents, and high ones, to the proprietor.
In the centre of the garden, where is now the fountain and its basin, was a
circus, half underground and half above, and there were innumerable booths and
kiosks for the sale of foolish trifles, all paying tribute to the ground landlord.
Gaming at the Palais Royal was not wholly confined to the public gambling
houses. During the carnival season of 1777 the gambling which went on in the
royal apartments became notorious for even that profligate time: in one night
the Duc de Chartres lost eight thousand livres. Louis XVI, honest man, took all
due precautions to reduce this extravagance, but was impotent.
Between the courtyard fountain and the northern arcade of the inner palace was
placed the famous Cannon du Palais Royal, which, by an ingenious disposition,
was fired each day at midday by the action of the sun's rays. All the world stood
around awaiting the moment when watches might be regulated for another
twenty-four hours.
The celebrated Abbé Delille, to whom the beauties of the gardens were being
shown, deplored the lack of good manners on the part of the habitués and
delivered himself of the following appropriate quatrain:
"Dans ce jardin tout se rencontrée
Exceptê l'ombrage et les fleurs;
Si l'on y dêregle ses mœurs
Du moins on y règle sa montre."
The Galerie de Bois was perhaps the most disreputable of all the palace
confines. It was a long, double row of booths which only disappeared when
Louis-Philippe built the glass-covered Galerie d'Orleans.
Up to the eve of the Revolution the Palais Royal enjoyed the same privileges as
the Temple and the Luxembourg, and became a sort of refuge whereby those
who sought to escape from the police might lose themselves in the throng. The
monarch himself was obliged to ask permission of the Duc d'Orleans that his
officials might pursue their police methods within the outer walls.
It was July 12, 1789. The evening before, Louis XVI had dismissed his
minister, Neckar, but only on Sunday, the 12th, did the news get abroad. At the
same time it was learned that the regiment known as the Royal Allemand, under
the orders of the Prince de Lambesc, had charged the multitude gathered before

the gates of the Tuileries. Cries of "A Mort!" "Aux Armes!" "Vengeance!" were
hurled in air from all sides.
At high noon in the gardens of the Palais Royal, on the 13th, as the midday sun
was scorching the flagstones to a grilling temperature, the sound of a tiny
cannon shot smote the still summer air with an echo which did not cease
reverberating for months. The careless, unthinking promenaders suddenly grew
grave, then violently agitated and finally raving, heedlessly mad. A young
unknown limb of the law, Camille Desmoulins, rushed bareheaded and
shrieking out of the Café de Foy, parted the crowd as a ship parts the waves,
sprang upon a chair and harangued the multitude with such a vehemence and
conviction that they were with him as one man.
"Citizens," he said, "I come from Versailles * * * It only remains for us to
choose our colours. Quelle couleur voulez vous? Green, the colour of hope; or
the blue of Cincinnati, the colour of American liberty and democracy."
"Nous avons assez déliberé! Deliberate further with our hands not our hearts!
We are the party the most numerous: To arms!"
On the morrow, the now famous 14th of July, the Frenchman's "glorious
fourteenth," the people rose and the Bastille fell.
Revolutionary decree, in 1793, converted the palace and its garden into the
Palais et Jardin de la Révolution, and appropriated them as national property.
Napoleon granted the palace to the Tribunal for its seat, and during the Hundred
Days Lucien Bonaparte took up his residence there. In 1830 Louis Philippe
d'Orleans gave a great fête here in honour of the King of Naples who had come
to the capital to pay his respects to the French king. Charles X, assisting at the
ceremony as an invited guest, was also present and a month later came again to
actually inhabit the palace and make it royal once more.

The table herewith showing the ramifications of the Bourbon Orleans family in
modern times is interesting—all collateral branches of the genealogical tree
sprouting from that of Louis Philippe. The heraldic embellishments of this
family tree offer a particular interest in that the armorial blazonings are in
accord with a decree of the French Tribunal, handed down a few years since,
which establishes the right to the head of the house to bear the écu plein de
France—d'azur a trois fleurs de lys d'or, thus establishing the Orleans
legitimacy.

View larger image
The Republic of 1848 made the palace the headquarters of the Cour des
Comptes and of the État Major of the National Guard. Under Napoleon III the
Palais Royal became the dwelling of Prince Jerome, the uncle of the emperor.
Later it served the same purpose for the son of Prince Napoleon. It was at this
epoch that the desecration of scraping out the blazoned lys and the chipping off
the graven Bourbon armoiries took place. Whenever one or the other hated
Bourbon symbol was found, eagles, phœnix-like, sprang up in their place, only
in their turn to disappear when the Republican device of '48 (now brought to
light again), Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—replaced them.
During the Commune of 1870 a part of the left wing and the central pavilion
suffered by fire, but restorations under the architect, Chabrol, brought them
back again to much their original outlines. Through all its changes of tenure and
political vicissitudes little transformation took place as to the ground plan, or
sky-line silhouette, of the chameleon palace of cardinal, king and emperor, and
while in no sense is it architecturally imposing or luxurious, it is now, as ever in
the past, one of the most distinctive of Paris's public monuments.

To-day the Palais Royal proper may be said to face on Place du Palais Royal,
with its principal entrance at the end of a shallow courtyard separated from the
street by an iron grille and flanked by two unimposing pavilions. The principal
façade hides the lodging of the Conseil d'État and is composed of but the
ground floor, a story above and an attic.
The Aile Montpensier, which follows on from the edifice which houses the
Comédie Française, was, until recently, occupied by the Cour des Comptes. The
Aile de Valois fronts the street of that name, and here the Princes d'Orleans and
King Jerome made their residence. To-day the same wing is devoted to the uses
of the Under Secretary for the Beaux Arts.
It is not necessary to insist on, nor reiterate, the decadence of the Palais Royal.
It is no longer the "capitol of Paris," and whatever its charms may be they are
mostly equivocal. It is more a desert than an oasis or a temple de la volupté, and
it was each of these things in other days. Its priestesses and its gambling houses
are gone, and who shall say this of itself is not a good thing in spite of the
admitted void.
The mediocrity of the Palais Royal is apparent to all who have the slightest
acquaintance with the architectural orders, but for all that its transition from the
Palais du Cardinal, Palais Egalité, Palais de la Revolution and Palais du
Tribunat to the Palais Royal lends to it an interest that many more gloriously
artistic Paris edifices quite lack.
There is a movement on foot to-day to resurrect the Palais Royal to some
approach to its former distinction, which is decidedly what it has not been for
the past quarter of a century. Satirical persons have demanded as to what should
be made of it, a vélodrome or a skating-rink, but this is apart from a real
consideration of the question for certain it is that much of its former charm can
be restored to it without turning it into a Luna Park. It is one of the too few
Paris breathing-spots, and as such should be made more attractive than it is at
the present time.
It was sixty years ago, when Louis Philippe was the legitimate owner of the
Palais Royal, its galleries, its shops, its theatre and its gardens, that it came to its
first debasement. "One went there on tip-toe, and spoke in a whisper," said a
writer of the time, and one does not need to be particularly astute to see the
significance of the remark.

It was Alphonse Karr, the écrivain-jardinier, who set the new vogue for the
Palais Royal, but his interest and enthusiasm was not enough to resurrect it, and
so in later years it has sunk lower and lower. The solitude of the Palais Royal
has become a mockery and a solecism. It is virtually a campo santo, or could
readily be made one, and this in spite of the fact that it occupies one of the
busiest and noisiest quarters of the capital, a quadrangle bounded by the Rues
Valois, Beaujolais, Montpensier and the Place du Palais Royal.
The moment one enters its portal the simile accentuates and the hybrid shops
which sell such equivocal bric-a-brac to clients of no taste and worse
affectations carry out the idea of a cloister still further, for actually the clients
are few, and those mostly strangers. One holds his breath and ambles through
the corridors glad enough to escape the bustle of the narrow streets which
surround it, but, on the other hand, glad enough to get out into the open again.

CHAPTER IX
THE LUXEMBOURG, THE ELYSÉE AND THE PALAIS
BOURBON

The kings and queens of France were not only rulers of the nation, but they
dominated the life of the capital as well. Upon their crowning or entry into Paris
it was the custom to command a gift by right from the inhabitants. In 1389
Isabeau de Bavière, of dire memory, got sixty thousand couronnes d'or, and in
1501, and again in 1504, was presented with six thousand and ten thousand
livres parisis respectively.
The king levied personal taxes on the inhabitants, who were thus forced to pay
for the privilege of having him live among them, those of the professions and
craftsmen, who might from time to time serve the royal household, paying the
highest fees.
It was during the period of Richelieu's ministry that Paris flowered the most
profusely. The constructions of this epoch were so numerous and imposing that
Corneille in his comedy "Le Menteur," first produced in 1642, made his
characters speak thus:
Dorante: Paris semble à mes yeux un pays de roman
* * * * *
En superbes palais a changé ses buissons
* * * * *
Aux superbes dehors du palais Cardinal
Tout la ville entière, avec pomp bâtie
* * * * *
In 1701, Louis XIV divided the capital into twenty quartiers, or wards, and in
1726-1728 Louis XV built a new city wall; but it was only with Louis XVI that
the faubourgs were at last brought within the city limits. Under the Empire and
the Restoration but few changes were made, and with the piercing of the new
boulevards under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann the city came to be of
much the same general plan that it is to-day.

In the olden time, between the Palais de la Cité and the Louvre and the Palais
des Tournelles, extending even to the walls of Charenton, was a gigantic garden,
a carpet embroidered with as varied a colouring as the tapis d'orient of the
poets, and cut here and there by alleys which separated it into little checker-
board squares.
Within this maze was the celebrated Jardin Dedalus that Louis XI gave to
Coictier, and above it rose the observatory of the savant like a signal tower of
the Romans. This centered upon what is now the Place des Vosges, formerly the
Place Royale.
To-day, how changed is all this "intermediate, indeterminate" region! How
changed, indeed! There is nothing vague and indeterminate about it to-day.
The earliest of the little known Paris palaces was the Palais des Thermes. It may
be dismissed almost in a word from any consideration of the royal dwellings of
Paris, though it was the residence of several Roman emperors and two queens
of France. A single apartment of the old palace of the Romans exists to-day—
the old Roman Baths—but nothing of the days of the Emperor Constantius
Chlorus, who founded the palace in honour of Julian who was proclaimed
Emperor by his soldiers in 360 A.D. The Frankish monarchs, if they ever
resided here at all, soon transferred their headquarters to the Palais de la Cité,
the ruins falling into the possession of the monks of Cluny, who built the
present Hotel de Cluny on the site.
Of all the minor French palaces the Luxembourg and the Elysée are the most
often heard of in connection with the life of modern times. The first is
something a good deal more than an art museum, and the latter more than the
residence for the Republican president, though the guide-book makers hardly
think it worth while to write down the facts.

Palais du Luxembourg
The Palais du Luxembourg has been called an imitation of the Pitti Palace at
Florence, but, beyond the fact that it was an Italian conception of Marie de
Médici's, it is difficult to follow the suggestion, as the architect, Jacques
Debrosse, one of the ablest of Frenchmen in his line, simply carried out the
work on the general plan of the time of its building, the early seventeenth
century.
Its three not very extensive pavilions are joined together by a colonnade which
encloses a rather foreboding flagged courtyard, a conception, or elaboration, of
the original edifice by Chalgrin, in 1804, under the orders of Napoleon. The
garden front, though a restoration of Louis Philippe, is more in keeping with the
original Médici plan; that, at any rate, is to its credit.
To-day the Luxembourg, the Republican Palais du Sénat, is but an echo of the
four centuries of aristocratic existence which upheld the name and fame of its
first proprietor, the Duc de Piney-Luxembourg, Prince de Tigry, who built it in
the sixteenth century. From 1733 to 1736 the palace underwent important
restorations and the last persons to inhabit it before the Revolution were the
Duchesse de Brunswick, the Queen Dowager of Spain and the Comte de

Provence, brother of Louis XVI, to whom it had been given by Letters Patent in
1779.
In 1791 the Convention thought so little of it that they made it a prison, and a
few years later it was called again the Palais du Directoire, and, before the end
of the century, the Palais du Consulat. This was but a brief glory, as Napoleon
transferred his residence in accordance with his augmenting ambitions, to the
Tuileries in the following year.

By 1870 the edifice had become known as the Palais du Sénat, then as the
headquarters of the Préfecture of the Seine, and finally, as to-day, the Palais du

Luxembourg, the seat of the French Senate and the residence of the president of
that body.
The principal public apartments are the Library, the "Salle des Séances," the
"Buvette"—formerly Napoleon's "Cabinet de Travail," the "Salle des Pas
Perdus"—formerly the "Salle du Trone," the Grand Gallery and the apartments
of Marie de Médici. The chapel is modern and dates only from 1844.
The Palais du Petit Luxembourg is the official residence of the president of the
Senate and dates also from the time of Marie de Médici. The picture gallery is
housed in a modern structure to the west of the Petit Luxembourg.
The façade of the Palais du Sénat is not altogether lovely and has little
suggestion of the daintiness of the Petit Luxembourg, but, for all that, it presents
a certain dignified pose and the edifice serves its purpose well as the legislative
hall of the upper house.

The Petit Luxembourg
The gardens of the Luxembourg form another of those favourite Paris
playgrounds for nursemaids and their charges. It is claimed that the children are
all little Legitimists in the Luxembourg gardens, whereas they are all Red
Republicans at the Tuileries. One has no means of knowing this with certainty,
but it is assumed; at any rate the Legitimists are a very numerous class in the
neighbourhood. Another class of childhood to be seen here is that composed of

the offsprings of artists and professors of the Latin quarter, and of the active
tradesmen of the neighbourhood. They come here, like the others, for the fresh
air, to see a bit of greenery, to hear the band play, to sail their boats in the basins
of the great fountain and enjoy themselves generally.
One notes a distinct difference in the dress and manners of the children of the
gardens of the Luxembourg from those of the Tuileries and wonders if the
breach will be widened further as they grow up.
The Jardin du Luxembourg is all that a great city garden should be, ample,
commodious, decorative and as thoroughly typical of Paris as the Pont Neuf.
Innumerable, but rather mediocre, statues are posed here and there between the
palace and the observatory at the end of the long, tree-lined avenue which
stretches off to the south, the only really historical monument of this nature
being the celebrated Fontaine de Médicis by Debrosse, the architect of the
palace. It was a memorial to Marie de Médici.

The Luxembourg Gardens
While one is in this quarter of Paris he has an opportunity to recall a royal
memory now somewhat dimmed by time, but still in evidence if one would
delve deep.
As a matter of fact, royalty never had much to do with this hybrid quarter of
Paris, though, indeed, its past was romantic enough, bordering as it does upon
the real Latin Quarter of the students. Bounded on one side by the immense
domain of the Luxembourg, it stretched away indefinitely beyond Vaugiraud,
almost to Clamart and Sceaux.
At No. 27 Boulevard Montparnasse is an elaborate seventeenth house-front half
hidden by the "modern style" flats of twentieth century Paris. This relic of the
grand siècle, with its profusion of sculptured details, was the house bought by
Louis XIV about 1672 and given to the "widow Scarron," the "young and
beautiful widow of the court," as a recompense for the devotion with which she
had educated the three children of the Marquise de Montespan, who, in 1673,

were legitimatized as princes of the royal house—the Duc de Maine, the Comte
de Vexin and Mademoiselle de Mantes.
Madame Scarron, who became in time Madame de Maintenon, the "vraie reine
du roi," died in 1719, and the house passed to La Tour d'Auvergne.
On this same side of the river are the Palais de l'Institut and the Palais Bourbon.
The Palais de l'Institut, or Palais Mazarin, is hardly to be considered one of the
domestic establishments, the dwellings of kings, with which contemporary Paris
was graced. It was but a creation of Mazarin, the minister, on the site of the
Hôtel de Nesle, and was first known as the Palais des Quatre Nations, where
were educated, at the expense of the Cardinal, sixty young men of various
nationalities.
The old chapel has since been transformed into the "Salle des Séances" of the
Institut de France, the Five French Academies. The black, gloomy façade of the
edifice, to-day, in spite of the cupola which gives a certain inspiring dignity, is
not lovely, and tradition and sentiment alone give it its present interest, though it
is undeniably picturesque.
An inscription used to be on the pedestal of one of the fountains opposite the
entrance which read:
"Superbe habitant du desert
En ce lieu, dis moi, que fais tu
—Tu le vois à mon habit vert
Je suis membre de l'institut."
If the inscription were still there it would save the asking of a lot of silly
questions by strangers who pass this way for the first time. The Palais de
l'Institut is one of the sights of Paris, and its functions are notable, though
hardly belonging to the romantic school of past days, for at present poets often
make their entrée via Montmartre's "Chat Noir," or are elected simply because
some other candidate has been "blackbouled."
Still following along the left bank of the Seine one comes to the Palais
Bourbon, the Chambre des Deputés, as it is better known. This edifice, where
now sit the French deputies, was built by Girardini for the Dowager Duchesse
de Bourbon in 1722, and, though much changed during various successive eras,
is still a unique variety of architectural embellishment which is not uncouth, nor
yet wholly appealing. Napoleon remade the heavily imposing façade, so

familiar to all who cross the river by the Pont de la Concorde, but its grimness
is its charm rather than its grace.
The structure cost its first
proprietor twenty million
or more francs, and since
it has become national
property the outlay has
been constant.
Everything considered it
makes a poor showing;
but its pseudo-Greek
façade, were it removed,
would certainly be
missed in this section of
Paris.
The principal apartments
are the "Salle des Pas
Perdus," the "Salle des
Séances," and the "Salle
des Conferences"—
where, in 1830, the Duc
d'Orleans took the oath
as king of France.
A recent discovery has
been made in the lumber
room of this old Palais Bourbon, where deputies howl and shout and make laws
as noisily as in any other of the world's parliaments.
This particular "find" was the throne constructed in 1816 for Louis XVIII, with
its upholstering of velvet embroidered with the golden fleur-de-lis. The records
tell that this throne also served Louis Philippe under the Second Empire, and
also was used under the Monarchy of July. It was after the momentous "Quatre
Setembre" that it was finally relegated to the garret, but now, as a historical
souvenir of the first rank, it has been placed prominently where all who visit the
Palais Bourbon may see it.
The history of the Palais de l'Elysée has not been particularly vivid, though for
two centuries it has played a most important part in the life of the capital. In

later years it has served well enough the presidential dignity of the chief
magistrate of the French Republic and is thus classed as a national property.
Actually, since its construction, it has changed its name as often as it has
changed its occupants. Its first occupant was its builder, Louis d'Auvergne,
Comte d'Evreux, who built himself this great town house on a plot of land
which had been given him by Louis XV. Apparently the young man had no
means of his own for the construction of his luxurious city dwelling, for he
refilled his coffers by marriage with the rich daughter of the financier Crozat.
The new-made countess's mother-in-law apparently never had much respect for
her son's choice as she forever referred to her as "the little gold ingot."
"The ingot" served to construct the palace, however, though at the death of its
builder, soon after, it came into the proprietorship of La Pompadour, who spent
the sum of six hundred and fifty thousand livres in aggrandizing it. It became
her town house, whither she removed when she grew tired of Versailles or
Bagatelle.
History tells of an incident in connection with a fête given at the Palais de
l'Elysée by La Pompadour. It was at the epoch of the "bergeries à la Watteau."
The blond Pompadour had the idea of introducing into the salons a troop of
living, sad-eyed sheep, combed and curled like the poodles in the carriages of
the fashionables in the Bois to-day. The quadrupeds, greatly frightened by the
flood of light, fell into a panic, and the largest ram among them, seeing his
duplicate in a mirror, made for it in the traditional ram-like manner. He raged
for an hour or more from one apartment to another, followed by the whole
flock, which committed incalculable damage before it could be turned into the
gardens. Such was one of the costly caprices of La Pompadour. She had many.
La Pompadour's brother, the Marquis de Menars et de Marigny, continued the
work of embellishment of the property up to the day when Louis XV bought it
as a dwelling for the ambassadors to his court. Its somewhat restricted park,
ornamented with a grotto and a cascade, was at this time one of the curiosities
of the capital.
In 1773, the financier Beaujon bought the property from the king and added
considerably to it under the direction of the architect Boullée, who also re-
designed the gardens. Thanks to Beaujon, the wonderful Gobelins of to-day
were hung upon the walls, and many paintings by Rubens, Poissin, Van Loo,
Von Ostade, Murillo, Paul Potter and Joseph Vernet were added.

The death of the financier brought the property into the hands of the Duchesse
de Bourbon, the sister of Louis Philippe, and the mother of the Duc d' Enghien,
who died so tragically at Vincennes a short time after. The duchess renamed her
new possession Elysée-Bourbon and there led a very retired and sad life among
surroundings so splendid that they merited a more gay existence.
At the Revolution the palace became a national property, and, under the
Consulate, was the scene of many popular fêtes, it having been rented to a
concern which arranged balls and other entertainments for the pleasure of all
who could afford to pay. Its name was now the Hameau de Chantilly, and,
considering that the entrance tickets cost but fifteen sous—including a drink—it
must have proved a cheap, satisfying and splendid amusement for the people.
This state of affairs lasted until 1805, when Murat bought it and here held his
little court up to his departure for Naples, when, in gratefulness for past favours,
he gave it to Napoleon. The emperor greatly loved this new abode, which he
rechristened the Elysée-Napoleon.
After his defeat at Waterloo Napoleon, limping lamely Parisward, down through
the Forests of Compiègne and Villers-Cotterets, sought in the Elysée-Napoleon
the repose and rest which he so much needed, the throng meanwhile
promenading before the palace windows, shouting at the tops of their voices
"Vive l'Empereur!" though, as the world well knew, his power had waned
forever; the eagle's wings were broken. The throng still crowded the precincts of
the palace, but the emperor fled secretly by the garden gate.
On the return of the Duchesse de Bourbon from Spain the magnificent structure
became again the Elysée-Bourbon. The duchess ceded the palace to the Duc and
Duchesse de Berry but, at the duke's death, in 1820, his widow abandoned it.
Some time after it was occupied by the Duc de Bordeaux, and, in 1830, it
became one of the long list of establishments whose maintenance devolved
upon the Civil List, though it remained practically uninhabited all through the
reign of Louis Philippe.
In 1848, the National Assembly designated the palace as the official residence
for the presidents of the French Republic. Three years after, on the night of the
first of December, as the last preparations were being made by Louis Bonaparte
for the Coup d' État and the final strangling of the young republic, the residence
of the president was transferred to the Tuileries, and the palace of the Faubourg

Saint Honoré was again left without a tenant, and served only to give hospitality
from time to time to passing notables.
After the burning of the Tuileries, and the coming of the Third Republic, the
Elysée Palace again became the presidential residence, and so it remains to-day.
One of the most notable of modern events connected with the Elysée Palace was
the diner de ceremonie offered by the president of the Republic and Madame
Fallières to Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt in April, 1910. The dinner was served in the
"Grand Salle des Fêtes" and the music which accompanied the repast was
furnished by the band of the Garde Republicain, beginning with the national
anthem of America and finishing with that of France. Never had a private
citizen, a foreigner, been so received by the first magistrate of France. The toast
of President Fallières was as follows: "Before this repast terminates I wish to
profit by the occasion offered to drink the health of Monsieur Theodore
Roosevelt, an illustrious man, a great citizen and a good friend of France and
the cause of peace. I raise my glass to Madame Roosevelt who may be assured
of our respectful and sympathetic homage, and I am very glad to be able to say
to our guests that we count ourselves very fortunate in being allowed to meet
them in person and show them this mark of respect."

CHAPTER X
VINCENNES AND CONFLANS

Vincennes is to-day little more than a dull, dirty Paris suburb; if anything its
complexion is a deeper drab than that of Saint Denis, and to call the Bois de
Vincennes a park "somewhat resembling the Bois de Boulogne," as do the
guidebooks, is ridiculous.
In reality Vincennes is nothing at all except a memory. There is to-day little
suggestion of royal origin about the smug and murky surroundings of the
Chateau de Vincennes; but nevertheless, it once was a royal residence, and the
drama which unrolled itself within its walls was most vividly presented. A book
might be written upon it, with the following as the chapter headings: "The
Royal Residence," "The Minimes of the Bois de Vincennes," "Mazarin at
Vincennes," "The Prisoners of the Donjon," "The Fêtes of the Revolution," "The
Death of the Duc d'Enghien," "The Transformation of the Chateau and the
Bois."
Its plots are ready-made, but one has to take them on hearsay, for the old
chateau does not open its doors readily to the stranger for the reason that it to-
day ranks only as a military fortress, and an artillery camp is laid out in the
quadrangle, intended, if need be, to aid in the defence of Paris. This is one of

the things one hears about, but of which one may not have any personal
knowledge.
The first reference to the name of Vincennes is in a ninth century charter, where
it appears as Vilcenna. The foundation of the original chateau-fort on the present
site is attributed to Louis VII, who, in 1164, having alienated a part of the
neighbouring forest in favour of a body of monks, built himself a suburban rest-
house under shelter of the pious walls of their convent.
Philippe Auguste, too, has been credited with being the founder of Vincennes;
but, at all events, the chateau took on no royal importance until the reign of
Saint Louis, who acquired the habit of dispensing justice to all comers seated
beneath an oak in the near-by Forest of Joinville.
The erection of the later chateau was begun by Charles, Comte de Valois,
brother of Philippe-le-Bel; and it was completed by Philippe VI of Valois, and
his successor, Jean-le-Bon, between the years 1337 and 1370, when it became
an entirely new manner of edifice from what it had been before. It was in this
chateau that was born Charles V, to whom indeed it owes its completion in the
form best known.
To-day, the outlines of the mass of the Chateau de Vincennes are considerably
abbreviated from their former state. Originally it was quite regular in outline, its
walls forming a rectangle flanked by nine towers, the great donjon which one
sees to-day occupying the centre of one side. The chapel was begun in the reign
of François I and terminated in that of Henri II. Its coloured glass, painted by
Jean Cousin from the designs of Raphael, is notable.
The chapel at Vincennes, with the Saint Chapelle of the Palais de Justice at
Paris, ranks as one of the most exquisite examples extant of French Gothic
architecture. It was begun in 1379, but chiefly it is of the sixteenth century,
since it was only completed in 1552. This chapel of the sixteenth century, and
the two side wings flanking the tower of the reign of Louis XIV, make the
Chateau de Vincennes a most precious specimen of mediæval ecclesiastical and
military architecture. If Napoleon had not cut down the height of the
surrounding walls the comparison would be still more favourable. In the
reproduction of the miniature from the Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry
given herein one sees the perfect outlines of the fourteenth century edifice.
In later years, Louis XIII added considerably to the existing structure, but little
is now to be seen of that edifice save the great tower and the chapel.

Charles IX, whose royal edict brought forth the bloody night of Saint
Bartholomew in 1572, fell sick two years later in the Chateau de Vincennes.
Calling his surgeon, Ambroise Paré, to his side he exclaimed: "My body burns
with fever; I see the mangled Huguenots all about me; Holy Virgin, how they
mock me; I wish, Paré, I had spared them." And thus he died, abhorring the
mother who had counselled him to commit this horrible deed.
The donjon of Vincennes was carried to its comparatively great height that it
might serve as a tower of observation as well as a place of last retreat if in an
attack the outer walls of the fortress should give way. Here at Vincennes a
certain massiveness is noted in connection with the donjon, though the actual
ground area which it covers is not very great; it was not like many donjons of
the time, which were virtually smaller chateaux or fortresses enclosed within a
greater.

Chateau de Vincennes
Vincennes, in comparison with many other contemporary edifices, possessed a
certain regularity of outline which was made possible by its favourable
situation. When others were of fantastic form, they were usually so built
because of the configuration of the land, or the nature of the soil. But here the
land was flat, and, though the edifice and its dependencies covered no very
extended area, they followed rectangular lines with absolute precision.
As its walls were of a thickness of three metres, it was a work easy of
accomplishment for Louis XI to turn the chateau into a Prison of State, a use to
which the first chateau had actually been put by the shutting up in it of
Enguerrand de Marigny. Henri IV, in 1574, passed some solitary hours and days

within its walls, and Mirabeau did the same in 1777. The Duc d'Enghien, under
the First Empire, before his actual death by shooting, suffered sorely herein,
while resting under an unjust suspicion.
In 1814-1815 the chateau became a great arsenal and general storehouse for the
army. It was attacked by the Allies and besieged twice, but in vain. It was
defended against the armies of Blucher by the Baron Daumesnil. Summoned to
surrender his charge, "Jambe de Bois" (so called because he had lost a leg the
year before) replied: "I will surrender when you surrender to me my leg." A
statue to this brave warrior is within the chateau, and commemorates further the
fact that he capitulated only on terms laid down by himself out of his humane
regard for the lives of friends and foes.
The ministers of Charles X, in 1830, had cause to regret the strength of the
chateau walls; and Barbés, Blanqui and Raspail, in 1848, and various
Republicans, who had been seized as dangerous elements of society after the
Coup d'État of 1851, also here found an enforced hospitality. The Chateau de
Vincennes had become a second Bastille.
The incident of the arrest and death of the Duc d'Enghien is one of the most
dramatic in Napoleonic history. The scene was Vincennes. Louis Antoine Henri
de Bourbon, son of the Prince de Condé, born at Chantilly in 1772, became,
without just reason, suspected in connection with the Cadoudal-Pichegreu plot,
and was seized by a squadron of cavalry at the Schloss Ettenheim in the Duchy
of Baden and conducted to Vincennes. Here, after a summary judgment, he was
shot at night in the moat behind the guardhouse. The obscurity of the night was
so great that a lighted lantern was hung around the neck of the unfortunate man
that the soldiers might the better see the mark at which they were to shoot.

