VII
Poor little old town of St. Clodoald! In later years I spent an afternoon hunting up its distant remembrances. Alas, but it was like looking at some worn-out engraving, some faded dun picture once known in all its brilliancy.
Obliterated was the dainty white stone Palace; scene of the revelries and the bright-coloured elegancies of the Regent; favourite retreat of Marie Antoinette; theatre of the “Dix-huit Brumaire” drama; early home of l’Aiglon! The Château de St. Cloud, the summer residence of the last Napoleon, had been burned by the Prussians—even as they burned the bulk of the town—in 1870.[[1]]
Many a time, when, not so many years ago, we could read daily the shameless slander, the wilful calumnies, of the German press on the subject of the “barbarity” of our soldiers during the South African wars, has my mind flown back to the picture of charred and jagged ruins standing against the rise of the hill which once met my eyes when I looked for the quiet, happy prospect I had known.
THE OLD PARK OF ST. CLOUD
The town, when I last saw it, and its ancient church had been rebuilt; but the Palace was a dismal ruin; and the park seemed scald and deserted. Gone also, worst luck of all, the Lanterne de Diogène—the quaint tower at the river-side opening of the main alley, built in the pleasure-loving days of Louis-le-Bien-Aimé. ‹It was called a mirador: I believe a structure of that kind is now known as “gazebo”—deplorable word!› From the top of it a magnificent panorama of distant Paris could be descried.
The neighbourhood of la Lanterne was the great trysting place of nurses and guardsmen, and the playing ground of children. On that day of back-dreaming exploration, I had been looking forward, with a kind of tenderness, to gazing once more on its bizarre shape. There is a well-known ronde, dating it would seem from the Middle Ages:
“La Tour, prends garde—
La Tour, prends garde—