II
In 1893, Chantilly was still the game-preserve of a hunter-prince, and everything about it was ordered for the chase. Those wide-open grassy glades, studded with birch or oak-scrub, were haunted by the deer; and in those thickets of golden broom the heavy does prepared their nurseries. Great, floundering, russet pheasants came flying by; at every step a hare or a white-tailed rabbit started up out of the grass. Far at the further end of the forest there were deep, unsightly thickets of mud and thorn, left darkling amid the trim order of the place, for the wild boar delights in them. As we walked or drove down the neat-clipt avenues of the forest, the roads appeared impassable to the traveller, and we wondered at the contrast between their shoals of sand and the careful forestry that pares and cuts every wilding branch of the over-arching hornbeam roof. But the roads are bad on purpose; every spring they are ploughed afresh, lest they lose the lightness beloved of the horseman.
Every May, a beautiful fault frustrates this skilful venery, for, thick as grass, thick and sweet, the lily of the valley springs in all the brakes and shady places. The scent of the game will not lie across these miles of blossom. The hunters are in despair, and the deer, still deafened with the winter’s yelp of the hounds—the deer, who sets his back against the sturdiest oak, and butts at the pack with his antlers, who swims the lakes, and from his island refuge sells his life as hard as he can—the deer, accustomed to be always vanquished, beholds himself at last befriended by an ally more invincible than water or forest oak, by the sweet innumerable white lily, innocent as himself, that every May-time sends the huntsmen home.
The lily that saves the deer is the consolation of poor women. Every morning during the brief season of its blossom, they are up before the dawn. Holding their children by the hand, they are off to the innermost dells of its forest; and before our breakfast-time they are back at the railway stations at Chantilly or Creil, laden with bunches of lilies, which they sell to the dusty passengers bound by the morning mails for London or for Brussels. Sweet flowers with the dew upon them, fragrant posies, who would not give a five-penny-piece for so much beauty? “What would you buy with your roses that is worth your roses?” sings the Persian poet. These tired country-women of the Oise would know what to reply: new sabots for the good man, a white communion veil for the second girl, a shawl for the old grandam, and a galette for the children’s dinner! The lilies are a harvest to them, like any other—a sweet, voluntary, unplanted harvest that comes three months before the corn is yellow.
The lilies were all out when we drove through the woods at Chantilly. I had never seen such a sight, for we had not yet visited Compiègne, where they are still more profuse and, I think, of a larger growth. In the Hay-woods in Warwickshire they grow sparsely, in timid clumps; and how proud of them we were! But nowhere have I seen such a sheet of coy flowers as these. Anemones and tulips of Florence, tall jonquils of Orange, ye have a plenteous rival in the north! The whole way to Commelle the glades were sweet with lilies.
Every traveller between Calais and Paris has marked unwitting the beauty of Commelle. You remember the view that precedes or follows (according to your direction) the little station of Orry-Coye? The rails are laid on the summit of a hill; the train rushes through a delicate forest of birch. Suddenly we come upon a clearing, and on the one hand we see, in a wide blue vista, the slow declining valley of the Thérain, placid and royal amid its mantling woods; while, on the other side, the hill breaks in a sort of precipice, and shows, deep below, a chain of lakelets asleep amid the trees; a turreted white castle rises out of a sedgy island, and appears the very palace of the Belle au Bois dormant. These are the Pools of Commelle—pools or lakes? Pool is too small and lake too large for the good French word étang. They are considerable lakelets, some miles round, four in a row, connected each with each. They lie in a sheltered valley, almost a ravine, whose romantic character contrasts with the rest of the forest. Here the clipped and slender trees of Chantilly give place to an older and more stately vegetation. The gnarled roots of the beeches grip the sides of the hills with an amazing cordage, spreading as far over the sandy cliff as their boughs expand above. In the bottom of the combe, one after another, lie the four sister pools. The road winds by their side through meadows of cowslips, past the bulrushes where the swan sits on her nest, and past the clear spaces of open water, where her mate swims double on the wave. The brink is brilliant with kingcup on a film of ladysmock. At the end of the last pool the ground rises towards the forest. There are some ruins; an old grey mill rises by the weir. The swell of the land, the grace and peace of the lake, the sedgy foreground, are exquisitely tranquil.