A Hunt under the Walls of Vincennes
From a Fourteenth Century Print
Napoleon confided to Josephine, who repeated the secret to Madame de
Remusat, that his political future demanded a coup d'État. On the morning of
the execution, the emperor, awakening at five o'clock, said to Josephine: "By
this time the Duc d'Enghien has passed from this life."
The rest is history—of that apologetic kind which is not often recorded.
In the chapel at Vincennes a commemorative tablet was placed, by the orders of
Louis XVIII, in 1816, to mark the death of the young duke.

The Bois de Vincennes is not the fashionable parade ground of the Bois de
Boulogne. On the whole it is a sad sort of a public park, and not at all
fashionable, and not particularly attractive, though of a vast extent and
possessed of a profoundly historic past of far more significance than that of its
sweet sister by the opposite gates of Paris.
It contains ten hundred and sixty-nine hectares and was due originally to Louis
XV, who sought to have a sylvan gateway to the city from the east. Under the
Second Empire the park was considerably transformed, new roads and alleys
traced, and an effort made to have it equal more nearly the beauty of the more
popular Bois de Boulogne. It occupies the plateau lying between the Seine and
the bend in the Marne, just above the junction of the two rivers.
There are some forty kilometres of roadway within the limits of the Bois de
Vincennes, and a dozen kilometres or more of footpaths; but, since the military
authorities have taken a portion for their own uses as a training ground, a
shooting range and for the Batteries of La Faisanderie and Gravelle, it has been
bereft of no small part of its former charm. There are three lakes in the Bois, the
Lac de Sainte Mandé, the Lac Daumesnil and the Lac de Gravelle.
A near neighbour of Vincennes is Conflans, another poor, rent relic of
monarchial majesty. The Chateau de Conflans was situated at the juncture of the
Seine and Marne, but, to-day, the immediate neighbourhood is so very unlovely
and depressing that one can hardly believe that it ever pleased any one's fancy,
least of all that of a kingly castle builder.
Banal dwellings on all sides are Conflans' chief characteristics to-day; but the
old royal abode still lifts a long length of roof and wall to mark the spot where
once stood the Chateau de Conflans in all its glory.

Conflans was at first the country residence of the Archbishops of Paris, and
Saint Louis frequently went into retreat here. When Philippe-le-Bel acquired the
property, he promptly gave it to the Comtesse d'Artois who made of it one of
the "plus beaux castels du temps." She decorated its long gallery, the portion of
the edifice which exists to-day in the humble, emasculated form of a warehouse
of some sort, in memory of her husband Othon. Here the countess held many
historic receptions and ceremonies during which kings and princes frequently
partook of her hospitality.
After the death of the countess, the French king made his residence at Conflans,
and Charles VI, when dauphin, was also lodged here that he might be near the
capital in case of events which might require his presence. A contemporary
account mentions the fact that his valet de chambre was killed by lightning at
Conflans while serving his royal master.
Conflans was the preferred suburban residence of the Princes and the Ducs de
Bourgogne, and Philippe-le-Hardi there organized his tourneys and his passes
d'armes with great éclat, on one occasion alone offering one hundred and fifteen
thousand livres in prizes to the participants.
This castle, for it was more castle than palace, was reputed one of the most
magnificent in the neighbourhood of the Paris of its time, surrounded as it was
with a resplendent garden and a forest in miniature, really a part of the Bois de

Vincennes of to-day, where roamed wild boar and wolves which furnished sport
of a kingly kind.
The view from the terrace of the chateau must have been wonderfully fine, the
towers and roof-tops of old Paris being silhouetted against the setting sun, its
windows dominating the swift-flowing current of the two rivers at the foot of
the fortress walls.
The greatest event of history enacted under the walls of Conflans was the battle
and the treaty which followed after, between Louis XI and the Comte de
Charolais, in 1405.
Commynes recounts the battle as follows: "Four thousand archers were sent out
from Paris by the king, who fired upon the castle from the river bank on both
sides."
Bows and arrows were hardly effective weapons with which to shoot down
castle walls, but stragglers who left themselves unprotected were from time to
time picked off on both sides and much carnage actually ensued. Finally a treaty
of peace was arranged, by which, at the death of Charles-le-Téméraire,
according to usage, Louis XI absorbed the proprietary rights in the castle and
made it a Maison Royale, bestowing it upon one of his favourites, Dame
Gillette Hennequin.
The kings of France about this time developed a predilection for the chateaux
on the banks of the Loire, and Conflans was offered for sale in 1554. Divers
personages occupied it from that time on, the Maréchal de Villeroy, the
Connetable de Montmorency and, for a brief time, Cardinal Richelieu.
It was in the Chateau de Conflans that was planned the foundation of the French
Academy; here Molière and his players first presented "La Critique de l'Ecole
des Femmes"; and here, also, was held the marriage of La Grande
Mademoiselle with the unhappy Lauzan.
At the end of the reign of Louis XIV Fr. de Harlay-Chauvallon, Archbishop of
Paris, bought the property of Richelieu, and, with the aid of Mansart and Le
Notre, considerably embellished it within and without. Madame de Sévigné, in
one of her many published letters, writes of the splendours which she saw at
Conflans at this epoch.
Saint-Simon, the court chronicler, mentions that the gardens were so
immaculately kept that when the Archbishop and "La Belle" Duchesse de

Lesdiguières used to promenade therein they were followed by a gardener who,
with a rake, sought to remove the traces of each footprint as soon as made.
Later, the Cardinal de Beaumont, the persecutor of the Jansenists, resided here.
"Notre archeveque est à Conflans
C'est un grand solitaire
C'est un grand so
C'est un grand so
C'est un grand solitaire."
The above verse is certainly banal enough, but the cardinal himself was a drôle,
so perhaps it is appropriate. At any rate it is contemporary with the churchman's
sojourn at Conflans.

CHAPTER XI
FONTAINEBLEAU AND ITS FOREST

Of all the French royal palaces Fontainebleau is certainly the most interesting,
despite the popularity and accessibility of Versailles. It is moreover the cradle of
the French Renaissance. Napoleon called it the Maison des Siècles, and the
simile was just.
After Versailles, Fontainebleau has ever held the first place among the suburban
royal palaces. The celebrated "Route de Fontainebleau" of history was as much
a Chemin du Roi as that which led from the capital to Versailles. Versailles was
gorgeous, even splendid, if you will; but it had not the unique characteristics,
nor winsomeness of Fontainebleau, nor ever will have, in the minds of those
who know and love the France of monarchial days.

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Not the least of the charm of Fontainebleau is the neighbouring forest so close
at hand, a few garden railings, not more, separating the palace from one of the
wildest forest tracts of modern France.
The Forest of Fontainebleau is full of memories of royal rendezvous, the
carnage of wild beasts, the "vraie image de la guerre," of which the
Renaissance kings were so inordinately fond.
It was from the Palace of Fontainebleau, too, that bloomed forth the best and
most wholesome of the French Renaissance architecture. It was the model of all

other later residences of its kind. It took the best that Italy had to offer and
developed something so very French that even the Italian workmen, under the
orders of François I, all but lost their nationality. Vasari said of it that it "rivalled
the best work to be found in the Rome of its time."
A charter of Louis-le-Jeune (Louis VII), dated at Fontainebleau in 1169, attests
that the spot was already occupied by a maison royale which, according to the
Latin name given in the document was called Fontene Bleaudi, an etymology
not difficult to trace when what we know of its earlier and later history is
considered.
Actually this fontaine belle eau is found to-day in the centre of the Jardin
Anglais, its basin and outlet being surrounded by the conventional stone rim or
border. After its discovery, according to legend, this fountain became the
rendezvous of the gallants and the poets and painters and the "sweet ladies" so
often referred to in the chronicles of the Renaissance. Rosso, the painter,
perpetuated one of the most celebrated of these reunions in his decorations in
the Galerie François I in the palace, and Cellini represented the fair huntress
Diana, amid the same surroundings.
Under Louis-le-Jeune in 1169 was erected, in the Cour du Donjon, the chapel
Saint-Saturnin, which was consecrated by Saint Thomas à Becket, then a
refugee in France.
Philippe Auguste and Saint Louis inhabited the palace and Philippe-le-Bel died
here in 1314. From a letter of Charles VII it appears that Isabeau de Bavière had
the intention of greatly adding to the existing chateau because of the extreme
healthfulness of the neighbourhood. The work was actually begun but
seemingly not carried to any great length.
Such was the state of things when François I came into his own and, because of
the supreme beauty of the site, became enamoured of it and began to erect an
edifice which was to outrank all others of its class. The king and court made of
Fontainebleau a second capital. It was a model residence of its kind, and gave
the first great impetus to the Renaissance wave which rose so rapidly that it
speedily engulfed all France.
Aside from its palace and its forest, Fontainebleau early became a noble and a
gracious town, thanks to the proximity of the royal dwelling. In spite of the
mighty scenes enacted within its walls, the palace has ever posed as one of the
most placid and tranquil places of royal residence in the kingdom.

All this is true to-day, in spite of the coming of tourists in automobiles, and the
recent establishment of a golf club with the usual appurtenances. Fontainebleau,
the town, has a complexion quite its own. Its garrison and its little court of
officialdom give it a character which even to-day marks it as one of the
principal places where the stranger may observe the French dragoon, with
casque and breastplate and boots and spurs, at quite his romantic best, though it
is apparent to all that the cumbersome, if picturesque, uniform is an unwieldy
fighting costume. There was talk long ago of suppressing the corps, but all
Fontainebleau rose up in protest. As the popular chanson has it: "Laissez les
dragons a leur Maire." This has become the battle cry and so they remain at
Fontainebleau to-day, the envy of their fellows in the service, and the glory of
the young misses of the boarding schools, who each Saturday are brought out in
droves to see the sights.
Many descriptions of Fontainebleau have been written, but the works of
Poirson, Pfnor and Champollion-Figèac are generally followed by most makers
of guidebooks, and, though useful, they have perpetuated many errors which
were known to have been doubtful even before their day.
The best account of Fontainebleau under François I is given in the manuscript
memoir of Abbé Guilbert. Apparently an error crept into this admirable work,
too, for it gives the date of the commencement of the constructions of François
as 1514, whereas that monarch only ascended the throne in 1515. The date of
the first works under this monarch was 1528, according to a letter of the king
himself, which began: "We, the court, intend to live in this palace and hunt the
'betes rousses et noirs qui sont dans la forêt.'"
An account of François I and his "young Italian friends" makes mention of the
visit of the king, in company with the Duchesse d'Étampes, to the studio of
Serlio who was working desperately on the portico of the Cour Ovale. He found
the artist producing a "melody of plastic beauty, garbed as a simple workman,
his hair matted with pasty clay." He was standing on a scaffolding high above
the ground when the monarch mounted the ladder. Up aloft François held a
conference with his beloved workman and, descending, shouted back the words:
"You understand, Maître Serlio; let it be as you suggest." After the porticos,
Serlio decorated the Galerie d'Ulysse which has since disappeared owing to the
indifference of Louis XV and the imbecility of his friends; and always it was
with François: "You understand, Maître Serlio; it is as you wish." The motif may
have been Italian, but the impetus for the work was given by the esprit of the
French.

The defeated monarch was not able to bring away from Padua any trophies of
war; but he brought plans of chateaux, and gardens as well. He did more: he
took the very artists and craftsmen who had produced many of the Italian
masterpieces of the time.
The tracing of the gardens at Fontainebleau, practically as they exist to-day, was
one of François I's greatest pleasures. In their midst, on the shores of the Étang
aux Carpes, was erected a tiny rest-house where the royal mistresses might
come to repose and laugh at the jests of Triboulet.

Palais de Fontainebleau
The edifice of François I is of modest proportions and of perfect unity; but it is
with difficulty that it presents its best appearance, overpowered as it is by the
heavier masses of the time of Henri IV, and suffering as it does because of the
eliminations of Louis XIV and Louis XV when they made their additions to the
palace.
Under the Convention, later on, Fontainebleau's palace again suffered. Under
the Consulate it became a barracks and a prison, and finally, not less terrible,
were the restorations of Napoleon and Louis Philippe. A castle may sometimes
suffer less from a siege than from a restoration.
From every point of view, however, Fontainebleau remains an architectural
document of the most profound interest and value, and, from the tourists' point
of view, it is the most appealing of all European palaces of this or any other age.
The expert, the artist and the mere curiosity-seeker all unite in their admiration
in spite of the fact that the fabric has been denuded of many of its original
beauties.

First, this royal dwelling is of the most ample and effective proportions; second,
it possesses a remarkable series of luxurious apartments; third, it still contains
some of the finest examples of furniture and furnishings of Renaissance and
Napoleonic times; and, in addition, there is also to be seen that admirable series
of paintings which represent the School of Fontainebleau. With such an array of
charms what does it matter if the unity of the Renaissance masterpiece of
François I is qualified by later interpolations? General impression is the
standard by which one judges the workmanship of a noble monument, and here
it is good to an extraordinary degree.
The palace of to-day sits at one end of the aristocratic little town of
Fontainebleau. Beyond is the forest and opposite are many hotels which depend
upon the palace as the source from which they draw their livelihood.
The principal entrance to the palace opens out from the Place Solferino and
gives access immediately to the Cour du Cheval Blanc of Chambiges, which,
since that eventful day in Napoleonic history nearly a hundred years ago, has
become better known as the Cour des Adieux. At the rear rises the famous
horseshoe stair, certainly much better expressed in French as the Escalier en
Fer à Cheval, from which the emperor took his farewell of his "Vieux
Grognards" lined up before him, biting savagely at their moustaches to keep
down their emotions.
This Cour du Cheval Blanc acquired its name from a plaster cast of Marcus
Aurelius's celebrated steed which was originally placed here under a canopy or
baldaquin held aloft by colonnettes. The moulds for this work were brought
from Venice by Primaticcio and Vignole, but it was never cast in bronze and the
statue itself disappeared in 1626. The courtyard, however, still kept the name
until the last of Napoleonic days.
As a Napoleonic memory this Cour des Adieux shares popularity with the
famous Cabinet of the Empire suite of apartments where Napoleon signed his
abdication. Certainly most visitors will carry away the memory of these words
as among the most vivid souvenirs of Fontainebleau.
"Le 5 Avril, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signa son abdication sur
cette table dans le cabinet de travail du Roi, le deuxieme après la
chambre à coucher à Fontainebleau."
The abdication itself (the document) is now exposed in the Galerie de Diane,
transformed lately into the Library.

On the right is the Aile Neuf, built by Louis XV, for the housing of his officers,
on the site of the Galerie de Ulysse, originally one of the most notable features
of the palace of François I. Opposite is the sober alignment of the Aile des
Ministres, and still farther to the rear are the Pavillon des Aumoniers, or de
l'Horloge; the Chapelle de la Trinité; the Pavillon des Armes; the Pavillon des
Peintres; the Pavillon des Poëls; the Galerie des Fresques; and, finally, the
Pavillon des Reines-Meres. All of these details are of the period of François I
save the last, which was an interpolation of Louis XIV.
The Fer à Cheval stairway, however, most curious because of the difficulties of
its construction, dates from the time of Louis XIII, and replaces the stairs built
by Philibert Delorme. The tennis court, just before the Pavillon de l'Horloge,
dates only from Louis XV.
The imposing entrance court is a hundred and twelve metres in width by a
hundred and fifty-two metres in length, and to see it as it was originally, before
the destruction of the Galerie d'Ulysse, one must imagine it as closed in by a
series of small pavilions with their frontons of colonnettes preceded only by a
staircase and two drawbridges crossing the moat, which at that time surrounded
the entire confines of the palace. The moat is to-day surrounded, where it still
exists, by a balustrade, due to the rather shabby taste of Louis XV.

Salle du Throne, Fontainebleau
An inner courtyard, known as the Cour de la Fontaine, is incomparably of finer
general design than the entrance court, and the Cour Ovale, absolutely as Henri
IV left it, is finer still. At the foot of this latter court is the Baptistry where were
baptised, in 1606, the three "Enfants de France," the dauphin, afterwards Louis
XIII; the Princesse Elizabeth, afterwards the Queen of Spain; and the Princesse
de Savoie.
The Cour Ovale is practically of the proportions of the ancient Manor of
Fontaine Belle Eau, built by Robert le Pieux. There, too, Philippe Auguste,
Saint Louis, Philippe-le-Bel, Charles V and Charles VII frequently resided.
François I had no wish that this old manor should entirely disappear and

preserved its old donjon, a relic which has since gone the way of many another
noble fane. There are several other notable courts or gardens, the Cour des
Offices, the Jardin de Diane, the Orangerie, the Cour des Princes, etc.
All the original gardens were laid out anew by Louis XIV, and that of Diane
underwent a considerable change at the hands of Napoleon, who also laid out a
Jardin Anglais on the site of the ancient Jardin des Pins, where originally sprang
into being the rippling Fontaine Beleau, or Belle Eau, which gave its name to
the palace, the forest and the town.
The park, as distinct from the great expanse of surrounding forest, is a finely
shaded range of alleys, due chiefly to Henri IV, who cut the great canal of
ornamental water and ordained the general arrangement of its details.
The principal curiosity of the park is the famous Treille du Roy, or the King's
Grape Vine, which, good seasons and bad, can be counted on to give three
thousand kilos of authentic chasselas, grapes of the finest quality. One wonders
who gets them: Ou s'en vont les raisins du roi? This is an interrogation that has
been raised more than once in the French parliament.
In general, the aspect of the exterior of the Palais de Fontainebleau, the walls
themselves, the Cours, the alleyed walks are chiefly reminiscent of the early art
of the Renaissance. François I is, after all, more in evidence than the Henris or
the Napoleons. Within, the same is true in general, though to a less degree. The
Renaissance is maitresse within and without; the other moods are wholly
subservient to her grace.
There is hardly an apartment in all the world of palaces in France, or beyond the
frontiers, to rank with the great Galerie François I at Fontainebleau, though
indeed its proportions are modest and its lighting defective to-day, for Louis XV
blocked up all the windows on one side. It remains, however, one of the richest
examples of the Franco-Italian decoration of its era, though somewhat tarnished
by the heedlessness of Charles X.

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Never were there before, nor since, its era such mythological wall-paintings as
are here to be seen. The aspirants for the Prix de Rome protest each year against
such subjects being set them for their concours, but their judges, recalling how
effective such examples are, are insistent. The best examples of the School of
Fontainebleau are a distinct variety of French painting. The veriest dabbler in
art can say with Michelet: "There is no reminiscence of anything Italian
therein."

Frankly, these works were the product of secondary artists and their pupils.
Leonardo da Vinci, too old to do anything more than direct, saw himself
succeeded by Del Sarto, Rosso and Primaticcio. Cellini may have contributed,
too, but his labours were doubtless blotted out to a great extent by the orders of
the all-powerful Duchesse d'Étampes who feared his competition with her
protegé, Primaticcio. One of the masters of this coterie was Nicolo dell' Abbate,
better known, perhaps, for his works painted at Bologna than for his frescoes at
Fontainebleau.
The Galerie Henri II is notable also for its decorations, the harmonious
juxtaposition of sculpture and painting, and, although "restored" in late years,
presents an astonishing pristine vigour. This apartment ranks with the Galerie
François I, all things considered, as one of the chief show apartments of the
palace. Its length is thirty metres, its breadth ten, with five ample round-headed
windows letting in a flood of light on either side, one set giving on the Cour
Ovale, and the other on the Parterre and the magnificent façade of the Porte
Dorée. The ceiling is broken up into octagonal caissons, their depths alternately
laid with gold or silver, bearing the monogram of the monarch and his devise.
The parquet is laid in divisions reproducing the design of the ceiling. On either
side the walls are wainscoted in oak similarly emblazoned in gold and silver,
with the initials of Diane de Poitiers, and of her admirer, Henri, everywhere
interlaced. Again, a colossal monogram reproduces itself in the chimney-piece
with the frescoes of Nicolo dell' Abbate, and fifty figures of mythological gods
and heroes decorate the window casings.

The chapel dates chiefly from the time of Henri IV, the altar and numerous
embellishments belonging to later reigns.
A certain sentiment, not a little real beauty, and much unauthenticated history
attach themselves to the Salon Louis XIII, the Salle du Trone, the Apartment of
Madame de Maintenon, those of Napoleon I, of Pope Pius VII and of Marie
Antoinette.
The Galerie de Diane is little reminiscent of the day of the huntress, being a
reconstitution under the First Empire, though its decorations date from the
Restoration, and the ceiling, and furniture, apparently of the best of Renaissance
times, are merely copies made by Louis Philippe, who did not hesitate, on
another occasion, to blue-wash the Salon de Saint Louis, and who hung

worthless third-rate paintings, which even provincial museums of the meanest
rank have since refused to house, in the admirably decorated apartments of the
period of François and Henri.
Fontainebleau, to-day, is but a memory of what it was, a memory by no means
fragmentary, by no means complete; but all sufficient.
Of later years there is actually little to single out in the way of remarkable
additions or restorations. Under the Second Empire the Galerie François I was
repainted, some false antiquities added as furnishings, and various ranges of
books were stored away in the Galerie de Diane, having been brought from the
chapel which had ceased to serve as the Library. This apartment was now
refitted as a chapel, and, to supplant six wall paintings which had been
removed, Napoleon III ordered seven canvases from the painter Schopin,
illustrating the life of Saint Saturnin.
Finally, the Salle de Spectacle completes the modern additions, and, while
gaudily striking, is scarcely above the taste of a gilded café in some pompous
Préfecture.
Henri IV was the creator of the park of the palace, which extended as far as the
village of Avon and absorbed all the Seigneurie de Montceau, of which Mi-Voie
(the dairy of Catherine de Médici) occupied a part. The acquisition of the
Seigneurie was made in 1609. Across it was cut a "grand canal" in imitation of
that already possessed by the Chateau de Fleury. It was a great rarity as a garden
accessory, and was more than a quarter of a league long and forty metres wide.
Bassompierre said in his memoirs that Henri IV made him a wager that it could
be filled with water in two days. It actually took eight.
To the north of the park, Henri IV built, under the name of La Menagerie, what
he called a maison de plaisance, but which was really the forerunner of the
animal house at Versailles.
To all these works of Henri IV in the gardens at Fontainebleau is attached the
name of Francine. There were two brothers of the name, Thomas and
Alexandre, and it was the latter who chiefly occupied himself with the Parterre,
the Chaussée and the Grand Canal at Fontainebleau. In the Jardin de la Reine he
erected the celebrated Fontaine de Diane which finally gave its name to the
garden itself. The fountain was designed by Barthélemy Prieur, and was cast in
1603. The original bronzes are now in the Louvre, those seen at Fontainebleau
to-day being later works (1684).

The Forest of Fontainebleau is a dozen leagues in circumference, and of an area
of nearly thirty-five thousand acres. Its beauty, its natural beauty, is unrivalled.
Rocks, ravines, valleys, patriarchal oaks and beeches, plains, woods, glades,
meadows, lawns and cliffs, all are here. Its population of stag and deer was
practically exterminated during the Revolution of 1830, but nevertheless it
sustained its reputation as a great hunting-ground for long afterwards.
The Royal Hunt invariably centered at La Croix du Grand Veneur, a notable
landmark of the forest even now, at the intersection of four magnificent forest
roads. Its name comes from a legend of a spectral black huntsman who was
supposed to haunt the forest, and who appeared for the last time, in reality or
imagination, to Henri IV shortly before his assassination.
In 1854, one of the last and most gorgeous of Fontainebleau hunts was given by
Louis Napoleon. The emperor spent lavishly for the equipment of the hunt, and
granted liberal stipends to the attendants that they might caparison themselves
with some semblance of picturesque dignity; horses and dogs were furnished
and cared for on the same liberal scale.
The costuming of a hunting party under such conditions was not the least
appealing of its picturesque elements. Three-cornered hats, gold lace, knee
breeches, silk stockings and other costly properties, when provided for a single
special occasion, as they were in this case, were apt to suggest the life of
centuries long gone by rather than that of modern times.
The Forest of Fontainebleau can best be briefly described as a rendezvous for
tourists and "trippers," and as a vast open-air studio for the youthful emulators
of "the men of Barbison."
Historic, romantic and artistic memories and realities are on every hand; the
march of time and progress has not dimmed them, nor thinned them out; the
Forest of Fontainebleau remains to-day the best known and most delightful
extent of wildwood in all the world.
The chief of the well-known names associated with the Forest of Fontainebleau,
and one which will never die, is that of Denecourt, called also the "Sylvain de la
Forêt," a mythological appellation which came from his abounding knowledge
of its devious ways and byways. It was in 1841 that Denecourt began his
original studies and catalogued its every stone and tree. He invented names and
gave a historical setting to many a picturesque and romantic site which might
not have been known at all had it not been for his enthusiasm.

After the vogue of Denecourt all the world followed in his footsteps until the
Parisian knew as well the Longue Rocher, the Gorges d'Apremont and the
Gorge de Franchard as he did the Rue de la Paix or the Champs Elysées.
Denecourt's great work, "Promenades dans la Forêt de Fontainebleau"
appeared in 1845, and if he is to be criticised for letting his fancy run away with
him now and then, and for the opera bouffe nomenclature of many of the caves
and mares and chènes and "fairy-bowers" and "tables of kings," he at least has
enabled a curious public to become better acquainted with this great forest.
The flora of the Forest of Fontainebleau is remarkably varied; Denecourt gives
seventy varieties of plants and flowers which grow and propagate here
naturally, to which are to be added a great number of nondescript vines, lichens
and vegetable mosses.
Of the trees the list extends from the imposing and sometimes gigantic oaks,
elms, beeches, and willows to shrubs and heather growth of the most humble
species.
A score or more of the most commonly known feathered tribes people the forest
to-day with almost the same freedom of life and abundance as in monarchial
times. The songsters are all there, from the robin to the nightingale; as well as
the partridge and the celebrated indigenous grouse.
Previous to 1830 the forest was well supplied with big game, deer and wild boar
without number; but, in later times, as was but natural, these have been greatly
thinned out. Rabbits and hares, to say nothing of foxes and the like, were
formerly so abundant that, under Louis Philippe, it was necessary to carry out
what was practically a war of extermination. To-day they exist, of course, but in
no great numbers.
Another sort of publicity has been given the Forest of Fontainebleau by its
association with the painters of the thirties. Theodore Rousseau, in 1836, lived
at Barbison, which at that time was but a hamlet of a few houses, with no
encumbering hotels, garages and merry-go-rounds as to-day.

Monument to Rousseau and Millet at Barbison
A certain Père Ganne kept a sort of a lodging house where artists were made
welcome at an exceedingly modest price. Not only the really famous and much
exploited painters of the time gained fortunes here, but those of a more
conservative school, who never rose to really great distinction, also drew much
of their inspiration from the neighbourhood, among them Hamon, Boulanger
and Célestin Nanteuil.
Without having to go far to hunt up their subjects, the Forest of Fontainebleau
lying near Barbison offered to painters much that was not available within so
small a radius elsewhere.
Diaz was here already when, in 1849, Jacque and Millet arrived upon the scene,
and at more or less frequent intervals, and for more or less lengthy stays, there
came Corot, Dupré and Daubigny.
Just what the Barbison school produced in the way of painting all the world
knows to-day, but these men were originally the target of every prejudiced critic
of the Boulevards and the Faubourgs. The present day has brought its reward
and appreciation, though it is the dealers who have profited—the men are dead.
In memory of the fame brought to this little corner of the forest in general, and
to Barbison in particular, there was placed (in 1894), at the entrance to the
village, a bronze medallion showing the heads of Millet and Rousseau. It was a

delicate way of showing appreciation for the talents of those two great men who
actually founded a new school of painting.
At the other end of the forest is the little village of Marlotte, also a haven for
many painters of a former day, and no less so for those of to-day. The old forest
in three quarters of a century has seen itself reproduced on canvas in all its
moods. No painter ever lived, nor could all the painters that ever lived, exhaust
its infinite variety. Hebert in his "Dictionnaire de la Forêt de Fontainebleau"
says, rightly enough, that, with the coming of the men of Fontainebleau and its
"artist-villages" the classic type of "Paysage d'Italie" has disappeared from the
Salon Catalogues.
Art amateurs and the common people alike made the reputation of
Fontainebleau; the mere "trippers" were brought thither by Denecourt, but the
real forest lovers were those who were attracted by the masterpieces of the
painters. The town of Fontainebleau has changed somewhat under this double
influence. At Fontainebleau itself are two monuments in memory of painters
who have passed away. One of these is to the memory of Decamps, who was
killed by a fall from his horse while riding in the forest; it is a simple bust, the
work of Carrier-Belleuse. The other is of Rosa Bonheur who died at Thomery, a
little village on the southern border of the forest, in 1902; it is an almost life-
size bull from a small model by the artist herself and surmounts a pedestal
which also bears a medallion of the artist.

CHAPTER XII
BY THE BANKS OF THE SEINE

On the highroad to Saint Germain one passes innumerable historic monuments
which suggest the generous part that many minor chateaux played in the court
life of the capital of old.
To-day, Maisons, La Muette and Bagatelle are mere names which serve the tram
lines for roof signs and scarcely one in a thousand strangers gives them a
thought.
The famous Bois de Boulogne and its immediate environment have for
centuries formed a delicious verdant framing for a species of French country-
house which could not have existed within the fortifications. These luxurious,
bijou dwellings, some of them, at least, the caprices of kings, others the
property of the new nobility, and still others of mere plebeian kings of finance,
are in a class quite by themselves.
Perhaps the most famous of these is the celebrated Bagatelle, within the
confines of the Bois itself. The Chateau de Bagatelle was built in a month, thus
meriting its name, by the Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, as a result of a
wager with Marie Antoinette. On its façade it originally bore the inscription:
"Parva sed apta"—"small but convenient."

