The Chateau of Maintenon dates from the sixteenth century. Since then it has been continued and enlarged without rigorous following of the original plan. It is built of stone and brick, worked and chiseled like the jewels of the French Renaissance. Its two unsymmetrical wings terminate, the one in a great donjon of stone, the other in a round tower of brick. Some parts have been restored, others have preserved their aspect of ancientness.... But here, as everywhere else, time has performed its harmonizing work, and what the centuries have not yet finished, the soft October light succeeds in completing. Diversity of styles, discordances between different parts of the construction, bizarre and broken lines traced against the sky by the inequalities of the roofs, the turrets, the towers and the donjon, neither disconcert nor shock us. All these things fuse into a robust and elegant whole. The very contrasts, born of chance, appear like the premeditated fancy of an artist who conceived a work at once imposing and graceful. The artist is the autumn sun.
Before the chateau extends a great park which also offers singular contrasts. Near the building are stiff parterres in the French style. Beyond, a long canal, straight and narrow, between two grassy banks, is pure Le Nôtre. But, on both sides of the canal, these stiff designs disappear and are replaced by vast meadows, fat and humid, sown with admirable clumps of trees; Le Nôtre never passed here. Nature and the seventeenth century are now reconciled, and the park of Maintenon presents that seductiveness common to so many old French parks which are ennobled by their majestic remnants of the art of Versailles.
Its unusual beauty springs from the ruined aqueduct which crosses its whole width. These immense arcades, half crumbled to ruin, clothed with ivy and Virginia creeper, give a solemn melancholy to the spot. They are the remains of the aqueduct which Louis XIV started to construct, to bring to Versailles the waters of the Eure, a gigantic enterprise which was one of the most disastrous of his reign. The gangs employed in this work were decimated by terrible epidemics caused by the effluvia of the broken soil. It is said that ten thousand men there met their death and fifty million francs were wasted. War in 1688 interrupted these works, "which," says Saint-Simon, "have not since been resumed; there remain of them only shapeless monuments which will make eternal the memory of this cruel folly." And, in 1687, Racine, visiting at Maintenon, described to Boileau these arcades as "built for eternity!" In the eighteenth century, the architects who were commissioned to construct the château of Crécy for Madame de Pompadour came to seek materials in the ancient domain of Madame de Maintenon.... These different memories are an excellent theme for meditation upon the banks of the grand canal, in whose motionless waters is reflected this prodigious romantic decoration.
Within the château, we are allowed to visit the oratory, in which are collected some elegant wood carvings of the sixteenth century; the king's chamber, which contains some paintings of the seventeenth century; a charming portrait of Madame de Maintenon in her youth and another of Madame de Thianges, the sister of Madame de Montespan; and lastly, the apartment of Madame de Maintenon.
What is called the apartment of Madame de Maintenon consists of two narrow chambers, containing furniture of the seventeenth century; I know not if these are originals or copies. Two portraits attract our attention, one of Madame de Maintenon, the other of Charles X.
The portrait of Madame de Maintenon is a copy of that by Mignard in the Louvre. "She is dressed in the costume of the Third Order of St. Francis; Mignard has embellished her; but it lacks insipidity, flesh color, whiteness, the air of youth; and without all these perfections it shows us a face and an expression surpassing all that one can describe; eyes full of animation, perfect grace, no finery and, with all this, no portrait surpasses his." (Letter from Madame de Cou-langes to Madame de Sévigné, October 26, 1694.) Madame de Coulanges does not consider as finery the mantle of ermine, the royal mantle thrown over the shoulders of the Franciscan sister.
