De te laisser abattre!”
which is sung by the Gallic infant, in a game somewhat cognate to our: “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush!” It used to be danced under the shadow of this tower; and, in a child’s way, I had always instinctively associated the unnamed stronghold of the ballad with this peaceful erection.
Alas for the dear old Tour, it was destined to be laid low, after all, in spite of our eager warning! The terrace on which it was built was seized as the emplacement of a battery of heavy Krupps, for the bombardment of the obstinate capital yonder away. The Lanterne de Diogène, in its white stone and clear outline against the trees, offered too distinct a mark to the answering gunners to be tolerated. It had to be levelled. It was never rebuilt. I could find nothing appertaining to it but the grass bordered slabs of its foundations....
Lost, too, to me was the particular alley redolent of the memory of both Reinette and Tremble; no doubt absorbed in some of the metalled motor roads that now traverse the park.
The Grande Cascade, however, which Lepautre, by order of Louis XIV, devised for the glorification of the Duke of Orleans’ future home, was still there. Its tiers of white stone steps over which the water, on Grandes Eaux days, used to pour down, foaming yet disciplined, in symmetric balustered channels, between ranks of allegoric statues standing like guards and lacqueys upon a royal stairway—still descend, framed by huge umbrageous elms, from the middle height of the hill to the wide marble bassin on the river level. How fully the great garden designers of the Roy Soleil understood the life-giving virtue of moving waters in their grandiose if freezing conception of the formal landscape! Here, in the midst of the nature-made beauty of the old Park—where there had been forests, more or less wild, ever since Gaulish days—these architectural waters have a startling effect; incongruous no doubt, but the artificiality of the stone-work has been mellowed by two centuries and more of summer suns and winter frosts. And these monumental streams are beyond compare more beautiful than their prototypes of Versailles and the copies erected in other Continental residences in imitation of the Grand Règne manner. This Lepautre was a man of fine power, in the style of his age. But he had also the servile fawning mind of that age. Soon after the triumph of the St. Cloud Park, he could find it in him to die in three days of jaundiced envy because some other design of his had been passed over by the King’s eye in favour of one by Mansard! Yea, to die of heart-burning, even as that greater man, Jean Racine, who, some years later, gave up the ghost in despair over a harsh remark passed by his royal master in a fit of temper; even as Vatel, the maître d’hotel, who fell upon his sword, and put an end to a life dishonoured by the failure of the fish at the celebrated Chantilly banquet!
Yes, the old cascade, at least, was still there, that once had filled the five-year-old’s imagination with a sense of the supreme in earthly grandeur. The Jet Géant, also; that spouting jet that reaches a height of ... but no, why cramp the stupendous into figures? Figures are finite things. The shaft of hissing water, in those days of confident wondering, reached the limit of the conceivable before it fell down again, in its thundering showers, through the iridescent bow, the arc-en-ciel, that could always be looked for when the sun shone on it at the sinking hour. But, alas, for the middle-aged visitor who sought for a taste again, however transient, of the noisy joyousness, the brilliance, the colour, locked up in memory’s casket!... The cidevant royal park—now Propriété Nationale, and duly stamped, wherever room can be found for it, with the priggish and lying motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was dull and drab and neglected: silent and morose. The Grand Monarque’s extravagances in stone seemed positively shamefaced. The whole place—this artificial park within the ancient woods—had the melancholy of things outworn and disowned.
FIRELIGHT PICTURES
Yet here, in my armchair by the firelight, up on the side of our dear Surrey hill, I can still picture sharply to myself the summer life of St. Cloud as it was in the careless precarious days of the Second Empire.