Bagatelle occupied a corner of the royal domain and, after its completion, was
sold to the Marquise de Monconseil, in 1747, who gave to this princely
suburban residence a dignity worthy of its origin. Then came La Pompadour on
the scene, the petite bourgeoise who, by the nobility acquired by the donning of
a court costume and marriage with the Sieur Normand d'Étioles, usurped the
right to sit beside duchesses and be presented to the queen, if not as an equal, at
least as the maitresse of her spouse, the king.
There is a legend about a meeting between La Pompadour and the king at
Bagatelle, a meeting in which she established herself so firmly in the graces of
the monarch that on the morrow she formed a part of the entourage at Versailles.
After having come into the possession of the heirs of Sir Richard Wallace,
Bagatelle finally became the property of the State.
It is in the Chateau de Bagatelle that is to be installed the "Musée de la
Parole"—"The Museum of Speech." The French, innovators ever, plan that
Bagatelle shall become a sort of conservatory of the human voice, and here will

be classed methodically the cylinders and disks which have recorded the spoken
words of all sorts and conditions of men.
In this Musée de la Parole will be kept phonographic records of all current
dialects in France, the argot of the Parisian lower classes, etc., etc.
Up to the present the evolution of the speech of man has ever been an enigma.
No one knows to-day how Homer or Virgil pronounced their words, and Racine
and Corneille, though of a time less remote, have left no tangible record of their
speech. Monsieur Got of the Comédie Française believes that Louis XIV
pronounced "Moi," "le Roi" as "Moué" "le Roué"; and thus he pronounced it in a
speech which has been recorded in wax and is to form a part of the collection at
Bagatelle.
The Polo Grounds of Bagatelle, between the chateau and the Seine as it swirls
around the Ile de la Folie, are to-day better known than this dainty little Paris
palace; but Bagatelle will some day come to its own again.
Neuilly bounds the Bois de Boulogne on the north, and has little of a royal
appearance to-day, save its straight, broad streets.
There is a royal incident connected with the Pont de Neuilly which should not
be forgotten. It came about in connection with the return of Henri IV from Saint
Germain in company with the queen and the Duc de Vendome. They were in a
great coach drawn by four horses which insisted on drinking from the river in
spite of the efforts of the coachman to prevent them.
The carriage was overturned and the royal party barely escaped being drowned.
One of the aids who accompanied them recounted the fact that the impromptu
bath had cured the king's toothache which he had acquired over a rather hasty
meal just before leaving the palace. "Had I witnessed the adventure," said the
Marquis de Verneuil, "I should have proposed the toast: 'Le Roi Boit!" As a
result of this incident a new bridge was constructed, though it was afterwards
replaced by the present stone structure over which a ceaseless traffic rushes in
and out of Paris to-day. It was this present bridge over which Louis XV was the
first to pass on September 22, 1772.
The Chateau de Neuilly was a favourite suburban residence of Louis Philippe. It
was here that a delegation came to offer him the crown, and, after he had
become king, he was pleased to still inhabit it and actually spent considerable
sums upon its maintenance. When the Revolution of 1848 broke out, the
sovereign took refuge at Neuilly and, when besieged by the multitude, took

flight in the night of February 26 and left his chateau in the hands of a band of
ruffians who pillaged it from cellar to garret, finally setting it on fire. It burned
like a pile of brushwood, and it is said that more than a hundred drunken
desperados perished when its walls fell in. This was the tragic end of the
Chateau de Neuilly.
By a decree of the president of the later Republic the Orleans princes were
obliged to sell all their French properties and the park of the Chateau de Neuilly
was cut up into morsels and lots were sold to all comers. Thus was born that
delightful Paris suburb, with the broad, shady avenues and comfortable houses,
with which one is familiar to-day. The aristocratic Parc de Neuilly, with Saint
James, is the only tract near Paris where one finds such lovely gardens and such
fresh, shady avenues.
Another quarter of Neuilly possesses a history worthy of being recounted. The
district known as Saint James derived its name from a great suburban property
which in 1775 belonged to Baudart de Saint James. He created a property
almost royal in its appointments, its gardens having acquired an extraordinary
renown. When he became a bankrupt a throng of persons visited the property
not so much with a view to purchase as out of curiosity. A writer of the time
says of this Lucullus that he was the envy of all Paris. He died soon after his
ruin, from chagrin, and in apparent poverty, which seemingly established his
good faith with his creditors. Under the First Empire the domain was bought by,
or for, the Princesse Borghese, who here gave many brilliant fêtes at which the
emperor himself frequently assisted. On the occasion of the marriage of
Napoleon to Marie Louise a series of fêtes took place here which evoked the
especially expressed encomiums of the emperor.
In 1815 Wellington made it his headquarters and here had his first conference
with Blucher. Upon Wellington quitting Saint James the property was pillaged
by the Iron Duke's own troops and actually demolished by the picks and axes of
the soldiery.
Near the Passy entrance of the Bois is La Muette, a relic of a royal hunting-
lodge which took its name from the royal pack of hounds (meute) which was
formerly kept here.
The Chateau de la Muette was the caprice of François I, who, when he came to
Paris, wished to have his pleasures near at hand, and, being the chief partisan of
the hunt among French monarchs, built La Muette for this purpose.

The Chateau de la Muette is thus classed as one of the royal dwellings of France
though hardly ever is it mentioned in the annals of to-day.
Rebuilt by Charles IX, from his father's more modest shooting box, La Muette
became the centre of the court of Marguerite de Navarre, the first wife of Henri
IV; after which it served as the habitation of the dauphin, who became Louis
XIII.
During the regency, Philippe d'Orleans took possession of the chateau until the
enthronement of Louis XV. The latter here established a little court within a
court, best described by the French as: "ses plaisirs privés." It was this monarch
who rebuilt, or at least restored, the chateau, and brought it to the state in which
one sees it to-day.
In 1783 Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the court took up a brief residence
here to assist at the aerostatic experiences of De Rosier, and in 1787, ceasing to
be a royal residence, La Muette was offered for sale after first having been
stripped of its precious wainscotings, its marbles and the artistic curiosities of
all sorts with which it had been decorated. The chateau itself now became the
property of Sebastian Erard, who bought it for the modest price of two hundred
and sixty thousand francs.
Somewhat farther from Paris, crossing the peninsula formed by the first of the
great bends of the Seine below the capital, is Chatou which has a royal reminder
in its Pavilion Henri IV, or Pavillon Gabrielle, which the gallant, love-making
monarch built for Gabrielle d'Estrées. Formerly it was surrounded by a vast
park and must have been almost ideal, but to-day it is surrounded by stucco,
doll-house villas, and unappealing apartments, until only a Gothic portal, jutting
from a row of dull house fronts, suggests the once cosy little retreat of the
lovely Gabrielle.
The height of Louveciennes, above Bougival, closes the neck of the peninsula
and from it a vast panorama of the silvery Seine and its coteaux stretches out
from the towers of Notre Dame on one hand to the dense forest of Saint
Germain on the other.
The original Chateau de Louveciennes was the property of Madame la Princesse
de Conti, but popular interest lies entirely with the Pavilion du Barry, built by
the architect Ledoux under the orders of Louis XV.
Du Barry, having received the chateau as a gift from the king, sought to
decorate it and reëmbellish it anew. Through the ministrations of a certain

Drouais, Fragonard was commissioned to decorate a special pavilion outside the
chateau proper, destined for the "collations du Roi."
The subject chosen was the "Progres de l'Amour dans le Cœur des Jeunes
Filles." Just where these panels are to-day no one seems to know, but sooner or
later they will doubtless be discovered.
Fragonard's famous "Escalade," or "Rendezvous," the first of the series of five
proposed panels, depicted the passion of Louis XV for du Barry. The
shepherdess had the form and features of that none too scrupulous feminine
beauty, and the "berger gallant" was manifestly a portrait of the king.
Perhaps these decorations at Louveciennes were elaborations of these smaller
canvases. It seems quite probable.
Sheltered snugly against the banked-up Forest of Saint Germain, on the banks
of the Seine, is Maisons-Laffitte. Maisons is scarcely ever mentioned by
Parisians save as they comment on the sporting columns of the newspapers, for
horse-racing now gives its distinction to the neighbourhood, and the old
Chateau de Maisons (with its later suffix of Laffitte) is all but forgotten.
François Mansart built the first Chateau de Maisons on a magnificent scale for
René de Longueil, the Superintendent of Finance. In a later century it made a
most effectual appeal to another financier, Laffitte, the banker, who parcelled
out the park and stripped the chateau.
For a century, though, the chateau belonged to the family of its founder, and in
1658 the surrounding lands were made into a Marquisate. In 1671, on the day of
the death of Philippe, Duc d'Anjou, Maisons may be said to have become royal
for the court there took up its residence. Later, the Marquis de Soyecourt
became the owner and Voltaire stayed here for a time; in fact he nearly died
here from an attack of smallpox.
In 1778 the property was acquired by the Comte d'Artois and the royal family of
the time were frequent guests. The king, the queen and each of the princes all
had their special apartments, and if Louis XVI had not been too busy with other
projects, more ambitious ones, there is little doubt but that he would have given
Maisons an éclat which during all of its career it had just missed. At the
Revolution it was sold as National Property and the proceeds turned into public
coffers.

With the Empire the chateau became more royalist than ever. Maréchal Lannes
became its proprietor, then the Maréchal de Montebello, who here received
Napoleon on many occasions. With the invasion of 1815 the village was
devastated, but the chateau escaped, owing to its having been made the
headquarters of the invading allies. After this, in 1818, the banker Laffitte came
into possession. He exercised a great hospitality and lived the life of an opulent
bourgeois, but he destroyed most of the outbuildings and the stables built by
Mansart, and cut up the great expanse of park which originally consisted of five
hundred hectares. His ideas were purely commercial, not the least esthetic.
The scheme of decoration within, as without, is distinctly unique. Doric
pilasters and columns support massive cornices and round-cornered ceilings,
with here and there antique motives and even Napoleonic eagles as decorative
features. To-day all the apartments are deserted and sad. The finest, from all
points of view, is that of the Salle-à-Manger, though indeed some of the motives
are but plaster reproductions of the originals. The chimney-piece, however, is
left, a pure bijou, a model of grace, more like a pagan altar than a comparatively
modern mantel. The oratory is in the pure style of the Empire, and the stairway,
lighted up by a curiously arranged dome-lantern, gives a most startling effect to
the entrance vestibule.
In general the design of Maisons is gracious, not at all outré, though undeniably
grandiose; too much so for a structure covering so small an area. The Cour
d'Honneur gives it its chief exterior distinction and the two pavilions have a
certain grace of charm, when considered separately, which the ensemble
somewhat lacks. The surroundings, had they not been ruthlessly cut up into
building lots for over-ambitious Paris shopkeepers, would have added greatly to
the present appearance of the property. As it is, the near-by race-course
absorbed the orchard, the pelouse and many of the garden plots.

CHAPTER XIII
MALMAISON AND MARLY

Out from Paris, by the cobbly Pavé du Roi, which a parental administration is
only just now digging up and burying under, just beyond the little suburban
townlet of Rueil (where the Empress Josephine and her daughter Hortense lie
buried in the parish church), one comes to Malmaison of unhappy memory. It is
not imposing, palatial, nor, architecturally, very worthy, but it is one of the most
sentimentally historic of all French monuments of its class.
Since no very definite outlines remain of any royal historical monument at
Rueil to-day the tourist bound towards Versailles by train, tram or road, gives
little thought to the snug little suburb through which he shuffles along, hoping
every minute to leave the noise, bustle and cobblestones of Paris behind.
Rueil is deserving of more consideration than this. According to Gregory of
Tours the first race of kings had a "pleasure house" here, and called the
neighbourhood Rotolajum. Not always did these old kings stay cooped up in a
fortress in the Isle of Lutetia. Sometimes they went afield for a day in the
country like the rest of us, and to them, with their slow means of
communication and the bad roads of their day, Rueil, scarce a dozen miles from
Notre Dame, seemed far away.
Childerbert I, son of Clovis, is mentioned as having made a protracted sojourn
at Rueil, and whatever may have existed then in the way of a royal residence
soon after passed to the monks of Saint Denis, who here fished and hunted and
lived a life of comfort and ease such as they could hardly do in their fortress-
abbey. They, too, required change and rest from time to time, and, apparently,
when they could, took it.
The Black Prince burned the town and all its dependencies in 1346, and only an
unimportant village existed when Richelieu thought to build a country-house
here on this same charming site which had so pleased the first French monarchs.
Richelieu did his work well, as always, and built an immense chateau,
surrounded by a deep moat into which were turned the swift-flowing waters of
the Seine. A vast park was laid out, in part in the formal manner and in part as a

natural preserve, and the neighbourhood once more became frequented by
royalty and the nobles of the court.
Richelieu bequeathed the property to his niece, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, and
Louis XIV became a frequent dweller there—as a visitor, but he did not mind
that. Louis XIV was sometimes a monarch, sometimes a master, and sometimes
a "family friend," to put it in a noncommittal manner.
The Revolution nearly made way with the property and the Duc de Massena, a
few years afterwards, reëstablished it after a fashion, but speculating land-
boomers came along in turn and royal memories meaning nothing to them the
property was cut up into streets, avenues and house lots.
The Chateau de Malmaison, which is very near Rueil, is in quite a different
class. Its history comes very nearly down to modern times. The memory of
Malmaison is purely Napoleonic. Its historical souvenirs are many, but its actual
ruins have taken on a plebeian aspect of little appeal in these later days.
In 1792 Malmaison was sold as a piece of national merchandise to be turned
into écus, and a certain Monsieur Lecouteux de Canteleu, having the ready cash
and a disposition to live under its roof, took over the proprietorship for a time. It
was he who sold it to Josephine Beauharnais, and it was she who gave it a glory
and splendour which it had never before possessed, gave it its complete fame, in
fact.

Chateau de Malmaison
Napoleon himself, as First Consul, was passionately fond of the place, but by
the time he had become emperor, because of unhappy memories, perhaps, for he
had them at times, came rarely to this charming suburban chateau.
It was at Malmaison that began the good fortune of Josephine, and it was at
Malmaison that it flickered out like the dying flame of a candle.
In a beating rain, on Saturday, December 16, 1809, Josephine quitted the
Tuileries, her eyes still red with the tears from that last brief interview. She
arrived at Malmaison at the end of a lugubrious day, when the whole place was
enveloped in a thick fog. She passed the night almost alone in this great house
where she had previously been so happy. She could hardly, however, have been

more sad than Napoleon was that same night. He had shut himself up in his
cabinet, remorseful and alone.
The Sunday following was hardly less melancholy, for it was then Josephine
learned that Malmaison had been endowed with an income of two millions for
its upkeep, and that her personal belongings and the furnishings of her favourite
apartments were already on the way thither from the Tuileries. The wound was
not even then allowed to heal, for she learned that Napoleon had ordained that
she was to receive the visits of the court as if she were still empress.
Napoleon had already written his former spouse to the effect that he would give
much to see her, but that he did not feel sufficiently sure of himself to permit of
it. This historic letter closed thus; "Adieu, Josephine, bonne nuit, si tu doutais
de moi, tout sera bien indigne."
On the 17th of December Napoleon actually did come to Malmaison to see her
from whom he was officially separated. Josephine had confided to Madame de
Remusat, her lady-in-waiting, "It almost seems as if I were dead, and only
possessed of the faculty of remembering the past."
In this Malmaison, so full of souvenirs of other days, Josephine was obliged to
content herself, for on January 12, 1810, the religious marriage of Josephine and
Napoleon was annulled automatically because, as was claimed, it had not been
celebrated with the necessary formalities.
Here at Malmaison Josephine even surrounded herself with the most intimate
souvenirs of Napoleon: a lounging chair that he was wont to occupy stood in its
accustomed place; his bed was always made; his sword hung upon the wall; his
pen was in his inkwell; a book was open on his desk and his geographical globe
—his famous mappemond—was in its accustomed place.
Princes passing through Paris came to Malmaison to salute the former empress,
and she allowed herself to become absorbed in her greenhouses and her dairy,
the direction of her house, her receptions and her petite cour.
In time all came to an end. When Napoleon returned to Paris in 1815 he
interrogated the doctor who had cared for Josephine during the illness which
terminated in her death the year before and asked him: "Did she speak of me at
the last?" The doctor replied: "Often, very often." With emotion Napoleon
replied simply: "Bonne femme: bonne Josephine elle m'aimeit vraiment."

After Waterloo Napoleon himself retired to Malmaison, which had become the
property of Josephine's children, Eugene and Hortense, and closed himself up in
the room where she died, the library which he occupied when triumphant First
Consul.
Here he lived five mortal days of anguish preceding his departure for Rochefort
on that agonizing exile from which he never returned.
After the divorce Josephine preserved the property as her own particular
residence, and in 1814 received there the celebrated visit of the allied
sovereigns. History tells of a certain boat ride which she took on a neighbouring
lake in company with the Emperor Alexander which is fraught with much
historic sentiment. It was this imprudent excursion, in the cool of a May
evening, that caused the death of the former empress three days later. It was
from this bijou of a once royal abode that Napoleon launched his famous
proclamation to the army which the arrogant Fouché refused to have printed in
the "Moniteur Officiel." Upon this Napoleon sent the Duc de Rovigo to Paris for
his passports and the necessary orders which would enable him to depart in
peace. The next moment he had changed his mind, and he changed it again a
few moments afterwards. As the result of the Prussians' advance on Paris by the
left bank of the Seine Napoleon was obliged to accept the inevitable, and with
the words of General Becker ringing in his ears: "Sire, tout est pret," he crossed
the vestibule and entered the gardens amid a painful calm on his part, and an
audible weeping by his former fellows in arms who were lined up to do him
honour. He embraced Hortense passionately, and saluted all the personages of
his party with a sympathy and emotion unbelievable. With an eternal adieu and
a rapid step down the garden walk to the driveway, he at last entered the
carriage which was awaiting him and was driven rapidly away. Some days after
the Allies pillaged and sacked Malmaison. Its chief glory may be said to have
departed with the Corsican.
Under the Restoration, Prince Eugene had a sort of "rag sale" of what was left.
The lands which Josephine had bought of Lecouteaux were sold to the highest
bidder and the exotic shrubs and plants to any who would buy, the pictures to
such connoisseurs as had the price, those that were left being sent to Munich. A
Swedish banker now came on the scene (1826) and bought the property—the
chateau and the park—which he preserved until his death twenty years later.
Then it went to Queen Christina, and was ultimately purchased by Napoleon III.

In October, 1870, during the siege of Paris, General Ducrot sought to make a
reconnaissance by way of Malmaison, and so weak was his project that the
equipages of the King of Prussia and his État Major invested the environs and
made the property their official headquarters.
Near by is a fine property called "Les Bruyeres," a royal estate of Napoleon III.
It was created and developed by the emperor and was always referred to as a
Parc Impérial.
Perhaps the most banal of all the royal souvenirs around Paris is that gigantic
mill-wheel known as the Machine de Marly, down by the Seine a few miles
beyond Malmaison, just where that awful cobblestoned roadway begins to
climb up to the plateau on which sits the chateau of Saint Germain and its park.
Because it is of unesthetic aspect is no reason for ignoring the famous Machine
de Marly, the great water-hoisting apparatus first established in the reign of
Louis XIV to carry the waters of the Seine to the ponds and fountains of
Versailles.
It was a creation of a Liègois, named Rennequin Sualem, who knew not how to
read or write, but who had a very clear idea of what was wanted to perform the
work which Louis XIV demanded. For a fact the expense of the erection of the
"Machine," and the cost of keeping its great wheels turning, were so great that it
is doubtful if it was ever a paying proposition, but that was not a sine qua non
so far as the king's command was concerned. It had cost millions of livres
before its wheels first turned in 1682, and, if the carpenter Brunet had not come
to the rescue to considerably augment the volume of water raised (by means of
compressed air), it is doubtful if there would ever have been enough water for
the fountains of Versailles to play even one day a year, as they do now every
happy Sunday, to the delight of the middle-class Parisian and the droves of
Cookites who gaze on them with wonder-opened eyes.
The water was led from the Machine de Marly to Versailles by a conduit of
thirty-six arches where, upon reaching a higher level than the gardens, it flowed
by gravity to the fountains and basins below. This aqueduct was six hundred
and forty-three metres long, and twenty-three metres high. It was a work which
would have done credit to the Romans.
A far greater romantic sentiment attaches itself to the royal chateau of Marly-le-
Roi than to the utilitarian "Machine," by which the suburb is best known to-day.

The history of Marly-le-Roi appears from the chronicles the most complicated
to unravel of that of any of the kingly suburbs of old Paris, though in the days of
the old locomotion a townlet twenty-six kilometres from the capital was hardly
to be thought of as a suburb.
Marly-le-Roi, at any rate, with Marly-le-Bourg and Marly-le-Chatel, was a
royal dwelling from the days of Thierry III (678). The neighbouring region had
been made into a countship by the early seventeenth century, and Louis XIV
acquired it as his right in exchange for Neuphle-le-Chateau in 1693,
incorporating it into the domain of Versailles.
By this time it had become known as Marly-le-Roi, in distinction to the other
bourgs, and the king built a chateau-royal, variously known as the Palais and the
Ermitage. For a fact it was neither one thing nor the other, according to accepted
definition, but rather a group of a dozen dependent pavilions distributed around
a central edifice, the whole straggling off into infinite and manifestly unlovely
proportions. It was as the sun surrounded by the zodiac.
Isolated on a monticule by the river bank the chateau overlooked its brood of
small pavilions, which in a way formed an entresol, or foyer, leading to the
Pavilion Royal. All were connected by iron trellises, en berceau, and the effect
must have been exceedingly bizarre; certainly theatrical.
The four faces of these pavilions were frescoed, and balustrades and vases at the
corners were the chief architectural decorations.
The royal pavilion consisted within of four vestibules on the ground floor, each
leading to a grand apartment in the centre. In each of the four angles was a
"self-contained" apartment of three or four rooms. What this royal abode lacked
in beauty it made up for in convenience.
Each of the satellite pavilions was occupied by a high personage at court. The
Chapel and the Corps de Garde were detached from the chateau proper, and
occupied two flanking wings.
The plans of the "Palais-Chateau-Ermitage" of Marly-le-Roi were from the
fertile brain of Mansart, and were arranged with considerable ingenuity, if not
taste, generously interspersed with lindens and truly magnificent garden plots.
There was even a cascade, or rather a tumbling river (according to the French
expression), for it fell softly over sixty-three marble steps, forming a sort of
wrinkled sheet of water, which must indeed have been a very charming feature.
It cost a hundred thousand écus to merely lead the water up to it. The expenses

of the Pavilion de Marly, in the ten years from 1680 to 1690, amounted to
4501279 livres, 12 sols, 3 deniers. From this one may well judge that it was no
mean thing.
The honour of being accounted a person of Marly in those times was accredited
as a great distinction, for it went without saying in that case one had something
to do with affairs of court, though one might only have been a "furnisher." To be
a courtier of Louis XIV, or to be a pensionnaire at Versailles, could hardly have
carried more distinction.
The court usually resided at Marly from Wednesday until Saturday, and as "the
game" was the thing it is obvious that the stakes were high.
The vogue of the day was gaming at table, and Marly, of all other suburban
Paris palaces, was an ideal and discreet place for it. "High play and midnight
suppers were the rule at Marly." This, one reads in the court chronicle, and
further that: "The royal family usually lost a hundred thousand écus at play at
each visit." One "gentleman croupier" gained as much as three thousand louis at
a single sitting.
Madame de Maintenon was the real ruler of Marly in those days; she had
appropriated the apartments originally intended for the queen, from which there
was a private means of communication to the apartments of the king, and
another forming a sort of private box, overlooking the royal chapel.
Little frequented by Louis XV, and practically abandoned by Louis XVI, the
palace at Marly was sold during the Revolution, after which it was stripped of
its art treasures, many of which adorn the gardens of the Tuileries to-day; the
great group of horses at the entrance to the Champs Elysées came from the
watering place of Marly.
Actually, the royal pavilion at Marly has been destroyed, and there remain but
the most fragmentary, unformed heaps of stones to tell the tale of its ample
proportions in the days of Louis XIV and de Maintenon.
The park is to-day the chief attraction of the neighbourhood, like the one at
Saint Cloud, which it greatly resembles. Across the park lies the great highway
from the capital to Versailles, over which so many joyous cavalcades were wont
to amble or gallop in the days of gallantry. The pace is not more sober to-day,
but gaily caparisoned horses and gaudy coaches have given way to red and
yellow "Rois des Belges," the balance lying distinctly in favour of the former
mode of conveyance, so far as picturesqueness is concerned.

The Forêt de Marly is very picturesque, but of no great extent. Formerly it
enclosed many shooting-boxes belonging to the nobles of the court, of which
those of Montjoie and Desert de Retz were perhaps the most splendid.
On the Versailles road was the Chateau de Clagny, a royal maison de plaisance,
of an attractive, but trivial, aspect, though its architecture was actually of a
certain massiveness. Its gardens and the disposition of its apartments pleased
the king's fancy when he chose to pass this way, which was often. He is said to
have personally spent over two million francs on the property. It must have been
of some pretensions, this little heard of Chateau de Clagny, for in a single year
ten thousand livres were expended on keeping the gardens. To-day it is non-
existent.

CHAPTER XIV
SAINT CLOUD AND ITS PARK

The historic souvenirs of Saint Cloud and its royal palace are many and varied,
though scarcely anything tangible remains to-day of the fabric so loved by
Francis I and Henri II, and which was, for a fact, but a magnificent country-
house, originally belonging to the Archbishops of Paris.
To-day the rapid slopes of the hillsides of Saint Cloud are peopled with a
heterogeneous mass of villas of what the Parisian calls the "coquette" order, but
which breathe little of the spirit of romance and gallantry of Renaissance times.
Saint Cloud is simply a "discreet" Paris suburb, and the least said about it, its
villas and their occupants to-day, the better.
The little village of Saint Cloud which is half-hidden in the Forest of Rouvray,
was sacked and burned by the English after the battle of Poitiers, and then built
up anew and occupied by the French monarchs in the reign of Charles VI. It
was he who built the first chateau de plaisance here in which the royal family
might live near Paris and yet amid a sylvan environment.
After this came the country-house of the Archbishops of Paris that Henri II,
when he tired of it, tore down and erected a villa in the pseudo-Italian manner
of the day, and built a fourteen-arch stone bridge across the Seine, which was a
wonder of its time.
The banker Gondi, after huddling close to royalty, turned over an establishment
which he had built to Catherine de Médici, who made use of it whenever she
wished to give a country fête or garden party. By this time the whole aspect of
Saint Cloud was royal.
It was within this house that the unhappy, and equally unpopular, Henri III was
cut down by the three-bladed knife of the monk Jacques Clément. The incident
is worth recounting briefly here because of the rapidity with which history was
made by a mere fanatical knife-thrust. With the death of Henri III came the
extinction of the House of Valois.

As the king sat in the long gallery of the palace playing at cards, on August 1,
1589, his cloak hanging over his shoulder, a little cap with a flower stuck in it
perched over one ear, and suspended from his neck by a broad blue ribbon a
basketful of puppies, an astrologer by the name of Osman was introduced to
amuse the royal party.
"They tell me you draw horoscopes," remarked the king.
"Sire, I will tell yours, if you will, but the heavens are unpropitious."

"Just over Meudon is a star which shines very brightly," continued the
astrologer, "it is that of Henri de Navarre. But look, your Majesty, another star
burns brilliantly for a moment and then disappears, mayhap it is your own."
"If ever a man had a voice hoarse with blood it is that astrologer," said the king.
"Away with him."
"If the Valois Henri doesn't die before the setting of another sun, I'll never cast
horoscope more," said the astrologer as he was hustled across the courtyard and
out into the highroad.
As he left, a man in a monk's garb begged to be admitted to the king's presence.
It was Jacques Clément, the murderous monk, a wily Dominican, bent on a
mission which had for its object the extinction of the Valois race.
While the king was reading a letter which the monk had presented the latter
stabbed him deep in the stomach.
Swooning, the king had just time to cry out: "Ha! le mechant moine: Il m'a tué,
qu'on le tue."
The murderer in turn was struck down forthwith and his body, thrown from the
windows of the palace, was écartelé by four white horses, which is the neat
French way of saying "drawn and quartered."
It was an imposing cortège which wound down from the heights of Saint Cloud
and followed the river bank to Saint Germain, Poissy and thence to Compiègne,
conveying all that was mortal of Henri III, the least popular of all the race of
Valois. Following close behind the bier were Henri IV and his suite, the
favourites d'Epernon, Laschant, Dugastz and an impressive soldiery.

