Poor little old town of St. Clodoald! In later years I spent an
afternoon hunting up its distant remembrances. Alas, but it was like
looking at some worn-out engraving, some faded dun picture once known in
all its brilliancy.
[Illustration: stone feature in garden]
Obliterated was the dainty white stone Palace; scene of the revelries
and the bright-coloured elegancies of the Regent; favourite retreat of
Marie Antoinette; theatre of the “_Dix-huit Brumaire_” drama; early home
of _l’Aiglon_! The Château de St. Cloud, the summer residence of the
last Napoleon, had been burned by the Prussians—even as they burned the
bulk of the town—in 1870.[1]
Footnote 1:
_This was written long before anyone here dreamed of the near
possibility of another German war._
Many a time, when, not so many years ago, we could read daily the
shameless slander, the wilful calumnies, of the German press on the
subject of the “barbarity” of our soldiers during the South African
wars, has my mind flown back to the picture of charred and jagged ruins
standing against the rise of the hill which once met my eyes when I
looked for the quiet, happy prospect I had known.
[Sidenote: THE OLD PARK OF ST. CLOUD]
The town, when I last saw it, and its ancient church had been rebuilt;
but the Palace was a dismal ruin; and the park seemed scald and
deserted. Gone also, worst luck of all, the _Lanterne de Diogène_—the
quaint tower at the river-side opening of the main alley, built in the
pleasure-loving days of _Louis-le-Bien-Aimé_. ‹It was called a
_mirador_: I believe a structure of that kind is now known as
“gazebo”—deplorable word!› From the top of it a magnificent panorama of
distant Paris could be descried.
The neighbourhood of _la Lanterne_ was the great trysting place of
nurses and guardsmen, and the playing ground of children. On that day of
back-dreaming exploration, I had been looking forward, with a kind of
tenderness, to gazing once more on its bizarre shape. There is a
well-known _ronde_, dating it would seem from the Middle Ages:
“_La Tour, prends garde—
La Tour, prends garde—
De te laisser abattre!_”
which is sung by the Gallic infant, in a game somewhat cognate to our:
“Here we go round the Mulberry Bush!” It used to be danced under the
shadow of this tower; and, in a child’s way, I had always instinctively
associated the unnamed stronghold of the ballad with this peaceful
erection.
Alas for the dear old _Tour_, it was destined to be laid low, after all,
in spite of our eager warning! The terrace on which it was built was
seized as the emplacement of a battery of heavy Krupps, for the
bombardment of the obstinate capital yonder away. The _Lanterne de
Diogène_, in its white stone and clear outline against the trees,
offered too distinct a mark to the answering gunners to be tolerated. It
had to be levelled. It was never rebuilt. I could find nothing
appertaining to it but the grass bordered slabs of its foundations....
[Illustration: tower rising from trees]
Lost, too, to me was the particular alley redolent of the memory of both
_Reinette_ and _Tremble_; no doubt absorbed in some of the metalled
motor roads that now traverse the park.
The _Grande Cascade_, however, which Lepautre, by order of Louis XIV,
devised for the glorification of the Duke of Orleans’ future home, was
still there. Its tiers of white stone steps over which the water, on
_Grandes Eaux_ days, used to pour down, foaming yet disciplined, in
symmetric balustered channels, between ranks of allegoric statues
standing like guards and lacqueys upon a royal stairway—still descend,
framed by huge umbrageous elms, from the middle height of the hill to
the wide marble _bassin_ on the river level. How fully the great garden
designers of the _Roy Soleil_ understood the life-giving virtue of
moving waters in their grandiose if freezing conception of the formal
landscape! Here, in the midst of the nature-made beauty of the old
Park—where there had been forests, more or less wild, ever since Gaulish
days—these architectural waters have a startling effect; incongruous no
doubt, but the artificiality of the stone-work has been mellowed by two
centuries and more of summer suns and winter frosts. And these
monumental streams are beyond compare more beautiful than their
prototypes of Versailles and the copies erected in other Continental
residences in imitation of the _Grand Règne_ manner. This Lepautre was a
man of fine power, in the style of his age. But he had also the servile
fawning mind of that age. Soon after the triumph of the St. Cloud Park,
he could find it in him to die in three days of jaundiced envy because
some other design of his had been passed over by the King’s eye in
favour of one by Mansard! Yea, to die of heart-burning, even as that
greater man, Jean Racine, who, some years later, gave up the ghost in
despair over a harsh remark passed by his royal master in a fit of
temper; even as Vatel, the _maître d’hotel_, who fell upon his sword,
and put an end to a life dishonoured by the failure of the fish at the
celebrated Chantilly banquet!
