We turned north now, toward Fontainebleau, which we had touched a month earlier on the way to Paris. It is a grand straight road from Orléans to Fontainebleau, and it passes through Pithiviers, which did not look especially interesting, though we discovered when it was too late that it is noted for its almond cakes and lark pies. I wanted to go back then, but the majority was against it.
Late in the afternoon we entered for the second time the majestic forest of Fontainebleau and by and by came to the palace and the little town, and to a pretty hotel on a side street that was really a village inn for comfort and welcome. There was still plenty of daylight, mellow, waning daylight, and the palace was not far away. We would not wait for it until morning.
I think we most enjoy seeing palaces about the closing hours. There are seldom any other visitors then, and the waning afternoon sunlight in the vacant rooms mellows their garish emptiness, and seems somehow to bring nearer the rich pageant of life and love and death that flowed by there so long and then one day came to an end, and now it is not passing any more.
It was really closing time when we arrived at the palace, but the custodian was lenient and for an hour we wandered through gorgeous galleries, and salons, and suites of private apartments where queens and kings lived gladly, loved madly, died sadly, for about four hundred years. Francis I built Fontainebleau, on the site of a mediæval castle. He was a hunter, and the forests of Fontainebleau, like those of Chambord, were always famous hunting grounds. Louis XIII, who was born in Fontainebleau, built the grand entrance staircase, from which two hundred years later Napoleon Bonaparte would bid good-by to his generals before starting for Elba. Other kings have added to the place and embellished it; the last being Napoleon III, who built for Eugénie the Bijou theater across the court.
It may have been our mood, it may have been the tranquil evening light, it may have been reality that Fontainebleau was more friendly, more alive, more a place for living men and women to inhabit than any other palace we have seen. It was hard to imagine Versailles as having ever been a home for anybody. At Fontainebleau I felt that we were intruding—that Madame de Maintenon, Marie Antoinette, Marie Louise, or Eugénie might enter at any moment and find us there. Perhaps it was in the apartments of Marie Antoinette that one felt this most. There is a sort of personality in the gorgeousness of her bedchamber that has to do, likely enough, with the memory of her tragic end, but certainly it is there. The gilded ceiling sings of her; the satin hangings—a marriage gift from the city of Lyons—breathe of her; even the iron window-fastenings are not without personal utterance, for they were wrought by the skillful hands of the king himself, out of his love for her.
The apartments of the first Napoleon and Marie Louise tell something, too, but the story seems less intimate. Yet the table is there on which Napoleon signed his abdication while an escort waited to take him to Elba.
For size and magnificence the library is the most impressive room in Fontainebleau. It is lofty and splendid, and it is two hundred and sixty-four feet long. It is called the gallery of Diana, after Diana of Poitiers, who for a lady of tenuous moral fiber seems to have inspired some pretty substantial memories. The ballroom, the finest in Europe, also belongs to Diana, by special dedication of Henry II, who decorated it magnificently to suit Diana's charms. Napoleon III gave great hunting banquets there. Since then it has been always empty, except for visitors.
The custodian took us through a suite of rooms called the "Apartments of the White Queens," because once they were restored for the widows of French kings, who usually dressed in white. Napoleon used the rooms for another purpose. He invited Pope Pius VII to Fontainebleau to sanction his divorce from Josephine, and when the pope declined, Napoleon prolonged the pope's visit for eighteen months, secluding him in this luxurious place, to give him a chance to modify his views. They visited together a good deal, and their interviews were not always calm. Napoleon also wanted the pope to sign away the states of the Church, and once when they were discussing the matter rather earnestly the emperor boxed the pope's ears. He had a convincing way in those days. I wonder if later, standing on the St. Helena headland, he ever recalled that incident. If he did, I dare say it made him smile.
The light was getting dim by the time we reached the pretty theater which Louis Napoleon built for Eugénie. It is a very choice place, and we were allowed to go on the stage and behind the scenes and up in the galleries, and there was something in the dusky vacancy of that little playhouse, built to amuse the last empress of France, that affected us almost more than any of the rest of the palace, though it was built not so long ago and its owner is still alive.[17] It is not used, the custodian told us—has never been used since Eugénie went away.
From a terrace back of the palace we looked out on a pretty lake where Eugénie's son used to sail a miniature full-rigged ship—large enough, if one could judge from a picture we saw, to have held the little prince himself. There was still sunlight on the treetops, and these and the prince's little pavilion reflecting in the tranquil water made the place beautiful. But the little vessel was not there. I wished, as we watched, that it might come sailing by. I wished that the prince had never been exiled and that he had not grown up and gone to his death in a South African jungle. I wished that he might be back to sail his ship again, and that Eugénie might have her theater once more, and that Louis Napoleon's hunting parties might still assemble in Diana's painted ballroom and fill the vacant palace with something besides mere curiosity and vain imaginings.