After the death of Henri III, Henri de Navarre, who played a not unpicturesque
part in the funeral ceremonies, installed himself in a neighbouring property
known as the Maison du Tillet. Thus it is seen that the royal stamp of the little
bourg of Saint Cloud was never wanting—not until the later palace and most of
the town were drenched with kerosene and set on fire by the Prussians in 1871.
The "Maison de Gondi" came, by a process of acquisition, and development, in
time, to be the royal palace of Saint Cloud. Its overloaded details of Italian
architecture were brightened up a bit by the surroundings planned and executed
by the landscapist Le Notre and the life of the court in its suburban retreat took
on a real and genuine brilliance which under the restraint of the gloomy walls of
the Louvre and Paris streets could hardly have been.
The brightest light shining over Saint Cloud at this time was the radiance shed
by the brilliant Henriette d'Angleterre. Her reign as a social and witty queen of
the court was brief. She died at the age of twenty-six, poisoned at the instigation
of the Chevalier de Lorraine whom she had caused to be exiled. This was the
common supposition, but Louis XIV was afterwards able to prove (?) his
brother innocent of the crime.
The gazettes of the seventeenth century recount many of the fêtes given at Saint
Cloud by Monsieur on the occasion of his marriage to the Princesse Palatine in
1671. One of the most notable of these was that given for Louis XIV, wherein
the celebrated cascades—an innovation of Le Notre—were first brought to
view.
Mansart was called in and a great gallery intended for fêtes and ceremonies was
constructed, and Mignard was given the commission for its decorations.
Monsieur died within the walls of the palace to which he had added so many
embellishments, as also did his second wife. Three royalties dead of ambition,
one might well say, for their lives were neither tranquil nor healthful. They went
the pace.
The regent journeyed out from Paris to this riverside retreat to receive the Tzar
Peter in 1717, and in 1752 Louis Philippe d'Orleans set about to give a fête
which should obscure the memory of all former events of a like nature into
oblivion. How well he succeeded may be a matter of varying opinion, for the
French have ever been prodigally lavish in the conduct of such affairs. At all
events the occasion was a notable one.

The predilection of royalty for Saint Cloud was perhaps not remarkable, all
things considered, for it was, and is, delightfully environed, and about this time
the Duc d'Orleans secretly married the Marquise de Montesson and installed her
in a habitation the "plus simple," a mere shack, one fancies, costing six millions.
The nouveau riche of to-day could scarcely do the thing with more éclat.
The Revolution took over the park of Saint Cloud and its appurtenances and
donated them to the democracy—"for the pleasure of the people," read the
decree.
On the eighteenth Brumaire, the First Republic blinked itself out in the Palais de
Saint Cloud, and the Conseil de Cinq Cents installed itself therein under the
Directoire. Bonaparte, returning from Egypt, arrived at Saint Cloud just as
Lemercier was dissolving the Conseil. Seeing trouble ahead he commanded
Murat to clear the chamber by drawn bayonets. He kept his light shining just a
bit ahead of the others, did Napoleon. His watchword was initiative. Deputies
clambered over each other in their haste to escape by stairway, door and
window, and Bonaparte saw himself Consul without opposition—for ten years
—for life.
The royal residences were put at Napoleon's disposition and he wisely chose
Saint Cloud for summer; Saint Cloud the cradle of his powers. As a restorer and
rebuilder of crumbling monuments Napoleon was a master, as he was in the
destructive sense when he was in the mood, and changes and additions were
made at Saint Cloud which for comfort and convenience put it in the very front
rank of French royal residences.
In March, 1805, Pope Pius VII baptised, amid a grand pomp and ceremony, in
the chapel of the palace, the son of Louis Bonaparte, and five years afterwards
(April 1, 1810), the same edifice saw the religious marriage of Napoleon with
Marie Louise.

The Gardens of Saint Cloud
On March 31, 1810, a strange animation dominated all the confines of the
palace. It was the occasion of the celebration of Napoleon's civil marriage with
Marie Louise. They did not enter the capital until three days later for the
ceremonial which united the daughter of the emperors who were descendants of
the Roman Cæsars, to the "Usurper," who was now for the first time to rank
with the other crowned heads of Europe.
The cortège which accompanied their majesties from Saint Cloud to Paris was a
pageant which would take pages to describe. The reader of these lines is
referred to the impassioned pages of the works of Frederic Masson for ample
details.
A hundred thousand curiosity seekers had come out from Paris and filled the
alleys of the park to overflowing. Music and dancing were on every hand.
Mingled with the crowd were soldiers of all ranks brilliantly clad in red, blue
and gold. "These warriors were a picturesque, obtrusive lot," said a chronicler;
"after having invaded Austria they acclaim the Austrian."
In 1815 the capitulation of Paris was signed at Saint Cloud. The gardens were
invaded by a throng which gave them more the aspect of an intrenched camp

than a playground of princes. A brutal victor had climbed booted and spurred
into the bed of the great Napoleon and on arising pulled the bee-embroidered
draperies down with him and trampled them under foot. Was this a proper
manifestation of victory?
At this period another great fête was given in the leafy park of Saint Cloud, a
fête which French historians have chiefly passed over silently. The host on this
occasion was the Prince of Schwartzenburg; the principal guests the foreign
sovereigns, gloating over the downfall of the capital.
Louis XVIII, after removing the traces of this desolate invasion, took up his
residence here on June 18, 1817, and in the following year built the stables and
the lodgings of the Gardes du Corps. In 1820 the chapel begun by Marie
Antoinette was finished and the Jardin du Trocadero constructed.
Charles X in his brief reign built, on the site of an old Ursulin convent, further
quarters intended for the personnel of the court. The ensemble ever took on an
increasing importance. At this time were laid out the gardens between the
cascades and the river, which, to some slight extent, to-day, suggest the former
ample magnificence of the park as it faced upon the river. Leading through this
lower garden was the Avenue Royale extending to the chateau.
Saint Cloud for Charles X, in spite of his first interest therein, could have been
but an unhappy memory for here he signed the abdication which brought about
his fall. He left his palace at Saint Cloud on July 30, 1830, at three o'clock in the
morning, just as day was breaking through the mists of the valley. He
succumbed, the last of the Bourbons, on the same spot on which Henri IV, as
chief of the house, had first been saluted as king.
Louis Philippe divided his time between Neuilly and Saint Cloud, and lent his
purse and his enthusiasm to elaborating to a very considerable extent both the
palace and its surroundings.
Napoleon III made Saint Cloud his preferred summer residence, and was
actually beneath the palace roof when the Prussian horde commenced its march
on the capital of Clovis. He left Saint Cloud on July 27, to take personal
command of the Army of the Rhine at Metz.
As did Charles X, Napoleon III ceased to be sovereign of the French by
enacting the final scene in his royal career in the Palais de Saint Cloud. Never
again was the palace to give shelter to a French monarch. The empress left
precipitately after the disaster of Woerth, and two months after the torch of

arson made a ruin of all the splendour of the palace and its dependencies. The
inhabitants of the little city, which had grown up around the confines of the
palace, fled in refuge to Versailles during the armistice. Scarcely an old house
was preserved in all the town.
Among the chefs d'œuvres of art which perished in the flames were the fine
works of Mignard—above all, the magnificent Galerie d'Apollon—the paintings
of LeMoyne, Nacret, Leloir, the marines of Joseph Vernet and innumerable
objects of art which had been gathered together for the embellishment of Saint
Cloud by the later monarchs. Some few treasures were saved by the care of the
Crown Prince of Prussia, and some vases, chairs and statues were appropriated
and packed off across the Rhine as the plunder of war.
The park of Saint Cloud to-day contains nearly four hundred hectares, the
public park and the "preserve." From it spreads out one of the loveliest
panoramas in the neighbourhood of Paris, alleyed vistas leading seemingly to
infinity, with a sprinkling of statues still flanking the Jardin du Trocadero.
From the town one enters the park through a great iron gate from the Place
Royale, or by the Avenue du Chateau, which lands one on the terraces where
once stood the royal palace.

The Cascades at Saint Cloud
From Ville d'Avray and from Sevres there are also entrances to the great park,
while to the latter runs an avenue connecting the "preserve" of Saint Cloud with
the wilder, more rugged Bois de Meudon.
Actually the surroundings of Saint Cloud's great park are the least bit tawdry.
Here and there are booths and tents selling trashy souvenirs, and even more
unpleasant-looking articles of food and drink, while fringing the river, and some
of the principal avenues approaching the cascade, are more pretentious
restaurants and eating houses which are royal in name and their prices if nothing
else.

The cascades are for the masses the chief sight of Saint Cloud to-day. Historical
souvenir plays little part in the minds of those who only visit a monumental
shrine to be amused, and so the falling waters of Saint Cloud's cascade, like the
gushing torrents of Versailles' fountains, are the chief incentives to a holiday for
tens of thousands of small Paris shopkeepers who do not know that a royal
palace was ever here, much less that it had a history.
There is an upper and a lower cascade, an artificial water ingeniously tumbled
about according to the conception of one Lepaute, an architect of the time of the
reign of Louis XIV.
Mansart designed the architectural attributes of the lower cascade and scores
considerably over his colleague. Circular basins and canals finally lead the
water off to a still larger basin lower down where it spouts up into the air to a
height of some forty odd metres at a high pressure. This is the official
description, but it is hard to get up any sympathy or enthusiasm over the thing,
either considered as a work of art or as a diversion. Frankly, then, Saint Cloud's
chief charm is its site and its dead and half-forgotten history. The "Tramp
Abroad" and "Rollo" and "Uncle George" knew it better than we, because in
those days the palace existed in the real, whereas we take it all on faith and
regret (sometimes) that we did not live a couple of generations ago.
Bellevue, on the banks of the Seine, just before reaching Saint Cloud, owes its
origin (a fact which the great restaurant of the Pavillon Bleu has made the most
of in its advertisements), to a caprice of Madame de Pompadour. She liked the
point of view (as do so many diners on the restaurant terrace to-day), and built a
"rendezvous-chateau" on the hillside, a half-way house, as it were, where Louis
XV might be at his ease on his journeyings to and from the capital.
The Pompadour was able to borrow a force of eight hundred workmen from the
king for as long as was necessary to carry out her ambitious projects at Bellevue
and on November 25, 1750, she had a house-warming in her modest villa
(demolished in 1794) and pendit la cremaillère with a ceremony whose chief
entertainment was the dancing of a ballet significantly entitled "L'Amour
Architect."
Neighbouring upon Saint Cloud is a whole battery of hallowed, historical spots
associated with the more or less royal dwellings of the French monarchs and
their favourites. It was but a comparatively short distance to Versailles, to Saint
Germain, to Maintenon and to Rambouillet, and the near-by Louveciennes was
literally strewn with the most charming country-houses, which, in many cases,

kings paid for and made free use of, though indeed the accounts for the same
may not have appeared in the public budgets, at least not under their proper
names.
At the summit of the hill which gives the town its name was a chateau
belonging originally to Madame la Princesse de Conti, and opposite the railway
station of to-day, with its prosaic and unlovely surroundings, was a magnificent
property belonging to Maréchal Magnan, and the Pavillon du Barry, built by the
architect Ledoux to the orders of Louis XV, who would provide a convenient
nest in the neighbourhood of Saint Cloud for his latest favourite. To-day the
pavilion exists in name, somewhat disfigured to be sure, but still reminiscent of
its former rather garish outlines, so on the whole it cannot be said to have
suffered greatly from an esthetic point of view. The property came finally to be
included as a part of the estate of Pierre Laffitte, though still known, as it
always has been, as the Pavillon du Barry.

CHAPTER XV
VERSAILLES: THE GLORY OF FRANCE

"Glorieuse, monumentale et monotone
La façade de pierre effrite, au vent qui passe
Son chapiteau friable et sa guirlande lasse
En face du parc jaune ou s'accoude l'automne.
* * * * * *
Mais le soleil, aux vitres d'or qu'il incendie
Y semble rallumer interieurement
Le sursaut, chaque soir de la Gloire engourdi."
These lines of Henri de Régnier explain the aspect of the Versailles of to-day
better than any others ever written.
Versailles is a medley of verdure, a hierarchy of bronze and a forest of marble.
This is an expression full of anomalies, but it is strictly applicable to Versailles.
Its waters, jets and cascades, its monsters, its Tritons and Valhalla of marble
statues set off the artificial background in a manner only to be compared to a
stage setting—a magnificent stage setting, but still palpably unreal.
Yes, Versailles is sad and grim to-day; one hardly knows why, for its memories
still live, and the tangible evidences of most of its great splendour still stand.
"Voici tes ifs en cone et tes tritons joufflus
Tes jardins composés où Louis ne vient plus,
Et ta pompe arborant les plumes et les casques."
It is not possible to give here either an architectural review or a historical
chronology of Versailles; either could be made the raison d'être for a weighty
volume.
The writer has confined himself merely to a more or less correlated series of
patent facts and incidents which, of itself, shows well the futility of any other
treatment being given of a subject so vast within the single chapter of a book.
The history of Versailles is a story of the people and events that reflected the
glory and grandeur of the Grand Monarque of the Bourbons and made his

palace and its environs a more sublime expression of earthly pomp than
anything which had gone before, or has come to pass since.
Versailles, after its completion, became the perfect expression of the decadence
and demoralization of the old régime. It can only be compared to the relations
between du Barry and the young Marie Antoinette, who was all that was
contrary to all for which the former stood.
That the court of Louis XV was artificially brilliant there is no doubt. It was this
that made it stand out from the sombre background of the masses of the time. It
was a dazzling, human spectacle, and Versailles, with its extravagant,
superficial charms, carried it very near to the brink of ruin, though even in its
most banal vulgarities there was a certain sense of ambitious sincerity. The
people of the peasant class lived as animals, "black, livid and scorched by the
sun." The sense of all this penetrated readily even to Versailles, so that La
Pompadour or Louis, one or the other of them, or was it both together, cried out
instinctively: "Apres nous le deluge."
The intricacies of the etiquette of the daily life of the king, his follies and
fancies, made the history of Versailles the most brilliant of that of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—certainly it was the most opulent. The
manners of the time were better than the morals, and if good taste in art and
architecture had somewhat fallen there is no doubt but that a charming fantasy
often made up for a lack of estheticism.
The story of the palace, the park, the king and his court are so interwoven that
no résumé of the story of one can ignore that of any of the others. The king and
court present themselves against this background with an intimacy and a
clearness which is remarkable for its appeal to one's curiosity. It is a long, long
day of life which begins with the petit lever and only ends with the grand
coucher.
If there was ever a Castle of Indolence and Profligacy it was Versailles, though
indeed it is regarded as the monarchy's brilliant zenith. The picture is an
unforgetable one to any who have ever read its history or seen its stones.
In the year 1650, Martial de Lomenci, one of the ministers of Charles IX, was
the Seigneur of Versailles, but at the will of Catherine de Médici he was
summarily strangled that she might get possession of the property and make a
present of it to her favourite, Albert de Gondi, Maréchal de Retz.

About 1625 Louis XIII had caused a small hunting pavilion to be built near by
and, by degrees, acquiring more land took it into his head to erect something
more magnificent in the way of a country-house, though the real conception of a
suburban Paris palace only came with Louis XIV.
Levau, the latter's architect, made the necessary alterations to the structure
already existing, and little by little the more magnificent project known in its
completed form to-day was evolved. War not being actually in progress, or
imminent, great bodies of soldiery were set at work with pick and shovel, and at
one time thirty thousand had laid aside their sabres and muskets for the more
peaceful art of garden-making under the direction of Le Notre.
In three decades the sum total of the chief roll of expenses of the palace and its
dependencies reached eighty-one million, one hundred and fifty-one thousand,
four hundred and fourteen livres, nine sols and two deniers. It is perhaps even
more interesting to know that of this vast sum more than three millions went for
marble, twenty-one millions for masonry, two and a half millions for the
rougher woodwork and a like sum for marquetry. Other additional "trifling"
embellishments of Versailles and the Trianon during the same period counted up
another six million and a half.
The expense of these works was enormous on all sides. Water being required for
the purpose of supplying the fountains it was proposed that the waters of the
Eure should be turned from their original bed and made to pass through
Versailles, and the enterprise was actually begun. Beyond the gardens was
formed the Little Park, about four leagues around, and beyond this lay the Great
Park, measuring twenty leagues around and enclosing several forest villages.
The total expenses of these works may never have been exactly known, but they
must have been immense, that is certain, and have even been estimated at as
much as one billion francs. The works were so far completed in 1664 that the
first Versailles fête was given to consecrate the palace. In honour of this event
Molière composed "La Princesse d'Elide."
The improvements, however, were continued, and in 1670, Levau, dying, was
succeeded by his nephew, Jules Hardouin Mansart, who wished to destroy the
chateau of Louis XIII and erect one uniform building. Louis XIV, out of respect
to his father, would not allow Mansart's project to be carried out and therefore
alterations were only made in the court by surrounding it on the western side
with the magnificent buildings now forming the garden front. The southern
wing was subsequently added for the accommodation of the younger members

of the royal family. In 1685 the northern wing was erected to meet the
requirements of the attachés of the court. The chapel was commenced in 1699
and finished in 1710.
Louis XIV took up his residence in the palace in 1681 with Madame de
Montespan, and, thirty-five years afterwards, died there, the reigning favourite
then being Madame de Maintenon. During this time Versailles was the theatre
of many extraordinary scenes. Louis XV was born here but did not take up his
residence here until after he was of age. Here it was that his favourites Madame
de Chateauroux, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry found
themselves most at home. It was under the direction of this monarch that the
theatre was built in the northern wing, and was formally opened on the occasion
of the marriage of the dauphin, Louis XVI, in 1770.
Towards the end of the reign of Louis XV a new wing and pavilion were added
on the northern side of the principal court, and it was proposed to build across
the court a new front in the same uniform style. The idea could not be carried
out in consequence of the troublous times of Louis XVI and the enormous
estimated expense. The Revolution intervened and Versailles remained closed
until it was reopened by the first Napoleon, who, however, was unable to take
up his residence in it on account of his frequent campaigns afield.
At the Restoration Louis XVIII, as the representative of the ancient monarchy,
wished to make Versailles the seat of the court, but was deterred from doing so
by the appalling previous expense. During the reigns of both Napoleon and
Louis XVIII considerable sums were expended in its refurbishing so that it was
not wholly a bygone when finally the French authorities made of it, if not the
chief, at least the most popular monument historique of all France.
And yet the aspect of Versailles is sadly wearying. To-day Versailles is lonely;
one is haunted by the silence and the bareness, if not actual emptiness. Only
once in seven years does the old palace take on any air of the official life of the
Republic, and that is when the two legislative bodies join forces and come to
Versailles to vote for the new president. For the rest of the time it is deserted,
save for the guardians and visitors, a memory only of the splendours imagined
and ordained by Louis XIV.
For nearly a century the master craftsmen of a nation conspired to its
beatification, and certainly for gorgeousness and extravagance Versailles has
merited any encomiums which have ever been expended upon it. It was made

and remade by five generations of the cleverest workers who ever lived, until it
took supreme rank as the greatest storehouse of luxurious trifles in all the world.
One wearies though of the straight lines and long vistas of Versailles, the
endless repetition of classical motives, which, while excellent, each in its way,
do pall upon one in an inexplicable fashion. It possesses, however, a certain
dignity and grace in every line. This is a fact which one can not deny. It is
expressive of—well, of nothing but Versailles, and the part it played in the life
of its time.
The millions for Versailles were obtained in ways too devious and lengthy to
follow up here. Even Louis XIV began to see before the end the condition into
which he had led the nation, though he punished every one who so much as
hinted at his follies. Vauban, "the hero of a hundred sieges," published a book
on the relations between the king and court and the tax-paying masses and was
disgraced forever after, dying within a few months of a broken heart that he
should have been so impotent in attempting to bring about a reform.
The life of the king at Versailles had little of privacy in it. From his rising to his
going to bed he was constantly in the hands of his valets and courtiers, even
receiving ambassadors of state while he was still half hidden by the heavy
curtains of his great four-poster. They had probably been waiting hours in the
Salon de l'Œl de Bœuf before being admitted to the kingly presence.
It was at this period that Michael Chamillard, the Minister of War, introduced
billiards into France by the way of Versailles. He played with Louis XIV and
pleased him greatly, but Chamillard was no statesman, as history and the
following lines from his epitaph point out.
"Ci git le fameux Chamillard
De son Roy le pronotaire
Qui fut un heros au billard
Un zero dans le Ministère."
This apartment of the Œil de Bœuf was the ancient Cabi du Conseil. It is a
wonderfully decorated apartment, and its furnishings, beyond those which are
actually built into the fabric, are likewise of a splendour and good taste which it
is to be regretted is not everywhere to be noted in the vast palace of Louis XIV.
The garnishings of the chimney-piece alone would make any great room
interesting and well furnished, and the great golden clock, finely chiselled and
brilliantly burnished, is about the most satisfactory French clock one ever saw,

marking, as it does, in its style, the transition between that of Louis XIV and
Louis XV.
Versailles, in many respects, falls far short to-day of the ideal; its very bigness
and bareness greatly detract from the value of the historic souvenir which has
come down to us. Changes could undoubtedly be made to advantage, and to this
point much agitation has lately been directed, particularly in cutting out some of
the recently grown up trees which have spoiled the classic vistas of the park,
and the removal of those ugly equestrian statues which the Monarchy of July
erected.
Versailles only came under Napoleon's cursory regard for a brief moment. He
hardly knew whether he would care to make his home here or not, but ordered
his architects to make estimates for certain projects which he had conceived and
when he got them was so staggered at their magnitude that he at once threw
over any idea that he may have had of making it his dwelling.
The Revolution had stripped the palace quite bare; no wonder that the emperor
balked at the cost of putting it in order. Napoleon may have had his regrets for
he made various allusions to Versailles while exiled at Saint Helena, but then it
was too late.
Louis Philippe took a matter-of-fact view of the possible service that the vast
pile might render to his family and accordingly spent much money in a great
expanse of gaudy wall decorations which are there to-day, thinking to make of it
a show place over which might preside the genius of his sons.
These acres of meaningless battle-pieces, Algerian warfare and what not are
characteristic of the "Citizen-King" whose fondness for red plush, green repp
and horsehair sofas was notable. What he did at Versailles was almost as great a
vandalism against art as that wrought by the Revolution.
Last scene of all:—Under Lebrun's magnificent canopied ceiling, where the
effigy of Louis XIV is being crowned by the Goddess of Glory, and the German
eagle sits on a denuded tree trunk screaming in agony and beating his wings in
despair, William of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of United Germany. It was
almost as great an indignity as France ever suffered; the only greater was when
the Prussians marched through the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile. That was, and
is, the Frenchman's—the Parisian's, at all events—culminating grief.
The apartment referred to is the Grand Galerie des Glaces (or Galerie Louis
XIV), which is accredited as one of the most magnificently appointed rooms of

its class in all the world. It is nearly two hundred and fifty feet in length, nearly
forty feet in width, and forty-three feet in height. It is lighted by seventeen large
arched windows, which correspond with arched niches on the opposite wall
filled with mirrors—hence the name.
Sixty Corinthian columns of red marble with bases and capitals of gilt bronze
fill up the intervening wall spaces. The vaulted ceiling by Lebrun is divided into
eighteen small compartments and nine of much larger dimensions, in which are
allegorically represented the principal events in the history of Louis XIV, from
the Peace of the Pyrenees to that of Nymeguen.
It was in this splendid apartment that Louis XIV displayed the grandeur of
royalty in its highest phase and such was the luxury of the times, such the
splendour of the court, that its immense size could hardly contain the crowd of
courtiers that pressed around the monarch.
Several splendid fêtes took place in this great room, of which those of the
marriage of the Duc de Bourgogne in 1697 and that given on the arrival of
Marie Antoinette were the most brilliant.
Following are three pen-pictures of this historic palace.
The Versailles of Long Ago. It was to Versailles that the Grand Roi repaired
after his stern chase of the Spaniards across Flanders; through the wood of Saint
Germain and over those awful cobblestones which Parisians know so well to-
day rolled the gilded carrosse of the king. He had already been announced by a
runner who had also brought news of the latest victory. Courtiers and populace
alike crowded the streets of the town in an effort to acquire a good place from
which to see the arrival of the king. Intendants and servitors were giving orders
on all sides, frequently contradictory, and gardeners were furbishing up the
alleyed walks and flower beds in readiness for Sa Majesté Louis Quatorze and
all his little world of satellites. A majestic effervescence bubbled over all, and
the bourgeoisie enjoyed itself hugely, climbing even on roof-tops and gables in
the town without the palace gates.
The Roi Soleil came at last to his "well-beloved city of Versailles." "He arrived
in a cloud of golden dust," said a writer of the time, and any who have seen
Versailles blazing and treeless in the middle of a long, hot summer, will know
what it was like on that occasion.
Cannons roared, and the sound of revelry and welcoming joy was everywhere to
be heard.

The Versailles of Yesterday. The lugubrious booming of cannons came rolling
over the meanderings of the Seine from the capital. The hard-heads of Paris
would understand nothing; they would make flow never-ceasing rivers of blood.
The national troops were well-nigh impotent; it was difficult to shoot down
your own flesh and blood at any time; doubly so when your native land has not
yet been evacuated by a venturesome enemy. It was the time of the Commune.
Traffic at Versailles was of that intensity that circulation was almost impossible.
In spite of a dismal April rain the town was full of all sorts and conditions of
men. The animation of the crowd was feverish, but it was without joy. A convoy
of prisoners passed between two lines of soldiers with drawn bayonets. They
were Frenchmen, but they were Communards. It was but a moment before they
were behind the barred doors of the barracks which was to be their prison,
packed like a troop of sheep for the slaughter. Versailles itself, the palace and
the town, were still sad. The rain still fell in torrents.
The Versailles of To-day. Roses, begonias, geraniums, the last of a long hot
summer, still shed their fragrant memories over the park of Versailles. In the
long, sober alleys a few leaves had already dropped from the trees above,
marking the greensward and the gravel like a tapis d'orient, red and green and
gold.
Flora and Bacchus in their fountains seemed less real than ever before, more
sombre under the pale, trickling light through the trees. A few scattered visitors
were about, sidling furtively around the Trianon, the Colonnade and the Bosquet
d'Apollon; and the birds of the wood were even now bethinking of their winter
pilgrimage. Versailles was still sad. The last rays of the setting sun shot forth
reflected gold from the windows of the chateau and soon the silver blue veil of a
September twilight came down like a curtain of gauze.
Versailles, the Versailles of other days, is gone forever. Who will awaken its
echoes in after years? When will the Trianon again awake with the coquetries of
a queen? When will the city of the Roi Soleil come again into its own proud
splendour?
The sun has set, the great iron gates of the courtyard are closed, the palace and
all therein sleeps.
"Allon nous en d'ici: laissons la place aux ombres."

CHAPTER XVI
THE GARDENS OF VERSAILLES AND THE TRIANONS

Versailles without its court of marble, its fountains, its gardens and its park, and
the attendant Grand and Petit Trianons, would hardly have the attraction that it
has to-day.
The ensemble is something of more vast and varied extent than is to be seen
elsewhere, though its aspect has somewhat changed from what it was of old,
and the crowds of Sunday and holiday visitors give the courts and alleyed walks
somewhat the aspect of a modern amusement resort.
The gardens of Versailles were but the framing of a princely dwelling created to
respond to the requirements of a court which was attempting to do things on a
grand scale. Everything was designed with most magnificent outlines;
everything was royal, in all verity—architecture, garden-making, fêtes,
receptions and promenades. What setting, then, could have been more
appropriate to the life of the times?
Versailles, the town, had never prospered, and has never proved sufficiently
attractive to become a popular suburb; and, though to-day it passed the mark of
half a hundred thousand population, it never would have existed at all had it not
been for the palace of Louis XIV.
Were it not for the palace and its attributes, Versailles would have absolutely no
memories for visitors, except such as may have lunched well at the Hotel des
Reservoirs or the Hotel du Trianon. That is not everything, to be sure; but it is
something, even when one is on an historic pilgrimage.
Even in the day of Louis XVI the popular taste was changing and Versailles was
contemptuously referred to as a world of automota, of cold, unfeeling statuary
and of Noah's Ark trees and forests. There was always a certain air of self-
satisfaction about it, as there is, to-day, when the Parisian hordes come out to
see the waters play, and the sight-seers marvel at the mock splendour and the
scraps of history doled out for their delectation by none-too-painstaking
guardians.

In spite of all this, no sober-minded student of art or history will ever consider
Versailles, the palace and the park, as other than a superb and a spectacular
demonstration of the taste of the times in which it was planned, built and lived
in.
Versailles was begun in 1624 by Louis XIII, who built here a humble hunting-
lodge for the disciples of Saint Hubert of whom he was the royal head. So
humble an erection was it that the monarch referred to it simply as a "petite
maison" and paid for it out of his own pocket, a rare enough proceeding at that
epoch.
The critical Bassompierre called it a "chetif chateau," and Saint-Simon referred
to it as a "house of cards." Manifestly, then, it was no great thing. It was,
however, a comfortable country-house, surrounded by a garden and a more
ample park.
It was not Lemercier, the presiding genius of the Louvre at this time, but an
unknown by the name of Le Roy, whom Louis XIII chose as his architect.
Boyceau traced the original parterres with a central basin at a crossroads of two
wide avenues. Each of the four compartments thus made was ornamented with
broderies and trimmed hedges, and the open spaces were ingeniously filled with
parti-coloured sands, or earth. A parterre of flowers immediately adjoined the
palace and rudimentary alleys and avenues stretched off towards the wood.
Although designed by Boyceau, this work was actually executed by his nephew,
Jacques de Menours, who, with difficulty, collected his pay. His books of
account showed that in five years, from 1631 to 1636, he had drawn but once a
year a sum varying from fifteen hundred to four thousand livres while in the
same period the king had spent on the rest of the work at Versailles two hundred
and thirty-eight thousand livres, thirty-two sols, six deniers, nearly one million
one hundred thousand francs of the money of to-day.
The first of the outdoor embellishments of the palace at Versailles is the great
Cour Royale, or the Cour d'Honneur, which opens out behind the long range of
iron gates facing upon the Place d'Armes. At the foot of this entrance court is an
extension called the Cour de Marbre. This Cour de Marbre, on January 5, 1757,
was the scene of the infamous attack on Louis XV by Damiens, just as the king
was starting out for the Trianon.
A thick redingote saved the king's life; but for "this mere pin-prick," according
to Voltaire, the monarch went immediately to bed, and five times in succession

sought absolution for his sins. Sins lay heavy even on royal heads in those days.
Damiens was but a thick-witted, superstitious valet, who, more or less
persecuted by the noble employers with whom he had been in service at various
times, sought to avenge himself, not on them, but on their king, as the
figurehead of all that was rotten in the social hierarchy. Louis, heretofore known
as the "Bien Aimé," had become suddenly unpopular because of the disastrous
war against England and Germany, and his prodigal dissipation of public
moneys.

