Some days after the Revolution of 1830 the Prince de Condé died in a most dramatic fashion, and his son, the Duc d'Enghien, having been shot at Vincennes under the Empire, he willed the Duc d'Aumale and his issue his legal descendants forever.
Towards 1840 the Duc d'Aumale sought to reconstruct the splendours of Chantilly, but a decree of January 22, 1852, banished the entire Orleans family and interrupted the work when the property was sold to the English bankers, Coutts and Company, for the good round sum of eleven million francs, not by any means an extravagant price for this estate of royal aspect and proportions. The National Assembly of 1872 did the only thing it could do in justice to tradition—bought the property in and decreed that it be restored to its legitimate proprietor.
It was as late as 1876 that the Duc d'Aumale undertook the restoration of the Chatelet and the rebuilding of the new chateau which is seen to-day. The latter is from the designs of Henri Daumet, member of the Institut de France.
In general the structure of to-day occupies the site of the moyen-age chateau but is of quite a different aspect.
The Duc d'Aumale made a present of the chateau and all that was contained therein to the Institut de France. From a purely sordid point of view it was a gift valued at something like thirty-five million francs, not so great as many new-world public legacies of to-day, but in certain respects of a great deal more artistic worth.
The mass is manifestly imposing, made up as it is, of four distinct parts, the Eglise, dating from 1692, the Écuries, the Chatelet—or Petit Chateau, and the Chateau proper—the modern edifice.
Before the celebrated Écuries is a green, velvety pelouse which gives an admirable approach. The architecture of the Écuries is of a heavy order and the sculptured decorations actually of little esthetic worth, representing as they do hunting trophies and the like. Before the great fountain one deciphers a graven plaque which reads as follows:
Louis Henri de Bourbon
Prince de Condé
Fut Construire Cette Écurie
1701-1784.
Within the two wings may be stabled nearly two hundred horses. The Grand Écuries at Chantilly are assuredly one of the finest examples extant of that luxuriant art of the eighteenth century French builder. Luxurious, excessively ornate and overpowering it is, and, for that reason, open to question. The work of the period knew not the discreet middle road. It was of Chantilly that it was said that the live stock was better lodged than its masters. The architect of this portion of the chateau was Jean Aubert, one of the collaborators of Jules Hardouin Mansart.
The characteristics of Chantilly, take it as a whole, the chateau, the park and the forest, are chiefly theatrical, but with an all-abiding regard for the proprieties, for beyond a certain heaviness of architectural style in parts of the chateau everything is of the finely focussed relative order of which the French architect and landscape gardener have for ages been past masters.