We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle—le Château de la Reine Blanche, as the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the Prince de Joinville. A tradition runs that, in 1227, the mother of St. Louis had a chateau here. Six hundred years later, the last of the Condés built the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. ’Tis the romantic Gothic of Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there is a homely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of an old tune—“Ma Normandie,” perhaps, or “Combien j’ai Douce Souvenance.” The mill-race rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers near the hall-door. It is very silent, very peaceful, very deserted. The Castle of St. Louis would not have seemed so old-world as this.
We must make a long road home by the Table Ronde, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to visit, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of steps leads steeply down the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which runs demurely, as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer than it looks, and as sometimes we see a meek-faced, slender little woman mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great oblong sheet of artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A stone’s-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, it dazzles in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here into a long low hill. There we found a score of white-bloused, bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour. Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of pictures.
Before we leave, we must stroll round by the castle, with its fine old gardens planted by Le Nôtre, its vast stables, imposing as a church, its sheets of water, out of which rises, elegantly turreted, the brand-new chateau of 1880, so reminiscent of the older castles of Touraine. For once there was an older castle here, built by Jean Bullant for Anne of Montmorency. The great constable left the splendid palace to his son, and in 1632 Chantilly, as it stood among the waters and the gardens of Le Nôtre, was a thing to wonder at and envy. Here Henri, Duke of Montmorency, kept his court and filled his galleries with famous pictures. He was a great patron of the arts. His wife, the Silvie of the poets of her time, has left her name still, like a perfume, among the avenues and parks of Chantilly. It was a princely life; but the duke was discontented in his castle; private wealth could not console him for public woes, and he joined in the revolt of Gaston d’Orléans. He was defeated at the head of his troops, taken prisoner, and beheaded at Toulouse, by order of Cardinal Richelieu. “On the scaffold,” says St. Simon, “he bequeathed one of his best pictures to Richelieu, and another to my father.”
The duke was a near kinsman of the Prince of Condé. Until the last, Silvie had believed that this cousin, powerful and in the king’s good graces, would intervene, and save her husband’s life. To her surprise, Condé held his peace. The axe fell—and Silvie understood, when the king awarded the confiscated glories of Chantilly to Condé.
For a hundred and fifty years, Chantilly continued to be the almost Royal pleasure-house, the Versailles of the Princes of Condé. Then the great Revolution rased the castle to the ground. It was not here, but some miles away—at St. Leu-Taverny—that the last Condé died, in 1830. Chantilly, which had come into the family by a violent death, left it also in a sombre and mysterious fashion. The last Prince of Condé was found one morning hanged to the handle of his casement-window. The castle of Chantilly passed to the Duc d’Aumale. In 1840 he began the labour of restoring it; but the Revolution of 1848 sent him into exile, and only in 1872 was Chantilly restored to its rightful proprietor. Then, like a phœnix, the new castle began to rise swiftly from its nest of ash and ruin. It is as like the castle of the Renaissance, from which it descends, as a young child is like its illustrious ancestor. ’Tis a princely and elegant palace, and we find no fault with it beyond its youth. It stands with a swanlike grace amid its waters; it holds, as in the days of Montmorency, a rare treasure of old pictures and priceless manuscripts; and so far as eye can reach from its terraces, the lands and forests are subject to its lord. Chantilly is, in truth, a great possession. The Duc d’Aumale, as we know, had no sons. He died in 1897, and, choosing the most gifted men of his country for his children, he bequeathed his palace and estate of Chantilly to the Institute of France.