Cour de Marbre, Versailles
Stretching out behind the palace are the famous gardens, the parterres, the tapis
vert, the fountains and the grand canal, with the park of the Trianons off to the
right.
Good fortune came to Louis XIV when he found André Le Notre, for it was he
and no other who traced the general lines of the garden of the Versailles which
was to be. He laid a generous hand upon the park and forest which had
surrounded the manor of Louis XIII, and extended the garden to the furthermost
limits of his ingenuity. Modifications were rapid, and from 1664 the parterres
and the greensward took on entirely new forms and effects. The Parterre des
Reservoirs became the Parterre du Nord, and an alley of four rows of lindens

enclosed the park on all sides. The Parterre à Fleurs, or the Jardin du Roy,
between the chateau and the Orangerie, was laid out anew.
By the following year the park began to take on the homogeneity which it had
hitherto lacked. The great Rondeau, as it was called, and which became later the
Bassin du Dragon, was excavated, and the Jardin Bas, or the Nouveau Parterre,
with an oval depression, was also planned.
At one end of the park was the celebrated Menagerie du Roy, where the rare and
exotic animals collected by the monarch had "a palace more magnificent than
the home of any other dumb animals in the world." This was the first period of
formal garden construction at Versailles, and it was also the period when the
first great impetus was given to sculptural decoration.
In 1679, following a journey in Italy, Le Notre took up again the work on the
gardens at Versailles, devoting himself to the region south of the palace which
hitherto had been ignored. This was Le Notre's most prolific period.
The creations at Versailles can be divided into two distinct epochs, that before
1670 and that coming after. After Le Notre's generous design, the king and
queen were seemingly never satisfied with the endless plotting and planting
which was carried on beneath the windows of the palace, and in many instances
changed the colour schemes and even the outlines of Le Notre's original
conceptions.
The Versailles of to-day is no longer the Versailles of Louis XIII, so far as the
actual disposition of details goes. Then there was very little green grass and
much sand and gravel, a scheme of decoration which entered largely into the
seventeenth century garden. This refers principally to the general effect, for Le
Notre made much use of the enclosing battery of lindens, chestnuts and elms of
a majestic and patriarchal grandeur which have since been cut and replaced by
smaller species of trees, or not replaced at all.
No sooner were the ornamental gardens planned at Versailles than the Potager
du Roy, or fruit and vegetable garden, was created. This same garden exists to-
day with almost its former outlines. Here a soil sufficiently humid, and yet
sufficiently well drained, contributed not a little towards the success of this
most celebrated of all kitchen gardens the world has known.
The work of installing a further system of artificial drainage was immediately
begun, and the Eaux des Suisses was created, to take the place of a former
stagnant pool near by. Undoubtedly it was a stupendous work, like all the

projects launched with regard to Versailles, but, like the others, it was brought
to a speedy and successful conclusion. The details of the history of this royal
vegetable garden are fully set forth in a work published in 1690 by the son of
the designer, the Abbé Michel de la Quintinye, in two bulky volumes. "It was
meet that a royal vegetable garden should have been designed by a 'Gentleman
Gardener,'" said the faithful biographer in his foreword, and as such the man
and the work are to be considered here.
The work was accomplished by the combined efforts of a gracious talent and
the expenditure of much money, put at La Quintinye's disposition by his royal
master, who had but to put his hand deep into the coffers of the royal treasury to
draw it forth filled with gold. Critics have said that La Quintinye's ability
stopped with the preparation of the soil, and with the design of the garden,
rather than with the actual cultivation, but at all events it was he who made the
garden possible.
La Quintinye adopted Arnauld d'Andilly's method of planting fruit trees en
espalier by training them against a wall-like background, and to accomplish this
divided the garden plot, which covered an area of eight hectares (twenty acres),
into a great number of subdivisions enclosed by walls, in order to multiply to as
great an extent as possible the available space to be used for the espaliers.
Again, these same walls served to shelter certain varieties which were planted
close against them. If this Potager du Roy was not actually the first garden of its
class so laid out, it was certainly one of the most extensive and the most
successful up to that time.
The great terraces of at least two metres in width surrounded the central garden,
leaving a free area for the latter which approximated three hectares.
These terraces were divided into twenty-eight compartments, forming nine
distinct varieties of gardens.
The celebrated gardener of Louis XIV sought not only to obtain fruits and
vegetables of a superior quality and an abundant quantity, but was the first
among his kind to produce early vegetables, or primeurs, in any considerable
quantity, and, by a process of forced culture, he was able to put upon the table
of the monarch asparagus in December, lettuce in January, cauliflower in March
and strawberries in April. All these may be found at the Paris markets to-day,
and at these seasons, but the growing of primeurs for the Paris markets has
become a great industry since the time it was first begun at Versailles.

Of asparagus La Quintinye said, "It is a vegetable that only kings can ever hope
to eat."
The Potager du Roy was begun in 1678, and completed in 1683. It cost, all told,
one million one hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and eighty-three
livres of which four hundred and sixty-seven thousand three hundred and sixty-
four went for constructions in brick and stone, walls, enclosures and drains. Its
annual maintenance (1685) amounted to twenty thousand nine hundred and
ninety-nine livres. The effort proved one of great benefit to its creator, for La
Quintinye, at the completion of this work, received further commissions of a
like nature from the Prince de Condé, the Duc de Montansier, Colbert, Fouquet
and others.
So great a marvel was this vegetable garden at Versailles that it was the object
of a pilgrimage of the Doge of Venice in 1685, and of the Siamese ambassadors
in the following year. The garden has been preserved as an adjunct to Versailles
up to the present day. For two centuries its product went to the "Service de
Bouche" of the chief of state, that is, the royal dinner table; but in 1875 the
Minister of Agriculture installed there the French National Horticultural
College, which to-day, with a widened scope, has admitted ornamental plants
and trees to this famous garden. Nevertheless the general outlines have been
preserved, though certain of the terraces have disappeared, as well as many of
the walls of the original enclosure, thus reducing the number of garden plots; in
fact but sixteen distinctly defined gardens remain, including the Clos aux
Asperges.

The Potager du Roy, Versailles
The general lines of the garden design of Le Notre and Boyceau at Versailles
are to be noted to-day, but if anything the maintenance of the gardens is hardly
the equal of what it was in the time of Louis XIV and a seeming disaster has
fallen upon Versailles as these lines are being written.
The military authorities have set aside, as a site for an aerostation camp, some
twenty-five acres of the park near Rocquencourt. This is one of the loveliest
parts, shaded by magnificent trees which, presumably, will have to be
sacrificed, since, if left standing, they would certainly interfere with
maneuvering with military aeroplanes, dirigibles and balloons.

At a time when deforestation is recognized to be one of the greatest dangers that
menace a country's prosperity, one of its consequences being such inundations
as those which recently devastated Paris and the Seine valley, it is regrettable
that the forest surrounding Versailles should be depleted.
Furthermore, the realization of the project means a loss of revenue to the state
which at present derives some sixty thousand francs a year from the farming
lease of this portion of the park.
Therefore, for material considerations, as well as because Versailles and its
surroundings should be preserved intact as a noble relic of one of the grandest
periods of French history, one of the most beautiful creations of French genius,
the project attributed to the military authorities is short-sighted. To diminish the
attractions of Versailles would certainly prove an unwise policy, as the stream of
tourists, which is the chief source of profit to Versailles and its population,
would inevitably be diverted to some other channel.
Only a short time ago a Société des Amis de Versailles was created for the
purpose of safeguarding its artistic and natural beauties. The government gave
the organization its approbation and there is something delightfully ironical in
the fact that the military authorities of the same government are planning to
destroy what the society, fathered by the Ministère des Beaux Arts, was formed
to preserve.
Another modern aspect of the park of Versailles was noted during the late
winter when, after a sharp freeze, all the youth of Paris had seemingly gone out
to Versailles for the skating only to be met by a freshly-posted notice which
read:
Defense
De Patiner Par
Arrêté du 17 Decembre, 1849
These signs were posted here and there about the park, in the courtyard, on the
postern gate, on trees, everywhere. The authorities were bound that there should
be no flagrant violation of the order of 1849.

The Bassin de Latone, Versailles
"You see," said one of the park guardians, "c'est defendu; but as we are only two
and the crowd is very large we can do nothing." This was evident. Thousands
overran the Grand Canal, which at its greatest depth was scarcely more than a
yard to the bottom, and so, despite of monarchial decree, Republican France
still skates on the ornamental waters of Versailles when occasion offers.
"N'oubliez pas le petit balayeur, s'il vous plait," was as often heard as "Allez
vous-en."
On the whole it was rather a picturesque sight. A thick haze hung over the now
white "Tapis Vert," and the nude figures of the Bassin d'Apollon were clothed in
a mantle of snow, while the white-robed statues of the Allée Royale, one could
well believe, shivered as one passed.
The fountains of Versailles, the "Grands Eaux" and "Petits Eaux," which shoot
their jets in air "semi-occasionally" for the benefit of Paris's "good papas" and
their children, are distinctly popular features, and of an artistic worth neither
less nor greater than most garden accessories of the artificial order. The fact that
it costs something like ten thousand francs to "play" these fountains seems to be

the chief memory which one retains of them in operation, unless it be the
crowds which make the going and coming so uncomfortable.
The Orangerie lies just below the terrace of the Parterre du Midi, and a thousand
or more non-bearing orange trees are scattered about. They are descendants of
fifteenth century ancestors, it is claimed—but doubtfully.
The great basin of water known as the Eaux des Suisses was excavated by the
Swiss Guard of Louis XIV to serve the useful purpose of irrigating the Potager
du Roy, and as a decorative effect of great value to that part of the garden upon
which faces the fourteen-hundred-foot front of the palace.
Still farther off towards the Bois de Satory, after crossing the Tapis Vert, lie the
famous Bassins de Latone and Apollon, the Bassin du Miroir and, finally, the
Grand Canal, with one transverse branch leading to the Menagerie (now the
government stud-farm) and the other to the Trianons.

The Fountain of Neptune, Versailles

The satellite palaces known as the Grand and Petit Trianons are, like the Palace
of Versailles itself, of such an abounding historical interest that it were futile to
attempt more than a mere intimation of their comparative rank and aspect.
The rather sprawling, one-story, horseshoe-shaped villa built by Louis XIV for
Madame de Maintenon, and known as the Grand Trianon, was an architectural
conception of Mansart's.
It is worth remarking that the Grand Trianon, to-day, is in a more nearly perfect
state than it has been for long past, for the restorations lately made have
removed certain interpolations manifestly out of place.
It is due to M. de Nolhac, the Conservateur du Musée de Versailles, that this
happy amelioration has been brought about and that Mansart's admirable work
is again as it was in the days of Madame de Maintenon and those of the later
Napoleon I.
In spite of all this the Trianon of to-day is not what it was in the eighteenth
century. "Madame de Maintenon," said de Musset, "made of Versailles an
oratory, but La Pompadour turned it into a boudoir." He also called the Trianon:
"a tiny chateau of porcelain." It was, too, the boudoir of Madame de Montespan.
Louis XV, too, built, or furnished, discreet boudoirs of this order on every hand.
More than one great gallery in which his elders had done big things he divided
and subdivided into minute apartments and papered the walls, or painted them,
all colours of the rainbow, or hung them with silks or velvets.
"Don't you think my little apartment shows good taste," he asked one day of the
Comtesse de Séran at Versailles.
"Not at all," she replied, "I would much rather that the walls were hung in blue."
That particular apartment was in rose, but, since blue was the favourite colour
of the monarch, the reply was but flattering. The next time that his friend, the
Comtesse, appeared on the scene the apartment had all been done over in blue.
The monarch soon began to turn his attention to the gardens. Bowers, labyrinths
and vases and statues were inexplicably mixed as in a maze. He began to have
the "gout pastoral," his biographer has said, a vogue that Madame du Barry and
Marie Antoinette came in time to push to its limits.
The king was too ready to admire all that was suggested, all that was offered,
and the ultimate effect was—well, it was the opposite of what he hoped it to be,

though doubtless he did not realize it.

Petit Trianon
In the garden of the Grand Trianon is a great basin with a cascade flowing down
over a sort of a high altar arrangement in red and white marble called the Buffet
de l'Architecture, and evolved by Mansart. This architect certainly succeeded
much better with his purely architectural conceptions than he did with
interpolated decorative elements intended to relieve a formal landscape.
The Petit Trianon, the pride of Louis XV, was designed by the architect Gabriel,
and its reigning goddess was Marie Antoinette. Souvenirs of the unhappy queen
are many, but the caretakers are evidently bored with their duties and hustle you
through the apartments with scant ceremony that they may doze again
undisturbed in their corners.
The garden of the Petit Trianon is a veritable Jardin Anglais, that is, the
decorative portion, where sweeps and curves, as meaningless as those one sees
on banknotes and no more decorative, are found in place of the majestic lines of
the formal garden when laid out after the French manner.

The Hameau, where is the dairy where the queen played housewife and
shepherdess, is just to the rear of this bijou palace and looks stagy and unreal
enough to be the wings and back-drop of a pastoral play.
Near Versailles was the Chateau de Clagny, with a garden laid out by Le Notre,
quite the rival of many better known. Of it Madame de Sévigné wrote: "It is the
Palais d'Armide; you know the manner of Le Notre; here he has done his best."
The Couvent des Recollettes, just across the Bois de Satory, was built by Louis
XIV out of regard for the religieux whom he displaced from an edifice which
stood upon a plot which was actually needed for the palace gardens. The
Chateaux of Noisy and Molineaux were also affiliated with Versailles.
The rest of the surroundings and accessories of Versailles are mere adjunctive
details of those chief features here mentioned. To catalogue them even would be

useless since they are all set down in the guidebooks.

CHAPTER XVII
SAINT GERMAIN-EN-LAYE

Saint Germain has not the popularity of Versailles, nor the charm of
Fontainebleau, but it is more accessible than either, and, if less known and less
visited by the general mass of tourists, it is all the more delightful for that.
Saint Germain, the chateau, the town and the forest, possess a magnificent site.
Behind is a wooded background, and before one are the meanderings of the
Seine which in the summer sunlight is a panorama which is to be likened to no
other on earth. Across the river bottom run the great tree-lined roadways,
straight as the proverbial flight of the arrow, while on the horizon, looking from
the celebrated terrace, one sees to-day the silhouetted outline of Paris with the
Tour Eiffel and the dome of the Sacré Cœur as the culminating points.
The town itself is ugly and ill-paved, and heavy-booted dragoons make a
hideous noise as they clank along to and from the cavalry barracks all through
the day and night. Neither are scorching automobiles making their ways to
Trouville and Dieppe over the "Route des Quarante Sous" a pleasant feature.
One can ignore all these things, however, for what is left is of a superlative
charm.

View larger image
Saint Germain-en-Laye in the first stages of French history was but a vast
extent of forest which under Charlemagne came to the possession of the monks
of the Abbaye de Saint Germain-des-Prés. The first royal palace here was built
by King Robert in the tenth century, practically upon the site of the present
edifice. In the eleventh century there came into being another royal dwelling,
and in the twelfth century Louis-le-Gros built a chateau-fort as a protection to
the royal residence and monastery. This did not prevent the Black Prince from
very nearly burning them down on one of his bold raids, but by 1367, Charles V
re-erected the "castel" of Saint Germain-en-Laye.

The English, by coercion, induced a monk of a neighbouring establishment at
Nanterre to deliver up a set of false keys by which the great gates of the castle
were surreptitiously opened, and, for a time, the descendants of the Conqueror
held possession.
The establishment of Charles V in no way satisfying the artistic ambitions of
Francis I, that monarch gave the task of reconstruction to the architect Pierre
Chambiges, in 1539, preserving only the Saint Chapelle of Saint Louis and the
donjon.
The building must have gone forward with an extreme rapidity for at the
architect's death, in 1544, it had reached nearly the level of the rooftop.
Chambiges' successor was his son-in-law, Guillaume Guillain, who, without
changing the primitive plan, completed the work in 1548.
Saint Germain, above the first story, is essentially a construction of bricks, but
the effect is even now, as Chambiges originally intended, an edifice with its
main constructive elements of lower sustaining walls and buttresses of stone
binding together the slighter fabric, or filling, above. Although it is Renaissance
through and through, Saint Germain shows not the slightest reminiscence of
anything Italian and must be considered entirely as an achievement of French
genius.
This edifice of Francis I was more a fortress than a palace in spite of its
decorative features, and Henri II, desiring something more of a luxurious royal
residence, began what the historians and savants know as the Chateau Neuf—
the palace of to-day which stands high on the hill overlooking the winding
Seine, to which seducing stream the gardens originally descended in terraces.
Chiefly it is to Henri IV that this structure owes its distinction, for previously
work went on but intermittently, and very slowly. Henri IV brought the work to
completion and made the chateau his preferred and most prolonged place of
residence, as indeed did his successor.
It is the Chateau Neuf of the time of Henri IV which is to-day known as the
Palais de Saint Germain-en-Laye. Of the Vieux Chateau only some fragmentary
walls and piles of débris, the Pavillon Henri IV, and, in part, the old royal chapel
remain.
Actually the structure of to-day includes that part of the Hotel du Pavillon Henri
IV which is used as a restaurant.

Henri IV and Louis XIII gave Saint Germain its first great éclat as a suburban
place of sojourn, and from the comings and goings of the court of that time
there gradually grew up the present city of twenty thousand inhabitants; not all
of them of courtly manners, as one learns from a recollection of certain facts of
contemporary modern history.
During the days when Mazarin actually held the reins of state the court was
frequently at Saint Germain. Louis XIV was born here, and until Versailles and
Marly came into being he made it his principal dwelling.
It was in one of the magnificent apartments, too, midway between the angle
turrets of the façade, Louis XIII ended his unhappy existence in 1642. His own
private band of musicians played a "De Profundis" of his own composition to
waft his soul on its long journey.
The chroniclers describe one of the monarch's last conversations as follows:
"When they transport my body to Paris after my soul has flown, Laporte,
remember that place where the road turns under the hill; it is a rough road,
Laporte, and will surely shake my bones sadly if the driver does not go slowly."
Those who have journeyed out from Paris to Saint Germain by road in this later
century will appreciate the necessity for the admonition.
Louis XIV, unlike Louis XIII, detested Saint Germain beyond words, because
the towers of the Abbaye de Saint Denis, where he was destined one day to be
buried, were visible from the terrace. Louis XV was not so particular for he was
so morbid that he even loved, as he claimed himself, the scent of new-made
graves.
The arrival of Anne d'Autriche and the royal family at Saint Germain during the
war of the Fronde was one of the most dramatic incidents of the period. They
had travelled half the night, coming from the Palais Royal only to find a palace
awaiting them which was unheated and unfurnished though the time was mid-
January. Always drear and gaunt it was immeasurably so on this occasion.
Mazarin had made no provision for the queen's arrival; there, were neither beds,
tables nor linen in their proper places, no servants, no attendants of any kind,
only the guardians of the palace. The queen was obliged to take rest from her
fatigue on a folding camp bedstead, without covering of any kind. The princes
fared no better, actually sleeping on the floor.
There were plenty of mirrors and much gold gingerbread on the walls and
ceilings, but no furniture. The personal belongings which the court had brought

with them were few. No one had a change of clothing even; those worn one day
were washed the next. However the queen good-naturedly smiled through it all.
She called it "an escapade which can hardly last a week."
All Paris was by this time crying "Vive la Fronde": "Mort à Mazarin": but it
proved to be something more than a little affair of a week, as we now know.
At this period, when Anne d'Autriche was practically a prisoner at Saint
Germain, the picture made by the old chateau against its forest background was
undeniably more imposing than that which one sees to-day. The glorious forest
was not then hidden by rows of banal roof-tops, and the dull drabs of barracks
and prisons.
In the warm spring mornings the glittering façade of the chateau was brilliant as
a diamond against its setting, and the radiating avenues of the park leading from
the famous terrace stretched out into infinite vistas that were most alluring. This
effect, fortunately, is not wholly lost to-day.
At night things were as idyllic as by day. The queen and her ladies, relieved of
the dreary presence of the king who still remained at Paris, revelled in an
unwonted freedom. Concerts, suppers and dances were the rule and moonlight
cavalcades to the heart of the forest, or promenades on foot the length of the
terrace, and by some romantically disposed couples far beyond, gave a genuine
"begone, dull care" aspect to court life which was not at all possible in the
capital.
The following picture, taken from a court chronicle, might apply as well to-day
if one makes due allowance for a refulgence of myriad lamps gleaming out
Parisward as night draws in.
"It is a rare moonlight night. The queen and her ladies have emerged late on the
stately terrace of Henri IV which borders upon the forest and extends for nearly
a league along the edge of the height upon which stands the chateau.
"The queen and her brother-in-law, Gaston, Duc d'Orleans, have seated
themselves somewhat apart from the rest beside the stone balustrade which
overlooks the steep descent to the plain below. Vineyards line the hillside and
the Seine flows far beneath, the fertile river-bottom rich with groves and
orchards, villas and gardens. Still more distant sweeps away the great plain
wrapped in dark shadows punctuated here and there with great splotches of
moonlight. Of the great city beyond (the Paris of to-day, whose myriad glow-
worm lights actually do lend an additional charm) not a vestige is to be seen.

Scarcely a lantern marks the existence of a living soul in the vast expanse
below, but the moon, high in the heavens, plots out the entire landscape with a
wonderful impressiveness, and the stars topping the forest trees to the rear and
the heights which rise on the distant horizon lend their quota of romanticism,
and, as if by their scintillations, mark the almost indiscernible towers of the old
Abbey of Saint Denis to the left.
"'Oh, what a lovely night,' said the queen to her companion. Again it is the old
chronicler who speaks. 'Can the world ever appear so calm and peaceful
elsewhere?'"
This Terrasse de Henri IV, so called, is one of the most splendid and best-known
terraces in Europe, and is noted for its extent as well as for its marvellous point
of view, the whole panorama Parisward being spread out before one as if on a
map, a view which extends from the Chateau de Maisons on the left to the
Aqueduct de Marly and the heights of Louveciennes on the right, including the
Bois de Vesinet, Mont Valerian, Montmartre and the whole Parisian panorama
as far as the Coteaux de Montmorency.

The Valley of the Seine, from the Terrace at Saint Germain
This terrace, too, was the project and construction of Le Notre in 1672. It is two
and a half kilometres in length and thirty metres in width, upheld by a stone
retaining wall which is surmounted by a balustrade. It extends from the Pavillon
Henri IV to a gun battery well within the confines of the forest. Entrance from
the precincts of the palace is by the great ornamental iron gateway known as the
Grille Royale, from which an alleyed row of lindens leads to the heart of the
forest.
The record of another merry party at Saint Germain is that which recounts that
summer evening when the king and court scuttled about the park enjoying
themselves as only royalty can—when some one else pays the bills. The terrace,
the gravelled walks and the alleyed paths of the forest all led to charming and
discreet rendezvous.
So preoccupied was every one on this particular occasion that the merry-makers
had hardly a thought for their king, who, left to his own devices, sought out four
maids of honour gossiping in a bower, and, taking the mischief-loving Lauzan
into his confidence, pried upon them in the ambush of the night. They were

gossiping over the dancers at the ball of the night before when one of them
proclaimed her fancy for the agility and grace of the king above all others. It
was the first expression of "La Vallière" since she had come timidly to court.
The rest is an idyll which is found set forth in all the history books at
considerable length, and at this particular moment it was a genuine idyll, for the
king had not then become the debauched roué that he was in later life.
After Anne d'Autriche, Henriette, the widow of Charles I of England, found at
Saint Germain a comfortable and luxurious refuge.
From 1661 onward Louis XIV made frequent visits to Saint Germain and was
so taken with the charms of the neighbourhood and the immediate site that he
conjured six and a half million francs out of his Civil List, in addition to his
regular stipend, for the upkeep of this palace alone. This was robbery: modern
graft pales before this; candelabra by the pound and writing tables by the square
yard were known before the days of machine politicians.
James II of England, in 1688, found a hospitable refuge at Saint Germain,
thanks to Louis XIV, and died within the palace walls in 1701, as did his wife,
Maria d'Este, in 1718.
Louis XV and Louis XVI gave Saint Germain scarce a thought, and under the
Empire it became a cavalry school, and later, under the Restoration, sinking
lower still, it merited only the denomination of a barracks. Its culminating fall
arrived when it was turned into a penitentiary.
Napoleon III, with finer instincts, here installed a museum, and restorations and
rebuilding having gone on intermittently since that time the palace has now
taken on a certain pretence to glory. Practically the palace in its present form is
a restoration, not entirely a new building, but a rebuilding of an old one, first
begun under the competent efforts of the architect Eugene Millet, who sought to
reëstablish the edifice as it was under Francis I. The great tower has been
preserved but the corner pavilions of the period of Louis XIV have been
demolished in accord with the carrying out of this plan.
For forty years Saint Germain has been in a state of restoration, and like the
restoration of Pierrefonds it has swallowed up fantastic sums. The western
façade has been rebuilt from the chapel to the entrance portal and the last of
Mansart's pavilions, which he built to please either his own fancy or that of
Louis XIV, have been demolished. Mansart himself made way with the old
tourelles and the balustrade which rounded off the angles of the walls of the

main buildings and substituted a series of heavy, ugly maisonettes, more like the
bastions of a fortress than any adjunct to a princely dwelling.
The courtyard of the chateau is curiously disposed; "so that it may receive the
sun at all times," was the claim of its designer. It, too, has been brought back to
the state in which it was originally conceived and shorn of its encumbering
outhouses and odds and ends which served their purposes well enough when it
was a barracks or a prison, but which were a desecration to anything called by
so dignified a name as a chateau or a palace. This courtyard is to-day as it was
when the lords and ladies in the train of Charles IX strolled and even gambolled
therein.
The Chapelle de Saint Louis (1240) is in every way remarkable, especially with
respect to its great rose-window, which was found by Millet to have been
walled up by Louis XIV.
The military museum of to-day, which is enclosed by the palace walls,
possesses a remarkable collection of its kind, but has no intimate lien upon the
history of the palace.
The parterre before the palace is cut off from the forest of Saint Germain by
three ornate iron gates. It was relaid, a transformation from designs originally
conceived in 1676, by Le Notre, modified in 1750 and much reduced in size and
beauty in the nineteenth century, though later enlarged by taking three hectares
of ground from the forest and turning them into the accepted form of an English
garden.
A peninsula of a superficial area of over ten thousand acres snugly enfolded in
one of the great horseshoe bends of the Seine contains the Forêt de Saint
Germain. A line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from Saint Germain to
Poissy, following the Route de Poissy, completely cuts off this tongue of land
which is as wild and wooded to-day as in the times of Francis, the Henris and
the Louis.
The routes and allées of the forest are traced with regularity and precision, and
historians have written them down as of a length of nearly four hundred
leagues, a statement which a glance at any map of the forest will well
substantiate.
High upon its plateau sits this historic wildwood, for the most part of a soil dry
and sandy, with here and there some great mamelon (Druidical or Pagan, as the
case may be) rising somewhat above the average level. Francis I, huntsman and

lover of art and nature, did much to preserve this great forest, and Louis XIV in
his time developed its system of roads and paths, "chiefly to make hunting
easy," says history, though it is difficult to follow this. At all events the forest
remains to-day the most extensive unspoiled breathing-spot of its class near
Paris.
Within this maze of paths and alleys are many famed historic spots, the Chêne
Saint Fiacre, the Croix de Noailles, the Croix Saint Simon, the Croix du Main
(erected in 1709 in honour of the son of Louis XIV), the Étoile des Amazones,
the Patte d'Oie, the Chêne du Capitaine and many more which are continually
referred to in the history of the palace, the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, and
of the Abbaye de Poissy.
The forest is not wholly separated from the mundane world for occasionally a
faint echo of the Rouen railway is heard, a toot from a river tug-boat bringing
coal up-river to Paris, the strident notes of automobile horns, or that of a
hooting steam-tram which scorches along the principal roadway over which
state coaches of kings and courtiers formerly rolled. The contrast is not
particularly offensive, but the railway threatens to make further inroads, so one
hardly knows the future that may be in store for the patriarch oaks and elms and
chestnuts which make up this secular wildwood. Their ages may not in all cases
approach those of the great Fontainebleau trees, and in point of fact the forest is
by no means as solitary, nor ever was. One of the most celebrated, certainly one
of the most spectacular, duels of history took place in the park at Saint
Germain-en-Laye.
Gui Chabot de Jarnac lived a prodigal and profligate life at the expense—it was
said—of the favours of the Duchesse d'Étampes. The dauphin, Henri, making an
accusation, deemed wholly uncalled for, a "duel judiciaire" took place, with La
Châtaigneraie as the dauphin's substitute as adversary of de Jarnac who sought
no apology but combat.
It was because Henri meantime had become king and issued his first Letters
Patent to his council concerning the "duel judiciaire," whereby he absolved
himself of the right to partake, that he appointed his dear friend François de
Vivonne, "Seigneur de la Châtaigneraie," to play the rôle for him.
Unfortunately the young man could not justify by victory the honour of his king
and before the monarch and the assembled court he was laid low by his
adversary.

