One of the most remarkable apartments is the Salle des Cartes, the old salon of the Aides de Camp, whose walls are ornamented with three great plans showing the roads and by-paths of the forest, and other decorative panels representing the hunt of the time of Louis XV.
Napoleon's Bedchamber, Compiègne
The Chambre à Coucher of the great Napoleon is perhaps the most interesting of all the smaller apartments, with its strange bed, which in form more nearly resembles an oriental divan than anything European. Doubtless it is not uncomfortable as a bed, but it looks more like a tent, or camp, in the open, than anything essentially intended for domestic use within doors. After the great Napoleon, his nephew Napoleon III was its most notable occupant, though it was last slept in by the Tzar Nicholas II, when he visited France in 1901.
The sleeping-room of the Empress Eugenie is fitted up after the style of the early Empire with certain interpolations of the mid-nineteenth century. The most distinct feature here is the battery of linen coffers which Marie Louise had had especially designed and built. The Salon des Dames d'Honneur, with its double rank of nine "scissors chairs," the famous tabourets de cour, lined up rigidly before the canapé on which the empress rested, is certainly a remarkable apartment. This was the decor of convention that Madame Sans Gene rendered classic.
Like all the French national palaces Compiègne has a too abundant collection of Sevres vases set about in awkward corners which could not otherwise be filled, and, beginning with the vestibule, this thing is painfully apparent.
The apartments showing best the Napoleonic style in decorations and furnishings are the Salon des Huissiers, the Salle des Gardes, the Escalier d'Apollon, the Salle de Don Quichotte—which contains a series of designs destined to have served for a series of tapestries intended to depict scenes in the life of the windmill knight—the Galerie des Fêtes, the Galerie des Cerfs, the Salle Coypel, the Salle des Stucs and the Salon des Fleurs, through which latter one approaches the royal apartments.
In the sixteenth century, or, more exactly, between 1502 and 1510, was constructed Compiègne's handsome Hotel de Ville, one of the most delightful architectural mixtures of Gothic and Renaissance extant. It is an architectural monument of the same class as the Palais de Justice at Rouen or the Hotel Cluny at Paris. Its frontispiece is marvellous, the rez-de-chaussée less gracious than the rest perhaps, but with the first story blooming forth as a gem of magnificent proportions and setting. Between the four windows of this first story are posed statuesque effigies of Charles VII, Jeanne d'Arc, Saint Rémy and Louis IX. In the centre, in a niche, is an equestrian statue of Louis XII, who reigned when this monument was being built. A balustrade à jour finishes off this story, which, in turn, is overhung with a high, peaked gable, and above rise the belfry and its spire, of which the great clock dates from 1303, though only put into place in 1536. The only false note is sounded by the two insignificant, cold and unlovely wings which flank the main structure on either side.
It is a sixteenth century construction unrivalled of its kind in all France, more like a Belgian town-hall belfry than anything elsewhere to be seen outside Flanders, but it is not of the low Spanish-Renaissance order as are so many of the imposing edifices of occidental and oriental Flanders. It is a blend of Gothic and Renaissance, and, what is still more rare, the best of Gothic and the best of Renaissance. Above its façade is a civic belfry, flanked by two slender towers. Within the portal-vestibule rises a monumental stairway which must have been the inspiration of many a builder of modern opera-houses.
Opposite the Hotel Dieu is the poor, rent relic of the Tour de Jeanne d'Arc, originally a cylindrical donjon of the twelfth century, wherein "La Pucelle" was imprisoned in 1430.