The real French garden is here to be seen almost at its best, its squares and ovals of grassy green apportioned off from the mass by gravelled walks and ornamented waters. The "tapis d'orient" effect, so frequently quoted by the French in writing of such works, is hardly excelled elsewhere.
All this shocked the mid-eighteenth century English traveller, but it was because he did not, perhaps could not, understand. Rigby, "the Norwich alderman" as the French rather contemptuously referred to this fine old English gentleman, said frankly of Chantilly: "All this has cost dear and produced a result far from pleasing." He would have been better pleased doubtless with a privet or box hedge and an imitation plaster rockery, things which have never agreed with French taste, but which were the rule in pretentious English gardens of the same period. Rigby must indeed have been a "grincheau," as the French called him, for this same up-country gentleman said of Versailles: "Lovely surrounding country but palace and park badly designed." Versailles is not that, whatever else its faults may be.
Chantilly is more than a palace, it is a museum of nature, a hermitage of art and of history. The fantasy of its tourelles, its lucarnes and its pignons are something one may hardly see elsewhere in such profusion, and the fact that they are modern is forgotten in the impression of the general silhouette.
The adventurer who first built a donjon on the Rocher de Chantilly little knew with what seigneurial splendour the site was ultimately to be graced. From a bare outpost it was transformed, as if by magic, into a Renaissance palace of a supreme beauty. The Duc d'Aumale said in his "Acte de Donation de Chantilly": "It stands complete and varied, a monument of French art in all its branches, a history of the best epochs of our glory."
Among all the palatial riches neighbouring upon Paris, not forgetting Versailles, Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Pierrefonds and Rambouillet, Chantilly, by the remarkable splendour of its surroundings, its situation and the artistic treasures which it possesses, is in a class by itself. It is a class more clearly defined by the historic souvenirs which surround it than any other contemporary structure of this part of France.
Its corridors and gravelled walks and the long alleys of the park and forest may not take on the fête-like aspect which they knew in the eighteenth century, but they are not solitary like those of Fontainebleau and Rambouillet, nor noisily overrun like those of Versailles or Saint Germain.
The ornamental waters which surround the Chateau de Chantilly are of a grand and nearly unique beauty. It is a question if they are not finer than the waters of Versailles, indeed they preceded them and may even have inspired them.
Chateau de Chantilly
The Chatelet, the chateau proper and the chapel form a group quite distinct from the Écuries. The Cour d'Honneur is really splendid and one hardly realizes the juxtaposition of modernity. The pavilion attributed to Jean Bullant, the western façade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the Grand Vestibule, the Grand Escalier and the Gallerie des Cerfs and a dozen other apartments are of a rare and imposing beauty, though losing somewhat their distinctive aspect by reason of the objets de musée distributed about their walls and floors.