This was one of the last of the "duels judiciaires" in France. What Saint Louis
and Philippe-le-Bel had vainly sought to suppress, the procedure having cost at
least a hundred thousand livres, was practically accomplished by Henri II by a
stroke of the pen.

CHAPTER XVIII
MAINTENON

Out from Paris, on the old Route d'Espagne, running from the capital to the
frontier, down which rolled the royal cortèges of old, lie Maintenon and its
famous chateau, some sixty odd kilometres from Paris and twenty from
Rambouillet.
Just beyond Versailles, on the road to Maintenon, lies the trim little townlet of
Saint Cyr, known to-day as the West Point of France, the military school
founded by Napoleon I giving it its chief distinction.
Going back into the remote past one learns that the village grew up from a
foundation of Louis XIV, who bought for ninety-one thousand livres "a chateau
and a convent for women," that Madame de Maintenon might establish a girls'
school therein. She reserved an apartment for herself, and one suspects indeed
that it was simply another project of the Widow Scarron to have a place of
rendezvous near the capital. Certainly under the circumstances, taking into
consideration the good that she was doing for orphaned girls, she might at least
have been allowed the right of a roof to shelter her when she wished. She was
absolutely dominant within, though never actually in residence for any length of
time. It was here that "Esther" and "Athalie," which Racine had composed
expressly for Madame de Maintenon's pensionnaires, were produced for the
first time.
When not actually living at Saint Cyr it was Madame de Maintenon's custom to
come hither from Paris each day, arriving between seven and eight in the
morning, passing the day and returning to town for the evening, much as a
celebrated American millionaire journalist, whose country-house overlooks the
famous convent garden, does to-day.
Madame de Maintenon actually went into retirement at Saint Cyr upon the
death of Louis XIV, and for four years, until her death, never left it. She died
from old age, rather than from any grave malady, in this "Maison d'Education,"
which she had inaugurated, and was buried in the chapel, beneath an elaborate
tomb which the Duc de Noailles, who married her niece, caused to be erected.
The tomb was destroyed during the Revolution and the "Maison Royale de

Saint Cyr," of which nothing had
been changed since its foundation,
was suppressed, the edifice itself
being pillaged and the remains of
Madame de Maintenon sadly
profaned, finally to be recovered
and deposited again in the chapel
where a simple black marble slab
marks them in these graven words:
Cy-Git Madame De Maintenon
1635-1719-1836
Napoleon I established the École
Militaire at Saint Cyr, from which
are graduated each year more than
four hundred subaltern officers.
The ancient gardens of Madame
de Maintenon's time now form the
"Champs de Mars," or drill
ground, of the military school.
South from Saint Cyr runs the great international highroad, the old Route
Royale of the monarchy. It rises and falls, but mostly straight as the flight of the
crow, until it crosses the great National Forest of Rambouillet. Following the
valley of the Eure almost to its headwaters it finally comes to Maintenon, a
town of a couple of thousand souls, whose most illustrious inhabitant was that
granddaughter of Theodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, named Françoise, and who
came in time to be the Marquise de Maintenon.
The Chateau de Maintenon was royal in all but name. The Tresorier des
Finances under Louis XI, Jean Cottereau (a public official who made good it
seems, since he also served in the same capacity for Charles VIII, Louis XII,
and Francis I), had a single daughter, Isabeau, who, in 1526, married Jacques
d'Angennes, who at the time was already Seigneur de Rambouillet.
As a dot this daughter acquired the lands of Maintenon. The property was
afterwards sold to the Marquis de Villeray, from whom Louis XIV bought it in
1674 and disposed of it as a royal gift to Françoise d'Aubigné, the fascinator of

kings, who was afterwards to become (in 1688) Madame La Marquise de
Maintenon.
This ambitious woman subsequently married her niece to the Duc d'Ayen, son
of the Maréchal de Noailles, and as a marriage portion—or possibly to avoid
unpleasant consequences—turned over the property of Maintenon to the young
bride and her husband to whose family, the Noailles, it has ever since belonged.
To-day the Duc and Duchesse de Noailles make lengthy stays in this delightful
seigneurial dwelling, and since the apartments are full to overflowing of
historical souvenirs of their family it may be truly said that their twentieth
century life is to some considerable extent in accord with the traditions of other
days.

Chateau de Maintenon
The existence of this princely residence is an agreeable reminder of the life of
luxury of the olden time albeit certain modernities which we to-day think
necessities are lacking.
Maintenon is certainly one of the most beautiful so-called royal chateaux of
France, if not by its actual importance at least by many of the attributes of its
architecture, the extent of the domain and the history connected therewith. It
bridges the span between the private chateau and those which may properly be
called royal.
In the moyen-age Maintenon was a veritable chateau-fort, forming a
quadrilateral edifice flanked by round towers at three of its angles, and at the

fourth by a great square mass of a donjon, all of which was united by a vast
expanse of solidly built wall which possessed all the classic attributes of the
best military architecture of its time. Entrance was only over a deep moat
spanned by a drawbridge.
Jean Cottereau made his acquisition of the domain towards 1490 and
immediately planned a new scheme of being for the old fortress which,
according to a more esthetic conception, would thus be brought into the class of
a luxurious residential chateau. He destroyed the courtines which attached the
great donjon to the rest of the building, and opened up the courtyard so that it
faced directly upon the park. He ornamented sumptuously the window
framings, the dormer windows, and the turrets, and framed in the entrance
portal with a series of sculptured motives which he also added to the entrance to
the great inner stairway. In short it was an enlargement and embellishment that
was undertaken, but so thoroughly was it done that the edifice quite lost its
original character in the process. Like all the chateaux built at this epoch
Maintenon was no longer a mere fortress, but a palatial retreat, luxurious in all
its appointments, and shorn of all the manifest militant attributes which it had
formerly possessed.
The shell was there, following closely the original outlines, but the added
ornamentation had effectually disguised its primordial existence. Living rooms
needed light and air, while a fortress or quarters for troops might well be
ordained on other lines. The Renaissance livened up considerably the severe
lines of the Gothic chateaux of France, and though invariably the marks of the
transition are visible to the expert eye it is also true, as in the case of Maintenon,
that there is frequently a homogeneousness which is sufficiently pleasing to
effectually cover up any discrepancies which might otherwise be apparent. The
warrior aspect is invariably lost in the transition, and thus a Renaissance
residential chateau enters at once into a different class from that of the feudal
fortress regardless of the fact that such may have been its original status.
The armorial device of Jean Cottereau—three unlovely lizards blazoned on a
field of silver—is still to be seen sculptured on the two towers flanking the
entrance portal which to-day lacks its old drawbridge before mentioned.
Surrounding the edifice is a deep, unhealthful, mosquito-breeding moat which is
all a mediæval moat should be, but which is actually no great attribute to the
place considering its disadvantages. One wonders that it is allowed to exist in so
stagnant a condition, as the running waters of the near-by Eure might readily be

made use of to change all this. The site of the chateau at the confluence of the
Eure and the Voise is altogether charming.
Madame de Maintenon did much to make the property more commodious and
convenient and built the great right wing which binds the donjon to the main
corps de logis. Her own apartments were situated in the new part of the palace.
She also built the gallery which leads from the Tour de Machicoulis to the
pointed chapel, which was a construction of the time of Cottereau, an accessory
which every self-respecting country-house of the time was bound to have. It
was by this gallery that the open tribune in the little chapel was reached, thus
enabling Louis XIV to pass readily to mass while he was so frequent a visitor at
that period when, at Maintenon, he was overseeing the construction of his
famous aqueduct.
Maintenon has had the honour, too, to count among its illustrious guests Racine,
who came at the request of Madame de Maintenon, and here wrote "Esther" and
"Athalie" which were later produced at Saint Cyr by Madame de Maintenon's
celebrated band of "Demoiselles."
Louis XIV was not the last of royal race to accept the Chateau de Maintenon's
hospitality for the unhappy Charles X was obliged to ask shelter of its chatelain
for himself and fleeing family. They arrived a little after midnight of a hot
August night, slept as well as possible in the former apartments of Madame de
Maintenon, and attended mass in the chapel on the following morning. The
monarch then discharged the royal guard and the "hundred Swiss" and gave up,
defeated at the game of playing monarch against the will of the people.
One enters the Cour d'Honneur by a great portal of the time of Louis XIV.
Immediately before one is the principal façade, with its towers of brick and its
slender little turrets framing in so admirably the entrance door. This façade is of
the fifteenth century and on the tympan of the dormer windows one may still
see the monogram of its builder, Cottereau. The drawbridge has been made way
with, and the turrets over the portal have been bound together by a diminutive
balcony of stone, which, while a manifest superfluity, is in no way
objectionable.
Under the entrance vault are doors on either side giving access to the living
apartments of the rez-de-chaussée. In the inner courtyard is to be found the most
exquisite architectural detail of the whole fabric, the tower which encloses the
monumental stairway, to which entrance is had by a portal which is a veritable
Gothic jewel. In the tympan of this portal, as in the dormer windows, is the

device of Jean Cottereau, except in this case it is much more elaborate—a Saint
Michel and the dragon, surrounded by a "semis de coquilles" bearing the
escutcheons of the chatelain—d'argent à lezards de sable.
At the left of this stairway tower is the principal courtyard façade, supported by
four arcades, pierced with great windows and surmounted by two fine dormer
windows, all in the style of Louis XII, of which the same effects to be observed
at Blois and in the Hotel d'Alluye are contemporary.
At the left of the inner court is the wing built by Cottereau which terminates in a
great round tower, while to the right is that erected by Madame de Maintenon
ending at the donjon. Directly opposite is a magnificent vista over the canal of
ornamental water framed on either side by patriarchal trees and having as a
background the silhouette of the arches of the famous aqueduct which was to
lead the waters of the Eure to Versailles.
The interior of the chateau is not less remarkable than the exterior. Entering by
the tower portal one comes at once to that magnificent grand escalier which is
accounted one of the wonders of the French Renaissance.
The Salle à Manger of to-day was the old-time Salle des Gardes. It is garnished
with a fine wainscoting and panels of Cordovan leather. The Chambre à
Coucher of Louis XIV, to the left, is to-day the Salon, and here are to be seen
portraits of Louis XIV, Louis XII, Francis I, Henri IV, and Louis XIII.
A tiny rotunda contains a statue of Henri IV as a child, and portraits of Madame
de Maintenon and Louis XIV in their youth. A portrait gallery of restrained
proportions contains effigies of Madame de Maintenon and her niece
Mademoiselle d'Aubigné, the Duc de Penthièvre, the Comtesse de Toulouse, the
Duc de Noailles, the Duchesse de Villars and the Duchesse de Chaumont.

Aqueduct of Louis XIV at Maintenon
The show-piece of the chateau, albeit of recent construction, is known variously
as the "Grand Galerie" and the "Longue Galerie." Its decorations are due to the
Duc de Noailles, the father of the present proprietor. Virtually it is a portrait
gallery of the Noailles family, going back to the times of the Crusaders and
coming down to the twentieth century.
The apartments of Madame de Maintenon form that portion of the chateau
which has the chief sentimental interest. In an ante-chamber is a chaise à
porteurs once having belonged to the Marquise, and her portrait by Mignard.
Cordovan leather is hung upon the walls, and the restored sleeping-room is
hung with a canopy and separated from the rest of the apartment by a balustrade
in bois doré. Above the chimney-piece is a portrait of Louis XIV, after Rigaud,
and, finally, the oratory is ornamented by a series of elegant sculptures in wood
and a magnificent Boule coffer.
In the left wing is found a beautiful chapel of the fifteenth century, which is
very pure in style. It is decorated with a series of Renaissance wood panels of
the finest workmanship. The coloured glass of the windows is of the sixteenth
century.
The rebuilt monumental stairway connects directly with a passage leading to the
entrance portico which opens on the garden terrace before the parterre.

The park of Maintenon is in every way admirable, with its pelouse, its great
border of trees, its waterways and more than thirty bridges. Jean Cottereau
himself planned the first vegetable and fruit garden, or potager, the same whose
successor is the delight of the dwellers at Maintenon to-day.
The parterre, the Grand Canal and the two avenues of majestic trees were due
to the conception of Le Notre, and their effect, as set off by the alleyed forest
background and the pillars of the aqueduct of Louis XIV, is something unique.
The gardens at Maintenon were perhaps not Le Notre's most famous work but
they followed the best traditions of their time, and because of their vast expanse
of ornamental water were, in a way, quite unequalled.
Ambling off towards the forest is a great avenue flanked with high overhanging
shade trees known as the Allée Racine. It gets its name from the fact that the
dramatist was wont to take his walks abroad in this direction and woo the muse
while he was a guest of Madame de Maintenon.

CHAPTER XIX
RAMBOUILLET AND ITS FOREST

Rambouillet is one of the most famous of the minor royal chateaux of France.
Built under the first of the monarchies, in the midst of the vast forest of Yveline,
it has always formed a part of the national domain. Even now, under Republican
France, it is still the scene of the hunts organized for visiting monarchs, and,

within the last half dozen years alone, the monarchs of Spain and Belgium, Italy
and England have shot hares and stags and pheasants in company with a
Republican president.
The occasions have lacked the picturesque costumes of the disciples of Saint
Hubert in other times; but the huntsman still winds his horn to the same
traditional tune and the banquets given in the chateau on such occasions are, in
no small measure, an echo of what has gone before.
It was in the old chateau of Rambouillet that Francis I died. In the month of
March, 1547, Francis, coming from Chambord in the south, crossed the
"accursed bridge" and arrived at the foot of the ivy-grown donjon which one
sees to-day, the last remaining relic of the mediæval fortress. For a year the
monarch had led a wandering life, revisiting all the favourite haunts of his
kingdom, and, though scarce turned fifty, was prematurely aged and gray.
He was lifted tenderly from his royal coach, and by the winding stair, carried
slowly to his apartments on the second floor, overlooking the three canals and
the "accursed bridge" and the tangled forest beyond.
Jacques d'Angennes, to whose ancestors Rambouillet one day belonged, acted
as host to his royal master and cared for him as a brother, but Francis was
dispirited, and growing weaker every moment. He complained bitterly of the
death of his favourite son from the plague, and of that of the gay monarch
across the channel, his old friend, Henry VIII of England.
He was restless and wished to move on to Saint Germain, but his condition
made that impossible. After a feeble attempt to rouse himself for a hunt in the
forest, he took to his bed again, with the admonition to his friend d'Angennes,
who never left him: "I am dying, send for my son, Henri."
The prince joined the mourners around the royal bedside and heard his father's
confession thus: "My son, I have sinned greatly; I have been led away by my
passions; follow that which I have done that is accredited good, and ignore the
evil; above all, cherish France; be good to my people."
That was all except the final counsel to "beware of the Guises; they are traitors."
After that he spoke no more. Francis I, the gallant, art-loving monarch, the
father of the Renaissance in France, was dead.
In 1562, Catherine de Médici, accompanied by her son Charles IX, here awaited
the results of the momentous battle of Dreux. In 1588, Henri III, fleeing Paris

after the "journée des barricades" came here to rest, and so fatigued was he on
his arrival that he went to bed "tout botté."

Laiterie de la Reine, Rambouillet
The son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan came into possession of "the
palace and lands" and in his honour the property was made, in spite of its
limited area, a Duché-Pairie.
Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon, as was but natural, because of its
proximity to Maintenon and to Paris, frequently honoured Rambouillet with

their presence; and, a little later, Louis XV and the beautiful Comtesse de
Toulouse followed suit.
The Duc de Penthièvre, to whom the property had by this time descended, at the
instance of Louis XVI, ceded to that monarch the domain of Rambouillet.
Louis XVI built vast commons and outbuildings, all with some architectural
pretence, to house the appanage of the royal hunt, and also built the Laiterie de
la Reine and the model farm where, in 1786, he established the first national
sheepfold.
To-day this is the famous École de Bergers, where is quartered the largest flock
of moutons à laine (merino sheep) in France, they having been brought chiefly
from Spain.
The Laiterie de la Reine was a tiny sandstone temple with interior fittings
chiefly of white marble, and with a great, round centre-table, and smaller tables
in each corner, equally of marble, as becomes a hygienically fitted dairy. It was
restored by Louis Napoleon during the Second Empire, and is still to be seen in
all its pristine glory.
In addition, Louis XVI had at Rambouillet a private domain of a considerable
extent which only the Constitution of 1791 united to the Civil List. This
property, except the palace, the park and the forest, was sold later by the State.
The Imperial Civil List, formed in 1805 by Napoleon, included these
dependencies specifically, and the emperor frequently hunted in the
neighbouring forest, though, compared to his predecessors, he had little time to
devote to that form of sport. Here, too, was signed, in 1810, the decree which
united Holland with the Empire.
Rambouillet has fallen sadly since the Revolution. A decree of the
Representants du Peuple, of October 14, 1793, provided that "the furnishings of
this palace, heretofore royal, shall be sold." Under the Consulate and Empire a
certain citizen, Trepsat by name, received an injury in protecting Napoleon in an
attack and, as recompense, was made the official Architect and Conservator of
the Palace of Rambouillet.
Hardly had Trepsat entered upon his functions when he suggested the
demolition of the chateau. Napoleon hesitated, but finally partially agreed,
insisting, however, that enough should be left to form a comfortable hunting-
lodge. Trepsat would have torn down all and rebuilt anew. Napoleon made an
appointment with his architect to visit the property and discuss the matter in

detail the following year (1805), but at that moment he was campaigning in
Austria, so the interview was not held. This was Trepsat's chance, and he found
a pretext to overthrow the entire east wing, but was stopped before he was able
to further carry out his ignorant act of vandalism. Trepsat was severely
reprimanded by the emperor himself, and was ordered to put things back as he
found them. "Even the most battered and sickly architect who ever lived could
hardly have had a worse inspiration," said Napoleon. Trepsat, be it recalled, had
lost a leg.
The restoration was commenced, but Trepsat, committing one fault after
another, and finally juggling with the accounts, was obliged to take on a
collaborator by the name of Famin, a young pensionnaire of the Académie des
Beaux Arts, recently returned from Rome. It was he who saved Rambouillet
from utter destruction.
The apartments of Napoleon, which were those given over to public functions
in the time of the Comte de Toulouse, had been, and were, most luxuriously
appointed. That which shows most clearly the imprint of the imperial régime is
the curious Salle de Bains which was in direct communication with the study, or
Cabinet de Travail.
It might have been a room in a Pompeian house so classic were its lines and
decorations. There was a series of medallions painted on the wall representing
portraits of members of the imperial family. These were chiefly portraits of the
female sex, and Napoleon, the first time he entered his bath, in an excess of
modesty and fury cried out: "Who is the ass that did this thing?" Immediately
they were painted out, and, for the sum of nine hundred and fifty francs, another
artist was found who filled the frames of the medallions with sights and scenes
associated less intimately with Napoleonic history.
Under the Empire the architect Famin was commissioned to furnish a series of
architectural embellishments to the gardens of Rambouillet. Various stone
statues were added and an octagon pavilion on the Ile des Roches was restored
and redecorated. Two great avenues were cut through the parterre, and, as if
fearing indiscretions on the part of his entourage, the emperor caused to be
planted long rows of lindens and tulip trees, which were again masked by two
rows of poplars. The peloux of the Jardin Français were reëstablished and the
curves and sweeps of the paths of the Jardin Anglais laid out anew.

Chateau de Rambouillet
This ancient government property, arisen anew from its ruins, now bore the
name of the Pavillon du Roi de Rome, after the son of Napoleon. The Écuries,
or stables, which had been built by Louis XVI, were transformed into kennels,
and various "posts," or miniature shooting-boxes, were distributed here and
there through the park.
Under the Restoration the transformation of the chateau, which had been
projected ever since the time of Louis XVI, undertaken and then abandoned by
Napoleon, was again commenced, but on a less ambitious scale than formerly.
Chiefly this transformation consisted of opening up windows, thus making
practically a new façade. It was not wholly a happy thought, and the spirit of

economy of Louis XVIII, no less, perhaps, than other motives, arrested this
mutilation and the architect was discharged from his functions.
Again the hand of fate fell hard upon Rambouillet and its definite eclipse as a
royal abode came with the abdication of Charles X. The abdication was actually
signed at Rambouillet, and here, in the same Salle du Conseil, the dauphin
renounced the throne in favour of the young Duc de Bordeaux.
It was at Rambouillet that Charles X passed those solemn last days before the
abdication. He had been unmercifully harassed at Paris and sought a quiet
retreat, "not too far from the Tuileries," where he might repose a moment and
take counsel. In view of later events this was significant; perhaps it was
significant at the time, for the king speedily repented his abdication. It was too
late, for he had classed as rebels all the royalists who would have accepted the
"infant king" as their monarch, even though the following Revolution prevented
this.
It was on the third of August that the commissioners, deputies of the
Provisionary Government, were brought before the king at Rambouillet. They
announced that twenty-five thousand armed Parisians were marching on the
chateau to compel him to quit his kingdom. It was not a matter for debate, and
at nine o'clock on the same night the monarch gave assent to being conducted to
Cherbourg, where he embarked upon his fatal exile.
After 1830, with a business-like instinct, the authorities rented the property for
twelve years to the Baron Schickler, and, at the end of the Revolution of 1848,
its career became more plebeian still; it was rented to a man who converted the
palace into an elaborately appointed road-house, and the lawns and groves into
open-air restaurants and dancing places.
Under the Gouvernement du Juillet the chateau, the park and the forest were
removed from the Civil List, and entered upon the inventory of the
Administration des Domaines.
Under the Second Empire Rambouillet appeared again on the monarchial Civil
List. Napoleon III came here at times to hunt, but not to live, and of his rare
appearances at the chateau but little record exists. Since 1870 Rambouillet has
belonged to the Republican Government, and, since royalties no longer exist in
France, Republican chiefs of state now take the lead in Rambouillet's national
hunts.

The property, as it stands to-day, is divided readily into four distinct parts, the
palace, the parterre, the Jardin Anglais and the park. The grove of lindens is
remarkable in every respect, the ornamental waters are gracious and of vast
extent, and the Laiterie and the Ferme are decidedly models of their kind; but
the Chaumière des Coquillages, a rustic summer-house of rocks and shells and
questionable débris of all sorts, is hideous and unworthy.
Not the least of the charming features of the park is the great alley of Louisiana
cypresses, one of the real sights, indeed, perfecting the charm of the great body
of water to the left of the chateau.
Of the structure which existed in the fourteenth century, the chateau of
Rambouillet retains to-day only a great battlemented tower, and some low-lying
buildings attached to it. Successive enlargements, restorations and mutilations
have changed much of the original aspect of the edifice, and modern structures
flank and half envelop that which, to all eyes, is manifestly ancient. The débris
of the old fortress, which was the foundation of all, adds its bit to the
conglomerate mass of which the chief and most imposing elements are the two
tall corps de logis in the centre.
Within, a rather banal Salle de Bal is shown as the chief feature, but it is
conventionally unlovely enough to be passed without emotion, save that its
easterly portion takes in the cabinet, or private apartment, where Charles X
signed his abdication. Adjoining this is the bedroom occupied by that monarch,
and a dining-room which also served His Majesty, and which is still used by the
head of the government on ceremonious occasions. Its decorative scheme is of
the period of Louis XV.
The Salle de Conseil is of the period of Charles X, and has some fairly
imposing carved wainscotings showing in places the monograms of Marie
Sophie and the Comtesse de Toulouse.
A great map, or plan, of the Forest of Rambouillet covers the end wall, and, if
not esthetically beautiful, is at least useful and very interesting.
It was executed under Louis XVI and doubtless served its purpose well when
the hunters gathered after a day afield and recounted anecdotes of their
adventures.
There is another apartment on the ground floor which is known as the Salle à
Manger des Rendezvous de Chasse, whose very name explains well its
functions.

The Cabinet de Travail of Marie Antoinette and the Salle de Bain of Napoleon
have something more than a mere sentimental interest; they were decidedly
practical adjuncts to the royal palace.
Napoleon's bath took the form of a rather short, deep pool. Its fresco
decorations, as seen to-day—replacing that family portrait gallery which
Napoleon caused to be painted out—are after the pseudo-antique manner and
represent bird's-eye views of various French cities and towns, while a series of
painted armorial trophies decorates the ceiling.
On the second floor are the apartments occupied by the Duchesse de Berry and
those of the Duchesse d'Angouleme.
In the great round tower is the circular apartment where Francis I breathed his
last. It is this great truss-vaulted room that most interests the visitor to
Rambouillet.
On the ground floor is another Salle de Bain, quite as theatrically disposed as
that of Napoleon. Its construction was due to the Comte de Toulouse whose
taste ran to Delft tiles and polychrome panels, framing two imposing marines,
also worked out in tiles.
The parterre, extending before the main building, is of an ampleness scarcely
conceivable until once viewed. It is purely French in design and is of the epoch
of the tenancy of the Comte de Toulouse. Before the admirably grouped lindens
was a boathouse, and off in every direction ran alleys of acacias, while here and
there tulip beds, rose gardens and hedges of rhododendrons flanked the very
considerable ornamental waters. This body of water, in the form of a trapezoid,
is divided by four grass-grown islets and separates the Jardin Anglais from the
Jardin Français. One of the islets is known as the Ile des Roches and contains
the Grotte de Rabelais, so named in honour of the Curé of Meudon, when he
was presented at Rambouillet by the Cardinal du Bellay. It was on this isle that
were given those famous fêtes in honour of the "beaux esprits" who formed the
assiduous cortège of Catherine de Vivonne, mythological, pagan and outré.
The Jardin Anglais at Rambouillet is the final expression of the species in
France. Designed under the Duc de Penthièvre, it was restored and considerably
enlarged by Napoleon and, following the contours of an artificial rivulet, it
fulfils the description that its name implies.
More remote, and half hidden from the precincts of the chateau, are the
Chaumière and the Ermitage and they recall the background of a Fragonard or a

Watteau. It is all very "stagy"—but, since it exists, can hardly be called unreal.
The park proper, containing more than twelve hundred hectares, is one of the
largest and most thickly wooded in France. Between the parterre and the
French and English garden and the park lie the Farm and the Laiterie de la
Reine, the caprice of Louis XVI when he would content Marie Antoinette and
give her something to think about besides her troubles. Napoleon stripped it of
its furnishings to install them, for a great part, at Malmaison, for that other
unhappy woman—Josephine. Later, to give pleasure to Marie Louise, he
ordered them brought back again to Rambouillet, but it was to Napoleon III that
the restoration of this charming conceit was due.
In the neighbourhood of Rambouillet was the famous Chateau de Chasse, or
royal shooting-box, which Louis XV was fond of making a place of rendezvous.
On the banks of the Étang de Pourras stood this Chateau de Saint Hubert,
named for the patron saint of huntsmen, and within its walls was passed many a
happy evening by king and courtiers after a busy day with stag and hound.
The hunt in France was perhaps at the most picturesque phase of its existence at
this time. The hunt of to-day is but a pale, though bloody, imitation of the real
sport of the days when monarchs and their seigneurs in slashed doublet and
hose and velvet cloaks pursued the deer of the forest to his death, and knew not
the maitre d'equipage of to-day.

CHAPTER XX
CHANTILLY

Chantilly, because of its royal associations, properly finds its place in every
traveller's French itinerary. Not only did Chantilly come to its great glory
through royal favour, but in later years the French government has taken it
under its wing, the chateau, the stables and the vast park and forest, until the
ensemble is to-day as much of a national show place as Versailles or Saint
Germain. It is here in the marble halls, where once dwelt the Condés and the
Montmorencys, that are held each year the examinations of the French
Académie des Beaux Arts. And besides this it is a place of pilgrimage for
thousands of tourists who, as a class, for a couple of generations previously,
never got farther away from the capital than Saint Cloud.

Many charters of the tenth century make mention of the estates of Chantilly,
which at that time belonged to the Seigneurs of Senlis. The chateau was an
evolution from a block-house, or fortress, erected by Catulus in Gallo-Roman
times and four centuries later it remained practically of the same rank. In the
fourteenth century the chateau was chiefly a vast fortress surrounded by a water
defence in the form of an enlarged moat by means of which it was able to resist
the Bourguignons and never actually fell until after the taking of Meaux by the
English king, Henry V.

Statue of Le Notre, Chantilly
Jean II de Montmorency, by his marriage with Marguerite d'Orgemont, came to
be the possessor of the domain, their son, in turn, becoming the heir. It was this
son, Guillaume, who became one of the most brilliant servitors of the monarchs
Louis XI, Louis XII, and Francis I, and it was through these friends at court that
Chantilly first took on its regal aspect.
In turn the celebrated Anne de Montmorency, Connetable de France, came into
the succession and finding the old fortress, albeit somewhat enlarged and
furbished up by his predecessor, less of a palatial residence than he would have,
separated the ancient chateau-fort from an added structure by an ornamental
moat, or canal, and laid out the pelouse, parterres and the alleys of greensward
leading to the forest which make one of the great charms of Chantilly to-day.
Here resided, as visitors to be sure, but for more or less extended periods, and at
various times, Charles V, Charles IX and Henri IV, each of them guests of the
hospitable and ambitious Montmorencys.

