FONTAINEBLEAU
We turned north now, toward Fontainebleau, which we had touched a month
earlier on the way to Paris. It is a grand straight road from Orleans to
Fontainebleau, and it passes through Pithiviers, which did not look
especially interesting, though we discovered when it was too late that
it is noted for its almond cakes and lark pies. I wanted to go back
then, but the majority was against it.
Late in the afternoon we entered for the second time the majestic forest
of Fontainebleau and by and by came to the palace and the little town,
and to a pretty hotel on a side street that was really a village inn for
comfort and welcome. There was still plenty of daylight, mellow, waning
daylight, and the palace was not far away. We would not wait for it
until morning.
I think we most enjoy seeing palaces about the closing hours. There are
seldom any other visitors then, and the waning afternoon sunlight in the
vacant rooms mellows their garish emptiness, and seems somehow to bring
nearer the rich pageant of life and love and death that flowed by there
so long and then one day came to an end, and now it is not passing any
more.
It was really closing time when we arrived at the palace, but the
custodian was lenient and for an hour we wandered through gorgeous
galleries, and salons, and suites of private apartments where queens and
kings lived gladly, loved madly, died sadly, for about four hundred
years. Francis I built Fontainebleau, on the site of a mediaeval castle.
He was a hunter, and the forests of Fontainebleau, like those of
Chambord, were always famous hunting grounds. Louis XIII, who was born
in Fontainebleau, built the grand entrance staircase, from which two
hundred years later Napoleon Bonaparte would bid good-by to his generals
before starting for Elba. Other kings have added to the place and
embellished it; the last being Napoleon III, who built for Eugenie the
Bijou theater across the court.
It may have been our mood, it may have been the tranquil evening light,
it may have been reality that Fontainebleau was more friendly, more
alive, more a place for living men and women to inhabit than any other
palace we have seen. It was hard to imagine Versailles as having ever
been a home for anybody. At Fontainebleau I felt that we were
intruding--that Madame de Maintenon, Marie Antoinette, Marie Louise, or
Eugenie might enter at any moment and find us there. Perhaps it was in
the apartments of Marie Antoinette that one felt this most. There is a
sort of personality in the gorgeousness of her bedchamber that has to
do, likely enough, with the memory of her tragic end, but certainly it
is there. The gilded ceiling sings of her; the satin hangings--a
marriage gift from the city of Lyons--breathe of her; even the iron
window-fastenings are not without personal utterance, for they were
wrought by the skillful hands of the king himself, out of his love for
her.
The apartments of the first Napoleon and Marie Louise tell something,
too, but the story seems less intimate. Yet the table is there on which
Napoleon signed his abdication while an escort waited to take him to
Elba.
For size and magnificence the library is the most impressive room in
Fontainebleau. It is lofty and splendid, and it is two hundred and
sixty-four feet long. It is called the gallery of Diana, after Diana of
Poitiers, who for a lady of tenuous moral fiber seems to have inspired
some pretty substantial memories. The ballroom, the finest in Europe,
also belongs to Diana, by special dedication of Henry II, who decorated
it magnificently to suit Diana's charms. Napoleon III gave great hunting
banquets there. Since then it has been always empty, except for
visitors.
The custodian took us through a suite of rooms called the "Apartments of
the White Queens," because once they were restored for the widows of
French kings, who usually dressed in white. Napoleon used the rooms for
another purpose. He invited Pope Pius VII to Fontainebleau to sanction
his divorce from Josephine, and when the pope declined, Napoleon
prolonged the pope's visit for eighteen months, secluding him in this
luxurious place, to give him a chance to modify his views. They visited
together a good deal, and their interviews were not always calm.
Napoleon also wanted the pope to sign away the states of the Church, and
once when they were discussing the matter rather earnestly the emperor
boxed the pope's ears. He had a convincing way in those days. I wonder
if later, standing on the St. Helena headland, he ever recalled that
incident. If he did, I dare say it made him smile.
The light was getting dim by the time we reached the pretty theater
which Louis Napoleon built for Eugenie. It is a very choice place, and
we were allowed to go on the stage and behind the scenes and up in the
galleries, and there was something in the dusky vacancy of that little
playhouse, built to amuse the last empress of France, that affected us
almost more than any of the rest of the palace, though it was built not
so long ago and its owner is still alive.[17] It is not used, the
custodian told us--has never been used since Eugenie went away.
From a terrace back of the palace we looked out on a pretty lake where
Eugenie's son used to sail a miniature full-rigged ship--large enough,
if one could judge from a picture we saw, to have held the little prince
himself. There was still sunlight on the treetops, and these and the
prince's little pavilion reflecting in the tranquil water made the place
beautiful. But the little vessel was not there. I wished, as we watched,
that it might come sailing by. I wished that the prince had never been
exiled and that he had not grown up and gone to his death in a South
African jungle. I wished that he might be back to sail his ship again,
and that Eugenie might have her theater once more, and that Louis
Napoleon's hunting parties might still assemble in Diana's painted
ballroom and fill the vacant palace with something besides mere
curiosity and vain imaginings.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] She lived six years longer, dying in 1920.