The castle is the chief interest at Pierrefonds, but not the only one; for, down by the lake, on the overgrown and weedy promenade, there stands the Établissement des Bains. Here tepid sulphur springs are captured and turned to healing uses. Happy sick people, who are sent to get well in this enchanting village! How they must gossip in the lime-walk and fish in the lake, read on the castle terraces,
and wander in the forest! Happy sick people; for, alas! (unless one stand in need of sulphur baths) Pierrefonds, in its lovely valley, is not, they say, a very healthy place. So, at least, from Compiègne, proclaims the trump of Envy; or perhaps the imparadised Pierrefondois, eager to keep their lovely home safe from the jerry-builder, have started these vague rumours of influenza, of languor, of rheumatisms. ’Tis a wise ruse, a weapon of defence against the Parisian—a sort of sepia shot forth to protect the natural beauty of the woods against the fate of Asnières.
There are three courses open to the visitor to Pierrefonds. He may stay there, and that would certainly be the pleasantest course. Or he may take the train, and after little more than half an hour arrive at Villers-Cotterets, where he will sleep, reserving for the morrow the lovely drive through the forest to Vaumoise, and the visit to the quaint old high-lying town of Crépy en Valois, whence the train will take him on to Paris. Crépy is a dear old town. No one would think that such a dull disastrous treaty once was signed there. The road that slopes down from Crépy to the plain is full of a romantic, almost an Umbrian picturesqueness. We drove there once, years ago, and visited the knolly forest full of moss and pines. But we have never seen Villers-Cotterets; for when we were at Pierrefonds we followed the third and worst course open to us: we drove back to Compiègne, and thence we took the train direct to Paris.
Part II
1901
Never again have I visited Pierrefonds or the woods of Compiègne. They lie an hour or so from Paris by the rail, but still to me they seem as inaccessible as fairyland. Sometimes, on a fine morning at Eastertide, a longing goes through me to start for those tall glades of oak, with the road that runs right through them to the lovely Vieux Moulin. But, to tell the truth, I have not dared; I doubt not, at the back of my heart, that village, forest, hill, and lake, have long since crumbled into ashes.
Years later, it was my fate, however, to return to Chantilly. The time was midwinter; January wrapped the earth in a shroud of snow and ice. But even in midwinter there still beats in copse and wold a heart of life too deep and sound for any frost to touch it. Not a flower, not a leaf, enlivened the forest; but how large and frequent seemed the forest-birds relieved against that dazzling steppe! The green woodpeckers, hopping about, two or three of them together, appeared (although, in fact, not more than fourteen inches long) as large and bright as parrots. This fine bird, the pivert of France where it is common, ever excites my admiration, so graceful is its shape, from the long bill to the slender somewhat drooping tail, so bright is its colouring—a mantle of moss green, a breast of greenish yellow, some yellow feathers in a tail of chequered brown and white, and a coif like a jewel, ruby-red, blood-red, drawn close over head and neck. In England I have never seen him, though I believe the bird exists with us; nor, though I sometimes find him in my Cantal orchards, have I ever seen the pivert so much to his advantage as during that cold week in January, relieved against a vast expanse of snow. The winter that year was unusually hard. The pools of Commelle were all fast bound in ice; the snow lay heaped beneath the lacy boughs of the beech roots twisted on their banks. Silent and deserted stood the castle of Queen Blanche. On every twig and branch of the woods glittered a spray of diamond dewdrops frozen hard. Brilliant, still, and white, the great forest stretched all round us, like an enchanted place where no one lived but we, until, as we reached the third pool of the chain, we suddenly found that we were not alone: a company of wild ducks had alighted on the ice, still disposed, as when they fly, in a long straggling V, and stood shuffling incessantly their webbed feet as if to warm them on that bitter floor.
One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the piqueurs, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its English name—Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “Levez votre queue, levez!” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War.
On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the taillis where the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all planted in taillis composé with hornbeam, elm, and oak—three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is a taillis composé or taillis sous futaie—perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.