Chantilly passed in 1632 to Charlotte, the sister of the last Maréchal de
Montmorency, the wife of Henri II, Prince de Condé, the mother of the Grand
Condé, the Prince de Conti and the Duchesse de Longueville.
With the Grand Condé came the greatest fame, the apotheosis, of Chantilly. This
noble was so enamoured of this admirable residence that he never left it from
his thoughts and decorated it throughout in the most lavish taste of his time,
destroying at this epoch the chateau of the moyen-age and the fortress. These
were the days of gallant warriors with a taste for pretty things in art, not mere
bloodthirsty slaughterers.
On the foundations of the older structures there now rose an admirable pile (not
that which one sees to-day, however), embellished by the surroundings which
were evolved from the brain of the landscape gardener, Le Notre. The
Revolution made way with this lavish structure and with the exception of the
Chatelet, or the Petit Chateau (designed by Jean Bullant in 1560, and
remodelled within by Mansart) the present-day work is a creation of the Duc
d'Aumale, the heir to the Condés' name and fame, to whom the National
Assembly gave back his ancestral estates which had in the meantime come into
the inventory of royal belongings through the claims established by the might of
the Second Empire.
Back to the days of the Grand Condé one reads of an extended visit made by
Louis XIV to his principal courtier. It was at an expense of two hundred
thousand écus that the welcoming fête was accomplished. Madame de Sévigné
has recounted the event more graphically than any other chronicler, and it
would be presumption to review it here at length. The incident of Vatel alone
has become classic.
To the coterie of poets at Rambouillet must be added those of Chantilly; their
sojourn here added much of moment to the careers and reputations of Boileau,
Racine, Bourdaloue and Bossuet. It was the latter, who, in the funeral oration
which he delivered on the death of the Prince de Condé, said:
"Here under his own roof one saw the Grand Condé as if he were at the head of
his armies, a noble always great, as well in action as in repose. Here you have
seen him surrounded by his friends in this magnificent dwelling, in the shady
alleys of the forest or beside the purling waters of the brooks which are silent
neither day nor night."

The Grand Condé died, however, at Fontainebleau. The heir, Henri-Jules de
Bourbon, did his share towards keeping up and embellishing the property, and
to him was due that charming wildwood retreat known as the Parc de Sylvie.
Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Minister of Louis XV at the commencement of his
reign, had gained a fabulous sum of money in the notorious "Law's Bank" affair,
and, with a profligate and prodigal taste in spending, lived a life of the grandest
of grand seigneurs at Chantilly, to which, as his donation to its architectural
importance, he contributed the famous Écuries, or stables. To show that he was
persona grata at court he gave a great fête here for Louis XV and the Duchesse
du Barry.
The last Prince de Condé but one before the Revolution built the Chateau
d'Enghien in the neighbourhood, and sought to people the Parc de Sylvie with a
rustic colony of thatched maisonettes and install his favourites therein in a weak
imitation of what had been done in the Petit Trianon. The note was manifestly a
false one and did not endure, not even is its echo plainly audible for all is
hearsay to-day and no very definite record of the circumstance exists.
Chantilly in later times has been a favourite abode with modern monarchs. The
King of Denmark, the Emperor Joseph II and the King of Sweden were given
hospitality here, and much money was spent for their entertainment, and much
red and green fire burned for their amusement and that of their suites.
The Revolution's fell blow carried off the principal parts of the Condé's
admirable constructions and it is fortunate that the Petit Chateau escaped the
talons of the "Bande Noire." Immediately afterwards the Chateau d'Enghien and
the Écuries were turned over to the uses of the Minister of War, and the
authorities of the Jardin des Plantes were given permission to transplant and
transport anything which pleased their fancy among the exotics which had been
set out by Le Notre in Chantilly's famous parterres.
Under the imperial régime the Forêt de Chantilly was given in fee simple to
Queen Hortense, though all was ultimately returned to the Condé heirs after the
Restoration. It was at this period that Chantilly received the visit of Alexander,
Emperor of Russia, and the historian's account of that visit makes prominent the
fact that during the periods of rain it was necessary that an umbrella be carried
over the imperial head as he passed through the corridors of the palace from one
apartment to another.

The host of the emperor died here in 1818 and his son, spending perhaps half of
his time here, cared little for restoration and spent all his waking hours hunting
in the forest, returning to the Petit Chateau only to eat and sleep.
The Duc de Bourbon added to the flanking wings of the Petit Chateau and
cleaned up the débris which was fast becoming moss-grown, weed encumbered
and altogether disgraceful. The moats were cleaned out of their miasmatic
growth and certain of the grass-carpeted parterres resown and given a
semblance of their former selves.
Some days after the Revolution of 1830 the Prince de Condé died in a most
dramatic fashion, and his son, the Duc d'Enghien, having been shot at
Vincennes under the Empire, he willed the Duc d'Aumale and his issue his legal
descendants forever.
Towards 1840 the Duc d'Aumale sought to reconstruct the splendours of
Chantilly, but a decree of January 22, 1852, banished the entire Orleans family
and interrupted the work when the property was sold to the English bankers,
Coutts and Company, for the good round sum of eleven million francs, not by
any means an extravagant price for this estate of royal aspect and proportions.
The National Assembly of 1872 did the only thing it could do in justice to
tradition—bought the property in and decreed that it be restored to its legitimate
proprietor.
It was as late as 1876 that the Duc d'Aumale undertook the restoration of the
Chatelet and the rebuilding of the new chateau which is seen to-day. The latter
is from the designs of Henri Daumet, member of the Institut de France.
In general the structure of to-day occupies the site of the moyen-age chateau but
is of quite a different aspect.
The Duc d'Aumale made a present of the chateau and all that was contained
therein to the Institut de France. From a purely sordid point of view it was a gift
valued at something like thirty-five million francs, not so great as many new-
world public legacies of to-day, but in certain respects of a great deal more
artistic worth.
The mass is manifestly imposing, made up as it is, of four distinct parts, the
Eglise, dating from 1692, the Écuries, the Chatelet—or Petit Chateau, and the
Chateau proper—the modern edifice.

Before the celebrated Écuries is a green, velvety pelouse which gives an
admirable approach. The architecture of the Écuries is of a heavy order and the
sculptured decorations actually of little esthetic worth, representing as they do
hunting trophies and the like. Before the great fountain one deciphers a graven
plaque which reads as follows:
Louis Henri de Bourbon
Prince de Condé
Fut Construire Cette Écurie
1701-1784.
Within the two wings may be stabled nearly two hundred horses. The Grand
Écuries at Chantilly are assuredly one of the finest examples extant of that
luxuriant art of the eighteenth century French builder. Luxurious, excessively
ornate and overpowering it is, and, for that reason, open to question. The work
of the period knew not the discreet middle road. It was of Chantilly that it was
said that the live stock was better lodged than its masters. The architect of this
portion of the chateau was Jean Aubert, one of the collaborators of Jules
Hardouin Mansart.
The characteristics of Chantilly, take it as a whole, the chateau, the park and the
forest, are chiefly theatrical, but with an all-abiding regard for the proprieties,
for beyond a certain heaviness of architectural style in parts of the chateau
everything is of the finely focussed relative order of which the French architect
and landscape gardener have for ages been past masters.
The real French garden is here to be seen almost at its best, its squares and ovals
of grassy green apportioned off from the mass by gravelled walks and
ornamented waters. The "tapis d'orient" effect, so frequently quoted by the
French in writing of such works, is hardly excelled elsewhere.
All this shocked the mid-eighteenth century English traveller, but it was because
he did not, perhaps could not, understand. Rigby, "the Norwich alderman" as
the French rather contemptuously referred to this fine old English gentleman,
said frankly of Chantilly: "All this has cost dear and produced a result far from
pleasing." He would have been better pleased doubtless with a privet or box
hedge and an imitation plaster rockery, things which have never agreed with
French taste, but which were the rule in pretentious English gardens of the same
period. Rigby must indeed have been a "grincheau," as the French called him,
for this same up-country gentleman said of Versailles: "Lovely surrounding

country but palace and park badly designed." Versailles is not that, whatever
else its faults may be.
Chantilly is more than a palace, it is a museum of nature, a hermitage of art and
of history. The fantasy of its tourelles, its lucarnes and its pignons are
something one may hardly see elsewhere in such profusion, and the fact that
they are modern is forgotten in the impression of the general silhouette.
The adventurer who first built a donjon on the Rocher de Chantilly little knew
with what seigneurial splendour the site was ultimately to be graced. From a
bare outpost it was transformed, as if by magic, into a Renaissance palace of a
supreme beauty. The Duc d'Aumale said in his "Acte de Donation de Chantilly":
"It stands complete and varied, a monument of French art in all its branches, a
history of the best epochs of our glory."
Among all the palatial riches neighbouring upon Paris, not forgetting Versailles,
Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Pierrefonds and Rambouillet, Chantilly, by the
remarkable splendour of its surroundings, its situation and the artistic treasures
which it possesses, is in a class by itself. It is a class more clearly defined by the
historic souvenirs which surround it than any other contemporary structure of
this part of France.
Its corridors and gravelled walks and the long alleys of the park and forest may
not take on the fête-like aspect which they knew in the eighteenth century, but
they are not solitary like those of Fontainebleau and Rambouillet, nor noisily
overrun like those of Versailles or Saint Germain.
The ornamental waters which surround the Chateau de Chantilly are of a grand
and nearly unique beauty. It is a question if they are not finer than the waters of
Versailles, indeed they preceded them and may even have inspired them.

Chateau de Chantilly
The Chatelet, the chateau proper and the chapel form a group quite distinct from
the Écuries. The Cour d'Honneur is really splendid and one hardly realizes the
juxtaposition of modernity. The pavilion attributed to Jean Bullant, the western
façade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the Grand Vestibule, the Grand Escalier and
the Gallerie des Cerfs and a dozen other apartments are of a rare and imposing
beauty, though losing somewhat their distinctive aspect by reason of the objets
de musée distributed about their walls and floors.
One of the landscape gems of Chantilly is the Pelouse, a vast esplanade of
greensward now forming, in part, the celebrated race track of Chantilly. Sport
ever formed a part of the outdoor program at Chantilly, but that of to-day is just

a bit more horsey than that of old, a good deal less picturesque and assuredly
more vulgarly banal as to its cachet than the hunts, the tourneys and courses of
the romantic age.
Thousands come to Chantilly to wager their coin on scrubs and dark horses
ridden by third-rate "warned-off" jockeys from other lands, but probably not ten
in ten thousand of the lookers on at the Grand Prix du Jockey Club in May ever
make the occasion of the spring meeting an opportunity for visiting the fine old
historic monument of the Condés.
The "Races" of Chantilly may be given a further word in that they are an
outgrowth of a foundation by the Duc d'Orleans in 1832. The track forms a
circuit of two thousand metres, and occupies quite the best half of the Pelouse,
closed in on one side by the thick-grown Forêt de Chantilly and flanked, in part,
on the other by the historic Écuries, with the Tribune, or grand stand, just to the
south.
Many tourists arrive at Chantilly by auto, stop brusquely before the Grande
Grille, rush through the galleries of the chateau, do "cent pas" in the park, give
a cursory glance at the stables and are off; but more, many more, with slower
steps and saner minds, drink in the charms which are offered on all sides and
consider the time well spent even if they have paid "Boulevard Prices" at the
Restaurant du Grand Condé for their dejeuner.
It has been said that a museum is a reunion of objets d'art brought about by a
methodical grouping, either chronologically or categorically. The Duc
d'Aumale's Musée de Chantilly is more an expression of personal taste. He
collected what he wished and he arranged his collections as suited his fancy.
The famous Musée de Chantilly, which is the lodestone which draws most folk
thither, so admirably housed, was a gift of the Duc d'Aumale who, for the glory
of his ancestors, and the admiration of the world, to say nothing of his own
personal satisfaction, here gathered together an eclectic collection of curious
and artistic treasures, certainly not the least interesting or valuable among the
great public collections in France. The effect produced is sometimes startling, a
Messonier is cheek by jowl with a Baron Gros, a Decamps vis à vis to a
Veronese, and a Lancret is bolstered on either hand by a Poussin and a Nattier.
Amid all this disorder there is, however, an undeniable, inexplicable charm.
There are three distinct apartments worth, more than all the others, the glance of
the hurried visitor to the Musée Condé at Chantilly. In the first, the Santuario, is

the Livre d'Heures of Etienne Chevalier, by Jean Fouquet, considered as the
most important relic of primitive French art extant.
The Cabinet des Gemmes comes second, and here is the celebrated "Diamant
Rose," called the Grand Condé.
Finally there is the Galerie de Psyche, with forty-four coloured glass windows,
executed for the Connetable de Montmorency in 1541-1542.
The great collection of historical and artistic treasures stowed away within the
walls of Chantilly the Duc d'Aumale selected himself in order to associate his
own name with the glorious memory of the Condés, who were so intimately
connected with the chateau.
The Duc sought to recover such of the former furnishings of the chateau as had
been dissipated during the Revolution whenever they could be heard of and
could be had at public or private sale.
In this connection a word on Chantilly lace may not be found inapropos. The
Chantilly lace of to-day, it is well to recall, is a mechanically produced article of
commerce, turned out by the running mile from Nottingham, England, though
in the days when Chantilly's porcelains rivalled those of Sevres it was purely a
local product. One may well argue therefore that the bulk of the Chantilly lace
sold in the shops of Chantilly to-day is not on a par with the admirable
examples to be seen in the glass cases of the museum.
A wooded alley leading to the great park runs between the main edifice and the
Chateau d'Enghien, a gentle incline descending again to the sunken gardens in a
monumental stairway of easy slope, the whole a quintessence of much that is
best of the art of the landscape gardener of the time.
To the left extends the vast Jardin Anglais—a veritable French Jardin Anglais.
Let not one overlook the distinction: On conventional lines it is pretty, dainty
and pleasing, but the species lacks the dignified formality of the Italian garden
or the ingenious arrangement of the French. Its curves and ovals and circles are
annoying after the lignes droites and the right angles and the broderies of the
French variety.
The Forêt de Chantilly covers two thousand four hundred and forty-nine
hectares and extends from the Bois de Hérivaux on one side to the Forêt de
Senlis on the other. The rendezvous-de-chasse was, in the old days, and is to-
day on rare occasions, at the Rond Point, to which a dozen magnificent forest

roads lead from all directions, that from the town being paved with Belgian
blocks, the dread of automobilists, but delightful to ride over in muddy weather.
The Route de Connetable, so called, is well-nigh ideal of its kind. It launches
forth opposite the chateau and at its entrance are two flanking stone lions. It is
of a soft soil suitable for horseback riding, but entirely unsuited for wheeled
traffic of any kind.
Another of the great forest roads leads to the Chateau de la Reine Blanche, a
diminutive edifice in the pointed style, with a pair of svelte towers coiffed
candle-snuffer fashion. Tradition, and very ancient and somewhat dubious
tradition, attributes the edifice as having belonged to Blanche de Navarre, the
wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal
attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This
quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode
in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill
grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated the more
mundane, work-a-day mill. The Duc de Bourbon restored the whole place in
1826 that it might serve him and his noble friends as a hunting-lodge.

CHAPTER XXI
COMPIÉGNE AND ITS FOREST

One of the most talked of and the least visited of the minor French palaces is
that of Compiègne. The archeologists coming to Compiègne first notice that all
its churches are "malorientées." It is a minor point with most folk, but when one
notes that its five churches have their high altars turned to all points of the
compass, instead of to the east, it is assuredly a fact to be noticed, even if one is
more romantically inclined than devout.
Through and through, Compiègne, its palace, its hotel-de-ville, its forest, is
delightful. Old and new huddle close together, and the art nouveau decorations
of a branch of a great Parisian department store flank a butcher's stall which
looks as though it might have come down from the times when all trading was
done in the open air.
Compiègne's origin goes back to the antique. It was originally Compendium, a
Roman station situated on the highway between Soissons and Beauvais. A
square tower, Cæsar's Tower, gave a military aspect to the walled and fortified
station, and evidences are not wanting to-day to suggest with what strength its
fortifications were endowed.

View larger image
It was here that the first Frankish kings built their dwelling, and here that Pepin-
le-Bref received the gracious gift of an organ from the Emperor Constantine,
and here, in 833, that an assembly of bishops and nobles deposed Louis-le-
Débonnaire.
Charles-le-Chauve received Pope Jean VIII in great pomp in the palace at
Compiègne, and it was this Pope who gave absolution to Louis-le-Begue, who
died here but a year after, 879. The last of the Carlovingians, Louis V (le-
Faineant), died also at Compiègne in 987.

The city is thus shown to have been a favourite place of sojourn for the kings of
the Franks, and those of the first and second races. As was but obvious many
churchly councils were held here, fourteen were recorded in five centuries, but
none of great ecclesiastical or civil purport.
The city first got its charter in 1153, but the Merovingian city having fallen into
a sort of galloping decay Saint Louis gave it to the Dominicans in 1260, who
here founded, by the orders of the king, a Hotel Dieu which, in part, is the same
edifice which performs its original functions to-day.
The first great love of Compiègne was expressed by Charles V, who rebuilt the
palace of Charles-le-Chauve in a manner which was far from making it a
monumental or artistically disposed edifice. It was originally called the Louvre,
from the Latin word opus (l'œuvre), a word which was applied to all the
chateaux-forts of these parts. The same monarch did better with the country-
houses which he afterwards built at Saint Germain and Vincennes; perhaps by
this time he had grown wise in his dealings with architects.
Like all the little towns of the Valois, Compiègne abounds in souvenirs of the
Guerre de Cent Ans, Jeanne d'Arc, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon I and
Napoleon III, and as its monuments attest this glory, so its forest, one of the
finest in France, awakens almost as many historical memories.
Wars and rumors of war kept Compiègne in a turmoil for centuries, but the most
theatrical episode was the famous "sortie" made by Jeanne d'Arc when she was
attempting to defend the city against the combined English and Burgundian
troops. It was an episode in which faint heart, perhaps treason, played an
unwelcome part, for while the gallant maid was taking all manner of chances
outside the gates the military governor, Guillaume de Flavy, ordered the barriers
of the great portal closed behind her and her men.
Near the end of the Pont de Saint Louis Jeanne d'Arc fell into the hands of the
besiegers. An archer from Picardy captured her single handed, and, for a round
sum in silver or in kind, turned her over to her torturer, Jean de Luxembourg. A
statue of the maid is found on the public "Place," and the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, a
great circular donjon of the thirteenth century, is near by. Another souvenir is to
be found in the ancient Hotel de Bœuf, at No. 9 Rue de Paris, where the maid
lodged from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of August, 1429, awaiting the
entry of Charles VII.

With the era of Francis I that gallant and fastidious monarch came to take up his
residence at Compiègne. He here received his "friend and enemy," Charles V,
but strangely enough there is no monument in Compiègne to-day which is
intimately associated with the stay here of the art-loving Francis. He preferred,
after all, his royal manor at Villers-Cotterets near by. There was more privacy
there, and it formed an admirable retreat for such moments when the king did
not wish to bask in publicity, and these moments were many, though one might
not at first think so when reading of his affairs of state. There were also affairs
of the heart which, to him, in many instances, were quite as important. This
should not be forgotten.
In 1624 a treaty was signed at Compiègne which assured the alliance of Louis
XIII with the United Provinces, and during this reign the court was frequently in
residence here. In 1631 Marie de Médici, then a prisoner in the palace, made a
notable escape and fled, doomed ever afterwards to a vagabond existence, a
terrible fall for her once proud glory, to her death in a Cologne garret ten years
later.
In 1635 the Grand Chancellor of Sweden signed a treaty here which enabled
France to mingle in the affairs of the Thirty Years' War.
During the Fronde, that "Woman's War," which was so entirely unnecessary,
Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiègne and received
Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal lady's costume was of
such a grotesque nature, and her speech so chevaleresque, that she caused even
a scandal in a profligate court. Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiègne practically
a prisoner; another ménage à trois had been broken up.
The most imposing event in the history of Compiègne of which the chronicles
tell was the assembling of sixty thousand men beneath the walls by Louis XIV,
in order to give Madame de Maintenon a realistic exhibition of "playing
soldiers." At all events the demonstration was a bloodless one, and an immortal
page in Saint-Simon's "Memoires" consecrates this gallantry of a king in a most
subtle manner.
Another fair lady, a royal favourite, too, came on the scene at Compiègne in
1769 when Madame du Barry was the principal artiste in the great fête given in
her honour by Louis XV. She was lodged in a tiny chateau (built originally for
Madame de Pompadour) a short way out of town on the Soissons road.

Du Barry must have been a good fairy to Compiègne for Louis XV lavished an
abounding care on the chateau and, rather than allow the architect, Jacques
Ange Gabriel, have the free hand that his counsellors advised, sought to have
the ancient outlines of the former structure on the site preserved and thus
present to posterity through the newer work the two monumental façades which
are to be seen to-day. The effort was not wholly successful, for the architect
actually did carry out his fancy with respect to the decoration in the same
manner in which he had designed the École Militaire at Paris and the two
colonnaded edifices facing upon the Place de la Concorde.
This work was entirely achieved when Louis XVI took possession. This
monarch, in 1780, caused to be fitted up a most elaborate apartment for the
queen (his marriage with Marie Antoinette was consecrated here), but that
indeed was all the hand he had in the work of building at Compiègne, which has
practically endured as his predecessor left it. The Revolution and Consulate
used the chateau as their fancy willed, and rather harshly, but in 1806 its
restoration was begun and Charles IV of Spain, upon his dethronement by
Napoleon, was installed therein a couple of years later.
The palace, the park and the forest now became a sort of royal appanage of this
Spanish monarch, which Napoleon, in a generous spirit, could well afford to
will him. He lived here some months and then left precipitately for Marseilles.
Napoleon affected a certain regard for this palatial property, though only
occupying it at odd moments. He embellished its surroundings, above all its
gardens, in a most lavish manner. Virtually, all things considered, Compiègne is
a Palais Napoleonien, and if one would study the style of the Empire at its best
the thing may be done at Compiègne.
On July 30, 1814, Louis XVIII and Alexander of Russia met at Compiègne
amid a throng of Paris notabilities who had come thither for the occasion.
Charles X loved to hunt in the forest of Compiègne. In 1832, one of the
daughters of Louis-Philippe, the Princesse Louise, was married to the King of
the Belgians in this palace.
From 1852 to 1870 the palace and its grounds were the scenes of many imperial
fêtes.
Napoleon III had for Compiègne a particular predilection. The prince-president,
in 1852, installed himself here for the autumn season, and among his guests was
that exquisite blond beauty, Eugenie Montijo, who, the year after, was to

become the empress of the French. Faithful to the memory of his uncle, by
reason of a romantic sentiment, the Third Napoleon came frequently to
Compiègne; or perhaps it was because of the near-by hunt, for he was a
passionate disciple of Saint Hubert. It was his Versailles!
The palace of Compiègne as seen to-day presents all the classic coldness of
construction of the reign of Louis XV. Its lines were severe and that the building
was inspired by a genius is hard to believe, though in general it is undeniably
impressive. Frankly, it is a mocking, decadent eighteenth century architecture
that presents itself, but of such vast proportions that one sets it down as
something grand if not actually of surpassing good taste.
In general the architecture of the palace presents at first glance a coherent unit,
though in reality it is of several epochs. Its furnishings within are of different
styles and periods, not all of them of the best. Slender gold chairs, false
reproductions of those of the time of Louis XV, and some deplorable tapestries
huddle close upon elegant "bergères" of Louis XVI, and sofas, tables and
bronzes of master artists and craftsmen are mingled with cheap castings
unworthy of a stage setting in a music hall. A process of adroit eviction will
some day be necessary to bring these furnishings up to a consistent plane of
excellence.
One of the façades is nearly six hundred feet in length, with forty-nine windows
stretching out in a single range. It might be the front of an automobile factory if
it were less ornate, or that of an exposition building were it more beautiful. In
some respects it is reminiscent of the Palais Royal at Paris, particularly as to the
entrance colonnade and gallery facing the Louvre.
The chief beauty within is undoubtedly the magnificent stairway, with its
balustrade of wrought iron of the period of Louis XVI. The Salle de Spectacle is
of a certain Third Empire-Louis Napoleon distinction, which is saying that it is
neither very lovely nor particularly plain, simply ordinary, or, to give it a French
turn of phrase, vulgar.
One of the most remarkable apartments is the Salle des Cartes, the old salon of
the Aides de Camp, whose walls are ornamented with three great plans showing
the roads and by-paths of the forest, and other decorative panels representing
the hunt of the time of Louis XV.

Napoleon's Bedchamber, Compiègne
The Chambre à Coucher of the great Napoleon is perhaps the most interesting
of all the smaller apartments, with its strange bed, which in form more nearly
resembles an oriental divan than anything European. Doubtless it is not
uncomfortable as a bed, but it looks more like a tent, or camp, in the open, than
anything essentially intended for domestic use within doors. After the great
Napoleon, his nephew Napoleon III was its most notable occupant, though it
was last slept in by the Tzar Nicholas II, when he visited France in 1901.
The sleeping-room of the Empress Eugenie is fitted up after the style of the
early Empire with certain interpolations of the mid-nineteenth century. The
most distinct feature here is the battery of linen coffers which Marie Louise had

had especially designed and built. The Salon des Dames d'Honneur, with its
double rank of nine "scissors chairs," the famous tabourets de cour, lined up
rigidly before the canapé on which the empress rested, is certainly a remarkable
apartment. This was the decor of convention that Madame Sans Gene rendered
classic.
Like all the French national palaces Compiègne has a too abundant collection of
Sevres vases set about in awkward corners which could not otherwise be filled,
and, beginning with the vestibule, this thing is painfully apparent.
The apartments showing best the Napoleonic style in decorations and
furnishings are the Salon des Huissiers, the Salle des Gardes, the Escalier
d'Apollon, the Salle de Don Quichotte—which contains a series of designs
destined to have served for a series of tapestries intended to depict scenes in the
life of the windmill knight—the Galerie des Fêtes, the Galerie des Cerfs, the
Salle Coypel, the Salle des Stucs and the Salon des Fleurs, through which latter
one approaches the royal apartments.
In the sixteenth century, or, more exactly, between 1502 and 1510, was
constructed Compiègne's handsome Hotel de Ville, one of the most delightful
architectural mixtures of Gothic and Renaissance extant. It is an architectural
monument of the same class as the Palais de Justice at Rouen or the Hotel
Cluny at Paris. Its frontispiece is marvellous, the rez-de-chaussée less gracious
than the rest perhaps, but with the first story blooming forth as a gem of
magnificent proportions and setting. Between the four windows of this first
story are posed statuesque effigies of Charles VII, Jeanne d'Arc, Saint Rémy
and Louis IX. In the centre, in a niche, is an equestrian statue of Louis XII, who
reigned when this monument was being built. A balustrade à jour finishes off
this story, which, in turn, is overhung with a high, peaked gable, and above rise
the belfry and its spire, of which the great clock dates from 1303, though only
put into place in 1536. The only false note is sounded by the two insignificant,
cold and unlovely wings which flank the main structure on either side.
It is a sixteenth century construction unrivalled of its kind in all France, more
like a Belgian town-hall belfry than anything elsewhere to be seen outside
Flanders, but it is not of the low Spanish-Renaissance order as are so many of
the imposing edifices of occidental and oriental Flanders. It is a blend of Gothic
and Renaissance, and, what is still more rare, the best of Gothic and the best of
Renaissance. Above its façade is a civic belfry, flanked by two slender towers.

Within the portal-vestibule rises a monumental stairway which must have been
the inspiration of many a builder of modern opera-houses.
Opposite the Hotel Dieu is the poor, rent relic of the Tour de Jeanne d'Arc,
originally a cylindrical donjon of the twelfth century, wherein "La Pucelle" was
imprisoned in 1430.
Between the palace and the river are to be seen many vestiges of the mediæval
ramparts of the town, and here and there a well-defined base of a gateway or
tower. Mediævalism is rampant throughout Compiègne.
The park surrounding the palace is quite distinct from the wider radius of the
Fôret de Compiègne. It is of the secular, conventional order, and its
perspectives, looking towards the forest from the terrace and vice versa, are in
all ways satisfying to the eye.
One of the most striking of these alleyed vistas was laid out under the orders of
the first Napoleon in 1810. It loses itself in infinity, almost, its horizon blending
with that of the far distant Beaux Monts in the heart of the forest.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the palace are innumerable statues, none of
great beauty, value or distinction. On the south side runs a Cours, or Prado, as it
would be called in Catalonia. The word Cours is of Provençal origin, and how it
ever came to be transplanted here is a mystery. Still here it is, a great tree-
shaded promenade running to the river. The climate of Compiègne is never so
blazing hot as to make this Cours so highly appreciated as its namesakes in the
Midi, but as an exotic accessory to the park it is quite a unique delight.
Within the park may still be traced the outlines of the moat which surrounded
the palace of Charles V, as well as some scanty remains of the same period.

