Royal Palaces and Parks of France

by M. F. Mansfield

Any chronicle which attempts to set down a record of the comings and goings of French monarchs is saved from being a mere dull chronology of dates and résumé of facts by its obligatory references to the architects and builders who made possible the splendid settings amid which these picturesque rulers passed their lives.

The castle builders of France, the garden designers, the architects, decorators and craftsmen of all ranks produced not a medley, but a coherent, cohesive whole, which stands apart from, and far ahead of, most of the contemporary work of its kind in other lands. Castles and keeps were of one sort in England and Scotland, of still another along the Rhine, and if the Renaissance palaces and chateaux first came into being in Italy it is certain they never grew to the flowering luxuriance there that they did in France.

Thus does France establish itself as leader in new movements once again. It was so in the olden time with the arts of the architect, the landscape gardener and the painter; it is so to-day with respect to such mundane, less sentimental things as automobiles and aeroplanes.

Another chapter, in a story long since started, is a repetition, or review, of the outdoor life of the French monarchs and their followers. Not only did Frenchmen of Gothic and Renaissance times have a taste for travelling far afield, pursuing the arts of peace or war as their conscience or conditions dictated; but they loved, too, the open country and the open road at home; they loved also la chasse, as they did tournaments, fêtes-champêtres and outdoor spectacles of all kinds. Add these stage settings to the splendid costuming and the flamboyant architectural accessories of Renaissance times in France and we have what is assuredly not to be found in other lands, a spectacular and imposing pageant of mediæval and Renaissance life and manners which is superlative from all points of view.

This is perhaps hard, sometimes, to reconcile with the French attitude towards outdoor life to-day, when la chasse means the hunting of tame foxes (a sport which has been imported from across the channel), "sport" means a prize fight, and a garden party or a fête-champêtre a mere gossiping rendezvous over a cup of badly made tea. In the France of the olden time they did things differently—and better.

Not all French history was made, or written, within palace walls; much of it came into being in the open air, like the two famous meetings by the Bidassoa, Napoleon's first sight of Marie Louise on the highroad leading out from Senlis, or his making the Pope a prisoner at the Croix de Saint Héram, in the Forest of Fontainebleau.

It is this change of scene that makes French history so appealing to those who might otherwise let it remain in shut-up and dry-as-dust books on library shelves.

The French monarchs of old were indeed great travellers, and it is by virtue of the fact that affairs of state were often promulgated and consummated en voyage that a royal stamp came to be acquired by many a chateau or country-house which to-day would hardly otherwise be considered as of royal rank.

Throughout France, notably in the neighbourhood of Paris, are certain chateaux—palaces only by lack of name—of the nobility where royalties were often as much at home as under their own royal standards. One cannot attempt to confine the limits where these chateaux are to be found, for they actually covered the length and breadth of France.

Journeying afield in those romantic times was probably as comfortably accomplished, by monarchs at least, as it is to-day. What was lacking was speed, but they lodged at night under roofs as hospitable as those of the white and gold caravanserai (and some more humble) which perforce come to be temporary abiding places of royalties en tour to-day. The writer has seen the Dowager Queen of Italy lunching at a neighbouring table at a roadside trattoria in Piedmont which would have no class distinction whatever as compared with the average suburban road-house across the Atlantic. At Biarritz, too, the automobiling monarch, Alphonse XIII, has been known to take "tea" on the terrace of the great tourist-peopled hotel in company with mere be-goggled commoners. Le temps va! Were monarchs so democratic in the olden time, one wonders.