Cours de Compiègne
Another distinctive feature is the famous Berceau en Fer, an iron trellis several
thousands of feet in length, which was built by Napoleon I as a reminder to
Marie Louise of a similar, but smaller, garden accessory which she had known
at Schoenbrunn. It was a caprice, if you like, and rather a futile one since it was
before the time when artistically worthless things were the rage just because of
their gigantic proportions. Napoleon III cut it down in part, and pruned it to
more esthetic proportions, and what there is left, vine and flower grown, is
really charming.
The Forêt de Compiègne as a historic wildwood goes back to the Druids who
practiced their mysterious rites under its antique shade centuries before the
coming of the kings, who later called it their own special hunting preserve.
Stone hatchets, not unlike the tomahawks of the red man, have been found and
traced back—well, definitely to the Stone Age, and supposedly to the time when
they served the Druids for their sacrifices.
The soldiers of Cæsar came later and their axes were of iron or copper, and
though on the warpath, too, their way was one which was supposed to lead
civilization into the wilderness. Innumerable traces of the Roman occupation
are to be found in the forest by those who know how to read the signs; twenty-
five different localities have been marked down by the archeologists as having
been stations on the path blazed by the Legions of Rome.

After the Romans came the first of the kings as proprietors of the forest, and in
the moyen-age the monks, the barons and the crown itself shared equally the
rights of the forest.
Legends of most weird purport are connected with various points scattered here
and there throughout the forest, as at the Fosse Dupuis and the Table Ronde,
where a sort of "trial by fire" was held by the barons whenever a seigneur
among them had conspired against another. Ariosto, gathering many of his
legends from the works of the old French chroniclers, did not disdain to make
use of the Forêt de Compiègne as a stage setting.
During the reign of Clothaire the forest was known as the Forêt de Cuise,
because of a royal palace hidden away among the Druid oaks which bore the
name of Cotia, or Cusia. Until 1346 the palace existed in some form or other,
though shorn of royal dignities. It was at this period that Philippe VI divided the
forests of the Valois into three distinct parts in order to better regulate their
exploitation.
The Frankish kings being, it would seem, inordinately fond of la chasse the
Forêt de Compiègne, in the spring and autumn, became their favorite
rendezvous. Alcuin, the historian, noted this fact in the eighth century, and
described this earliest of royal hunts in some detail. In 715 the forest was the
witness of a great battle between the Austrasians and the Neustrians.
Before Francis I with his habitual initiative had pierced the eight great forest
roads which come together at the octagon called the Puits du Roi, the forest was
not crossed by any thoroughfare; the nearest thing thereto was the Chaussée de
Brunhaut, a Roman way which bounded it on the south and east.
Louis XIV and Louis XV, in turn, cut numerous roads and paths, and to the
latter were due the crossroads known as the Grand Octagone and the Petit
Octagone.
It was over one of these great forest roads, that leading to Soissons, that Marie
Louise, accompanied by a cortège of three hundred persons, eighty conveyances
and four hundred and fifty horses, journeyed in a torrential rain, in March 1807,
when she came to France to found a dynasty.
A marriage had been consummated by procuration at Vienna, and she set out to
actually meet her future spouse for the first time at Soissons. At the little village
of Courcelles, on the edge of the forest between Soissons and Compiègne, two
men enveloped in great protecting cloaks had arrived post-haste from

Compiègne. At the parish church they stopped a moment and took shelter under
the porch, impatiently scanning the horizon. Finally a lumbering berlin de
voyage lurched into view, drawn by eight white horses. In its depths were
ensconced two women richly dressed, one a beautiful woman of mature years,
the other a young girl scarce eighteen years.
The most agitated of the men, he who was clad in a gray redingote, sprang
hastily to the carriage door. He was introduced by the older woman as "Sa
Majesté l'Empereur des Françaises, mon frere." The speaker was one of the
sisters of Napoleon, Caroline, Queen of Naples; the other was the Archduchess
Marie Louise, daughter of Franz II, Emperor of Austria.
An imposing ceremonial had been planned for Soissons and the court had been
ordered to set out from Compiègne with the emperor, in order to arrive at
Soissons in due time. When the actual signal for the departure was given the
emperor was nowhere to be found. As usual he had anticipated things.
For weeks before the arrival of the empress to be Napoleon had passed the
majority of his waking hours at Paris in the apartments which he had caused to
be prepared for Marie Louise. He selected the colour of the furnishings, and
superintended the very placing of the furniture. Among other things he had
planned a boudoir which alone represented an expenditure of nearly half a
million francs.
Lejeune, who had accompanied Maréchal Berthier to Vienna to arrange the
marriage, had returned and given his imperial master a glowing description of
the charms of the young archduchess who was to be his bride. The emperor
compared his ideal with her effigy on medals and miniatures and then worked
even more ardently than before that her apartments should be worthy of her
when she arrived.
It was just following upon this fever of excitement that Napoleon and the court
had repaired to Compiègne. So restless was the emperor that he could hardly
bide the time when the archduchess should arrive, and it was thus that he set out
with Murat to meet the approaching cortège.
The pavilion which had been erected for the meeting was left to the citizens of
the neighbourhood, and the marvellous banquet which had been prepared by
Bausset was likewise abandoned. Napoleon had no time to think of dining.
All the roadside villages between Soissons and Compiègne were hung with
banners, and the populace appeared to be as highly excited as the contracting

parties. It still rained a deluge, but this made no difference. Two couriers at full
gallop came first to Compiègne, crying: "Place": "Place": The eight white
horses and the berlin de voyage followed. Before one had hardly time to realize
what was passing, Napoleon and his bride whisked by in a twinkling.
At nine o'clock an outpost in the park at Compiègne announced the arrival of
the emperor and his train. At ten o'clock a cannon shot rang out over the park
and the emperor and empress passed into the chateau to proceed with certain
indispensable presentations; then to souper, a petite souper intime, we are
assured.
On the morrow all the world of the assembled court met the empress and
avowed that she had that specious beauté du diable which has ever pleased the
French connoisseur of beautiful women. They went further, however, and stated
that in spite of this ravishing beauty she lacked the elegance which should be
the possession of an empress of the French. The faithful Berthier silenced them
with the obvious statement that since she pleased the emperor there was nothing
more to be said, or thought.
Flying northward on the great highroad leading out from Paris to Chantilly and
Compiègne gadabout travellers have never a thought that just beyond Pont Saint
Maxence, almost in plain view from the doorway of the Inn of the Lion
d'Argent of that sleepy little town, is a gabled wall which represents all that
remains of the "Maison de Philippe de Beaumanoir," called the Cour Basse.

THE END

INDEX
Aiguillon, Duchesse d', 217
Alcuin, 358
Alexander, Emperor, 221, 330, 349
Alphonse XIII of Spain, 7
Amboise, 26, 28, 86
Amboise, Bussy d', 72
Ancre, Maréchal d', 67
Andelot, Coligny d', 72-73
Andilly, Arnauld d', 267
Anet, Chateau d', 29, 111
Angennes, Jacques d', 44, 299, 311
Angers, Chateau d', 22
Anglas, Boissy d', 114
Angouleme, Duchesse d', 321
Anjou, Ducs d', 22, 136, 212
Anne of Austria, 96-97, 136-137, 284-287, 289, 347
Arc, Jeanne d', 345-346, 354
Ardennes, 54
Arlors, 25
Artois, Comtesse d', 176
Aubert, Jean, 333
Aubigné, D', 299
Aumale, Duc d', 29, 327, 331-332, 335, 338, 339
Auvergne, Louis d', 162-163
Ayen, Duc d', 299

Bagatelle, Chateau de, 163, 203-206
Bailly, Sylvain, 104
Barbés, 173
Barbison, 200-201
Baril, Jean, 25
Barry, Mme. du, 211, 242-243, 245, 250, 275, 329, 348
Bassompierre, 195, 262
Bastille, 71, 145, 173

Bausset, 361
Bavière, Isabeau de, 69, 151, 182
Beauharnais, Eugene, 220, 222
Beauharnais, Hortense, 215, 220, 221
Beaujon, 164
Beaumont, Cardinal de, 179
Beauvais, Hotel de, 11
Becker, General, 221
Becket, Thomas à, 182
Bedford, Duke of, 69
Belleveu, 241-242
Berquin, Louis de, 67
Berry, Duc de, 165
Berry, Duchesse de, 50, 321
Berthier, Maréchal (see Wagram, Prince de)
Blanchard, 130
Blanqui, 173
Blois, 21, 26, 305
Blondel, 37
Blucher, 173, 209
Boileau, 328
Boissy, Forest of, 49
Bonaparte, Caroline, 359
Bonaparte, Jerome, 147
Bonaparte, Louis, 235
Bonaparte, Lucien, 145
Bonheur, Rosa, 202
Bordeaux, Duc de, 166
Borghese, Princesse, 208
Bossuet, 328
Boulanger, 200
Boullée, 164
Boulogne, Bois de, 168, 174, 175, 203, 206, 209
Bourbon Family, 164-165, 329, 331, 341
Bourbon, Palais, 120, 159-161
Bourdaloue, 328
Bourg-la-Reine, 3
Boyceau, 30, 262, 270
Breton, Mme. de, 121-122

Brunet, 223
Brunswick, Duchesse de, 154
Bullant, Jean, 109, 327, 336

Cadoudal, 173
Cambacères, Consul, 115-116
Cardinal, Palais (see Royal, Palais)
Carpeaux, 118
Carrier-Belleuse, 202
Cartouche, 67
Cellini, 182, 192
Chabanne, Comte de, 73
Chabrol, 147
Chalgrin, 154
Chambiges, Pierre, 91, 281-282
Chamblay, 54-56
Chambord, 71, 86, 310
Chamillard, Michael, 252-253
Champaigne, Philippe de, 135
Champollion-Figèac, 184
Chantilly, Chateau and Forest of, 324-340, 362
Chappell, Comte des, 72
Charenton, 152
Charlemagne, 18, 116, 281
Charles II, 344
Charles V, 22, 23, 25, 62-63, 66, 68, 77, 82-84, 170, 190, 247, 281,
327, 344, 356
Charles VI, 63, 66, 69, 176-177, 229
Charles VII, 69, 182, 190, 346, 354
Charles VIII, 21, 299
Charles IX, 89, 91-94, 106, 108-110, 171, 209, 291, 312, 327
Charles X, 57, 108, 118, 146, 173, 192, 204, 212, 237-238, 303, 317,
319-320, 349
Charles IV, Emperor, 63
Charles V, Emperor, 85, 88, 346
Charles I, of England, 104, 137, 289
Charles the Bold of Burgundy (see Charolais, Comte de)
Charolais, Comte de, 177-178
Chartres, Ducs de (see Orleans, Ducs de)

Chateauroux, Mme. de, 250
Chatou, 210
Chenonceaux, 26, 32, 71
Chevalier, Etienne, 339
Childerbert I, 216
Christina, Queen, 222
Cinq-Mars, 73, 134
Clagny, Chateau de, 228, 277
Clément, Jacques, 93, 230-232
Clothaire, 357
Clotilde, 61
Clovis, 61, 76, 216
Coictier, Jacques, 66, 152
Colbert, 3, 87, 98, 100, 269
Coligny, Admiral, 93
Collo, Jean, 27
Commynes, 177
Compiègne, Palace and Forest of, 52-53, 165, 232, 335, 342-362
Conciergerie, 61, 65-68
Condé Family, 73, 269, 324, 327-331, 333, 337, 339
Conflans, Chateau de, 2, 175-179
Constantine, Emperor, 344
Consulat, Palais du (see Luxembourg, Palais du)
Conti Family, 211, 242, 327
Corneille, 73, 133, 151
Corot, 200
Cottereau, Jean, 299, 300-305, 307
Courcelles, 359
Cousin, Jean, 170
Coypel, 137
Cromwell, 137
Crozat, 162

Dagobert, 54
Damiens, 67, 263-264
Dante, 24
Dardelle, 123
Daru, 100
Daubigny, 200

Daumesnil, Baron, 173
Daumet, Henri, 332
Debanes, 22
Debrosse, Jacques, 64, 154, 158
Decamps, 202, 338
Delille, Abbé, 143
Delorme, Marion, 73
Delorme, Philibert, 34, 108-111, 189
Denecourt, 198-199, 201
Deputés, Chambre des (see Bourbon, Palais)
Desmoulins, Camille, 145
Diaz, 200
Directoire, Palais du (see Luxembourg, Palais du)
Donon, 100
Dorbay, 110
Drouais, 211
Ducamp, Maxine, 126
Ducerceau, 92, 94, 110, 112
Ducrot, General, 222
Dugastz, 232
Dupaira, 95
Duperac, 110
Dupré, 200
Durfort, Madame, 49

Egalité, Palais (see Royal, Palais)
Enghien, Chateau d', 340
Enghien, Duc d', 169, 172-174, 331
Epernon, Ducs d', 103, 232
Erard, Sebastian, 210
Este, Maria d', 290
Estival, Convent of, 49
Estrées, Gabrielle d', 102, 210
Étampes, Duchesse d', 86, 185, 192, 294
Étoiles, Normand d', 204
Eugenie, Empress, 120-122, 125-126, 238, 350, 352
Evans, Dr., 122

Fallières, President, 166-167

Famin, 314-315
Faure, Felix, 56, 58-59
Féraud, 114
Ferrare, Duc de, 70
Flandre, Comte de, 82
Flavy, Guillaume de, 345
Fleury, Chateau de, 195
Fontaine, 99, 127
Fontainebleau, Forest of, 6, 50, 52, 181, 183, 196-202, 279, 294
Fontainebleau, Palais de, 2, 26, 28, 33, 34, 87, 91, 111, 180-196, 329,
335, 336
Fouché, 221
Fould, 53
Fouquet, Jean, 339
Fouquet, Nicolas, 269
Fragonard, 211
Francine, Thomas and Alexandre, 196
Francis I, 8, 10, 12, 16, 21, 32, 44-45, 62, 64, 67, 77, 79, 81, 84-89,
108, 110, 170, 181, 183-187, 189-191, 194, 209,
229, 281-282, 290, 292, 299, 306, 310-311, 321, 326, 346, 358
Franz II, 359

Gabriel, 276, 348
Gaillon, Chateau de, 33
Ganne, Père, 200
Girardini, 160
Gisors, Castle of, 82
Gondi, 230, 232
Goujon, Jean, 89, 90
Grand Trianon, 39, 248, 258, 259, 260, 263, 264, 274-276
Gregory of Tours, 215
Grévy, Jules, 58
Gros, Baron, 338
Grosbois, Chateau de, 51
Guilbert, Abbé, 184
Guillain, Guillaume, 282
Guise, Ducs de, 70, 72-73, 103

Hamon, 200

Harlay-Crauvallon, Archbishop De, 178-179
Haussmann, Baron, 3, 13, 152
Hebert, 201
Hennequin, Dame Gillette, 178
Henri II, 26, 32, 44, 69-70, 78, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 108, 110, 170, 193,
229, 230, 282, 294-295, 311, 327
Henri III, 29, 92-93, 101, 109, 230-232, 312
Henri IV, 16, 26, 27, 29, 45-46, 71-72, 87, 89, 92, 94-95, 102-103, 111-
112, 118, 172, 186, 190, 191, 194-197,
206, 209, 210, 231, 232, 238, 282-283, 306, 327
Henrietta of England, 233, 289
Henriette de France, 104, 137
Henry V of England, 63, 326
Henry VI of England, 63, 69
Henry VIII of England, 311
Hérivaux, Bois de, 340
Hohenzollern, Prince de, 53
Hortense, Queen, 330
Hugo, Victor, 73
Hugues Capet, 62

Institut, Palais de l', 159-160
Isabey (Père), 40

Jacob of Cologne, 87
Jacque, 200
James II of England, 290
Jarnac, Gui Chabot de, 294
Joachim, Prince, 52, 56
John II of France, 83, 170
John VIII, Pope, 344
Joinville, Forest of, 169
Josephine, Empress, 174, 215, 217-222, 323
Justice, Palais de (see La Cité, Palais de)

Karr, Alphonse, 149

La Barauderie, De, 30
Labaudy, 50

La Brosse, 102
La Cité, Palais de, 12, 61-68, 75, 81, 82, 93, 152, 153, 170
La Châtaigneraie, 294
Laffitte, Pierre, 212, 213, 243
Lambesc, Prince de, 144
La Muette, Chateau de, 111, 203, 209-210
Lancret, 338
Langeais, 33
Lannes, Maréchal, 213
Laporte, 284
La Quintinye, 267-269
La Reine Blanche, Chateau de, 341
Laschant, 232
Latini, Brunetto, 24
Lauzan, 178, 289
La Vallière, Louise de, 289
Lebrun, Charles, 97, 255, 256
Lebrun, Consul, 115
Le Calabrese, Henri, 27
Lecouteux de Canteleu, 217, 222
Ledoux, 211, 243
Lefuel, 100
Lejeune, 360
Leloir, 239
L'Elysée, Palais de, 153, 162-167
Lemercier, Jacques, 96, 100, 135, 262
Le Moyne, 239
Le Notre, 16, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 35, 39, 40, 104, 128, 129-130, 179,
233, 248, 264-266, 270, 277, 288, 292, 307-308, 327, 330
Lepaute, 240
Le Roy, 262
Les Bruyeres, 222
Lescot, Pierre, 88-90, 109
Lesdiguières, Duchesse de, 179
Levau, 97-98, 110, 247, 249
Lomenci, Martial de, 247
Longueil, René de, 212
Longueville, Mme. de, 73, 327
Loret, 11

Lorraine, Cardinal de, 111
Lorraine, Chevalier de, 233
Louis I, 344
Louis V, 344
Louis VI, 281
Louis VII, 169, 181, 182
Louis IX, 23, 62, 77, 169, 176, 182, 190, 281, 295, 341, 344, 354
Louis XI, 21, 66, 69, 152, 172, 177-178, 299, 326
Louis XII, 26, 69, 299, 305, 306, 326, 354
Louis XIII, 16, 48, 87, 96, 112, 132, 134, 136, 171, 189, 190, 194, 209,
247, 249, 262, 266, 283-284, 306, 347
Louis XIV, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 29, 33, 38, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50, 85, 87, 97-
99, 104, 112, 118, 127, 136-137, 152, 158, 170, 178, 186, 189, 190, 206,
217, 223-224, 226, 233, 240, 245, 247, 249, 251-253, 255-257,
261, 264, 268, 270, 273, 274, 277, 283, 284, 288-290, 291, 293, 296,
297, 299, 303-307, 312, 328, 345, 347, 358
Louis XV, 4, 14, 16, 17, 38, 48, 112, 152, 162, 163, 174, 185, 186, 189,
190, 192, 205, 207, 209, 211, 227, 241, 243, 246, 250, 253, 263-264,
275-276, 284, 290, 312, 320, 323, 329, 345, 348, 350-352, 358
Louis XVI, 37, 39, 41, 43, 57, 108, 113, 118, 143, 144, 152, 154, 210,
213, 227, 250, 261, 235-236, 352, 356, 358-362, 290, 312-313, 316,
320, 322, 348, 351
Louis XVIII, 118, 161, 174, 237, 250, 316, 349
Louis Philippe, 105, 108, 117-118, 146, 149, 154, 162, 166, 186, 194,
199, 207, 238, 254-255, 350 (see also Orleans Family)
Louveciennes, Chateau de, 210-212, 242, 288
Louvre, 4, 12, 13, 22, 25, 32, 44, 62, 68, 75-105, 108, 109, 110, 111,
112, 118, 124, 131, 132, 152, 233, 351
Lude, Comtesse de, 49
Luxembourg, Jean de, 346
Luxembourg, Palais de, 28, 40, 115, 136, 144, 153-158

Machine de Marly, 223-224
Madrid, Chateau de, 111
Magnan, Maréchal, 242
Maine, Duc de, 159
Maintenon, Chateau de, 242, 296-308, 312
Maintenon, Mme. de, 158-159, 194, 227, 249, 274, 296-299, 302-303,
305-308, 312, 347

Maisons-Laffitte, Chateau de, 203, 212-214, 288
Malmaison, Chateau de, 215-223, 323
Mandrin, 67
Mansart, François, 212-213
Mansart, Jules Hardouin, 35, 137, 179, 226, 233, 241, 249, 274, 276,
291, 327, 333
Mantes, 55
Mantes, Mlle. de, 159
Marat, 116
Marceliano, Pucello and Edme, 26
Marie Antoinette, 49, 115, 194, 204, 210, 237, 245, 256, 276-277, 320,
322, 349
Marie Louise, 6, 117, 208
Marie Sophie, 320
Marie Thérèse, 11
Marigny, Enguerrand de, 62, 172
Marigny, Marquis de, 99
Marlotte, 201
Marly-le-Roi (or -le-Bourg or -le-Chatel), 2, 224-228, 283, 288
Mary Tudor, of England, 69
Marseilles, 91
Massena, Duc de, 217
Masson, Frederic, 236
Matignon, Maréchal de, 70
Mayenne, Duc de, 101
Mazarin, Cardinal, 87, 104, 136, 159, 169, 283-285
Mazarin, Palais (see Institut, Palais de l')
Médici, Catherine de, 26, 31, 33, 44, 48, 68, 69-71, 90-91, 93-94, 97,
107, 108, 110, 111, 171, 195, 230, 247, 311
Médici, Marie de, 72, 103, 154, 155, 158, 206, 347
Menars et de Marigny, Marquis de, 163
Menours, Jacques de, 30, 262-263
Mercogliano, 18
Messonier, 338
Metezeau, Thibaut, 92, 94
Metternich, Prince de, 121
Meudon, Bois de, 240
Meudon, Chateau de, 34, 111
Michelet, 192

Mignard, 233, 239, 306
Millet, Eugene, 290, 291
Millet, Jean François, 200, 201
Mirabeau, 172
Molière, 73, 104, 178, 249
Molineaux, Chateau de, 278
Mollet, Claude, 29, 30
Mollien, 100
Monconseil, Marquise de, 204
Mongomere, Comte de, 67
Montansier, Duc de, 269
Montargis, 28
Montebello, Maréchal de, 213
Montespan, Marquise de, 159, 249, 275, 312
Montesson, Marquise de, 234
Montgaillard, 50
Montgolfier, 130
Montgomeri, Sieur de, 70
Montmartre, 288
Montmorency Family, 178, 324, 326-327, 339
Montmorency, Forest of, 49, 288
Montpensier, Mlle. de, 136
Moreau, Architect, 138
Moreau, Hégésippe, 123-124
Moskowa, Prince de la, 53
Muette, Chateau de la, 111
Murat, Princes de, 52-56, 165, 235, 361
Murillo, 164
Musée de Cluny, 12
Musset, De, 274

Nacret, 239
Nanterre, 281
Nanteuil, Célestin, 200
Napoleon I, 6, 13, 40, 51-52, 57, 79, 88, 100, 108, 115-118, 127, 129,
145, 154, 155, 160, 165, 171, 173-174, 180, 186, 187-188, 190, 194,
208, 213, 217-222, 235-237, 250, 254, 274, 296, 298, 313-316,
320, 321, 322, 345, 349, 352, 355-356, 359-362

Napoleon III, 13, 58, 92, 100, 105, 118-122, 147, 152, 166, 195, 197,
222, 238, 290, 313, 318, 323, 345, 350-352, 356
Nattier, 338
Neckar, 144
Nemours, Duc de, 70
Neufforge, De, 37
Neuilly and its Chateau, 206-209, 238
Nicholas II, 352
Nicolo dell' abbate, 193
Nigra, Chevalier, 121
Noailles, Ducs de, 298-300, 306
Noisy, Chateau de, 278
Nolhac, M. de, 274

Olivier, Emile, 125
Oppenard, 137
Orgemont, Marguerite d', 326
Orleans, Ducs d', 137-140, 143, 144-149, 161, 209, 233, 234, 286-287,
337
Orleans, Palais d' (see Royal, Palais)
Ormesson, D', 73
Osman, 230-231
Oursins, Juvenal des, 66

Palatine, Princesse, 233
Palissy, Bernard, 31-32
Panseron, 37
Paré, Ambroise, 171
Paul, Saint Vincent de, 73
Penthièvre, Duc de, 306, 312, 322
Pepin-le-Bref, 343
Percier, 100, 127
Perrault, Charles, 98-99
Petit Luxembourg, Palais du, 155, 157
Petit Trianon, 39, 260, 264, 274, 276-277, 329
Pfnor, 184
Philippe Auguste, 12, 62, 77, 80-82, 169, 182, 190
Philippe III, 62, 177
Philippe IV, 62, 170, 176, 182, 190, 295

Philippe VI, 170, 358
Philippe II, of Spain, 69
Philippe-Egalité, 138-139
Picard, Achille, 125
Pichegreu, 173
Pierrefonds, 290, 335
Pisan, Christine de, 23
Pius VII, 6, 115, 194, 235
Poirson, 184
Poissin, 164
Poissy, 23, 232, 292, 293
Poitiers, Diane de, 29, 44, 70-71, 193
Pompadour, Mme. de, 163, 204-205, 241-242, 246, 250, 275, 348
Potter, Paul, 164
Poussin, 338
Prieur, Barthélemy, 196
Primaticcio, 87, 188, 192, 193
Provence, Comte de, 154

Quatre Nations, Palais des (see Institut, Palais de l')

Rabelais, 322
Racine, 297, 303, 308, 328
Rambouillet, Chateau and Forest of, 44-45, 50, 55-59, 242, 296, 298,
309-323, 328, 335, 336
Rambouillet, Seigneur de, 299
Raphael, 87, 170
Raspail, 173
Ravaillac, 67, 102
Redon, 128
Régnier, Henri de, 244
Remusat, Mme. de, 174, 219
Retz, Maréchal de, 247
Revolution, Palais de la (see Royal, Palais)
Richelieu, Cardinal, 72, 73, 95, 100, 131-139, 151, 178, 179, 216-217
Rigaud, 307
Rigby, 334
Robert II, 62, 190, 281
Rochefort, Henri, 120-121

Romain, Mme., 141
Ronsard, 34, 90, 109, 111
Roosevelt, Theodore, 166-167
Rosier, De, 210
Rosny, 55
Rosso, 182, 192
Rousseau, Theodore, 200, 201
Rousselle, 123
Rouvray, Forest of, 229
Rovigo, Duc de, 221
Royal, Palais, 131-150, 284, 351
Royale, Place (see Vosges, Place des)
Rubens, 164
Rueil (see Malmaison)

Sadi-Carnot, 58
Saint Cloud, Palais de, 13, 93, 228, 229-243
Saint Cyr, 296-298, 303
Saint Germain-en-Laye, 28, 91, 111, 136, 203, 206, 223, 232, 242, 256,
279-295, 311, 324, 336, 345
Saint Germain, Forest of, 212, 292-295
Saint James, Baudart de, 208
Saint Louis (see Louis IX)
Saint Maur, Chateau de, 111
Saint Ouen, 54
Saint-Simon, 179, 262, 348
Sarto, Del, 192
Savoie, Louise de, 108
Savoie, Philippe de, 66
Scarron, Mme. (see Maintenon, Mme. de)
Schickler, Baron, 318
Schopin, 195
Sénat, Palais du (see Luxembourg, Palais du)
Senlis, 6
Senlis, Forêt de, 340
Senlis, Seigneurs de, 324
Séran, Comtesse de, 275
Serlio, 88, 185
Serres, Olivier de, 33

Servandoni, 112
Sévigné, Mme. de, 179, 277, 328
Soissons, 359-361
Soyecourt, Marquis de, 212
Sualem, Rennequin, 223
Sully, Duc de, 102, 103

Talmon, Prince de, 73
Tessé, Marquis de, 73
Thermes, Palais des, 12, 62, 153
Thierry III, 224
Thiers, President, 122-123
Thomery, 202
Thou, De, 73
Temple, The, 144
Tiercelin, Jean, 108
Tillet, Maison du, 232
Toulouse, Comte de, 321
Toulouse, Comtesse de, 312, 320
Tournelles, Palais des, 66, 68-71, 81, 152
Trepsat, 313-314
Trianon (see Grand Trianon)
Triboulet, 186
Tribunat, Palais du (see Royal, Palais)
Trochu, General, 120
Tuileries, Palace and Gardens of the, 3, 13, 31, 33-34, 40, 76, 78, 82,
91, 92, 94, 106-130, 131, 155, 157, 166, 218, 227, 317
Turenne, 73
Turgot, 100

Valerian, Mont, 288
Vallet, Pierre, 27
Valois, Charles, Comte de, 170
Valois, Elizabeth de, 69
Valois, Marguerite de (1492-1549), 8, 10
Valois, Marguerite de (1553-1615), 10, 69, 111, 209
Van Loo, 164
Vasari, 181
Vauban, 252

Vaux-le-Vicomte, 36, 42
Vendome, Duc de, 102, 206
Vernet, Joseph, 164, 239
Verneuil, Marquis de, 207
Veronese, 338
Versailles, 2, 36, 42, 85, 88, 99, 112, 118, 145, 163, 180, 196, 205, 215,
223-224, 226, 228, 239, 240, 242, 244-278, 279, 283, 296,
305, 324, 334, 335, 336, 350
Vesinet, Bois de, 288
Vexin, Comte de, 159
Vignole, 188
Vignon, 113
Villa Normande, 54
Villeray, Marquis de, 299
Villeroy, Marquis Neuville de, 108
Villeroy, Maréchal de, 178
Villers-Cotterets, 28, 165, 346
Vincennes, Chateau de, 168-175, 331, 345
Vincennes, Bois de, 168, 174-175, 177
Vinci, Leonardo da, 87, 192
Visconti, 100
Vivonne, François de, 294
Voltaire, 263
Von Ostade, 164
Vosges, Place des, 71-74, 152.

Wagram, Prince de, 51, 52, 360, 362
Wallace, Sir Richard, 205
Wellington, 208-209
William I, Emperor, 255
Wolsey, 132

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