Yes, the old cascade, at least, was still there, that once had filled
the five-year-old’s imagination with a sense of the supreme in earthly
grandeur. The _Jet Géant_, also; that spouting jet that reaches a height
of ... but no, why cramp the stupendous into figures? Figures are finite
things. The shaft of hissing water, in those days of confident
wondering, reached the limit of the conceivable before it fell down
again, in its thundering showers, through the iridescent bow, the
_arc-en-ciel_, that could always be looked for when the sun shone on it
at the sinking hour. But, alas, for the middle-aged visitor who sought
for a taste again, however transient, of the noisy joyousness, the
brilliance, the colour, locked up in memory’s casket!... The _cidevant_
royal park—now _Propriété Nationale_, and duly stamped, wherever room
can be found for it, with the priggish and lying motto: _Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité_ was dull and drab and neglected: silent and morose.
The _Grand Monarque’s_ extravagances in stone seemed positively
shamefaced. The whole place—this artificial park within the ancient
woods—had the melancholy of things outworn and disowned.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: FIRELIGHT PICTURES]
Yet here, in my armchair by the firelight, up on the side of our dear
Surrey hill, I can still picture sharply to myself the summer life of
St. Cloud as it was in the careless precarious days of the Second
Empire.
[Illustration: children outdoors]
The Empress Eugénie, then a young wife, and one of the most beautiful
women of Europe, lived at the _Château_. And the Park, though thrown
open to the people, was kept trim with jealous care. Roads generously
sanded, lawns watered and mown with systematic care, parterres ever
bright with flowers, all was marvellously different then from the
present day shabbiness.
I seem to see again, even with almost a lifetime’s experience
intervening, the vivid scene impressed on the observant and eager eyes
of the child. The gay-hued crowds of ladies in all the then elegance of
scuttle bonnets and crinolines; the bevies of children, of every class,
but all joyous and noisy; the bands of marching youths, buzzing the
popular airs of the year on the euphonious _Mirliton_; the siege of
every “kiosk” where the wafers hot from the mould, or the cool lemonade,
were dispensed; the swans, stately but voracious, being fed upon the
great pond; the bright coloured beribboned _nourrices_ squatting with
the nurslings on the circular benches within sound of the _musique
militaire_, and the inevitable giant bearded _sapeur_ in flirtatious
attendance; the quite too beautiful officers with tight waists, waxed
moustaches and swaying gold epaulets—what not?
Before the great gates, solemnly walking to and fro, or standing
picturesquely sentinel, there never wanted a party of veteran grenadiers
in their towering brass-fronted bearskins and white cross-belts to
produce the desired “Old Guard” effect. Or it might be heavy-moustached
troopers, _Guides_, with sweeping plumes over the huge _colback_; with
pelisses of fur and eagle-embroidered sabretaches, copying, on their
side, the grim appearance of Napoleon’s ‹the real one’s› body guard.
The whole place, indeed, was pervaded with the “immense” uniforms of
those pretorians: those long service professional soldiers for whose
showy maintenance the Imperial Government stinted an otherwise dwindling
national army—disastrous army, destined, despite its gallantry, to be so
soon decimated, swept away, by the legions of _das Volk in Waffen_
wielded with the ruthless mastery of German generalship!
[Sidenote: FORGOTTEN BRILLIANCIES]
For such as have only known France since the strictly utilitarian days
that followed the great _débâcle_; days when the notion that any kind of
smartness is incompatible with “republican efficiency seems to have
become an obsession” it is difficult to realize the gilded magnificence
of the _Garde Impériale_. Still less, perhaps, in these anti-militarist
times, the idolatry of the people for its _beaux militaires_. Of a
truth, on a sunny day, they brightened the park walks almost as much as
the Geraniums in the great stone urns, or the forbidden golden fruit in
the orange tubs!
The authorities were sedulous, especially in such places as St. Cloud,
to keep the pleasant side—the pride, the pomp and circumstance—of
soldiering in evidence. The happy little town was awakened in the
morning, was apprised of noon and again of sundown, by the incredibly
joyous “sonneries” of the _Lanciers de l’Impératrice_, whose trumpeters
specially gathered from far and wide, could sound all tuckets and points
of war in an admirable harmony of high overtones blended with the noble,
grave sounds of the ordinary calls.... Entrancing music to the little
boy, in the glycine-clad house of the _rue du Château_, who would start
awake, hearken, and then turn round and go to sleep again in great
content. The drums of the _garde montante_, headed by the olympian
_tambour-major_, sedulously tossing and twirling his cane, daily rattled
the window panes as in great pomp it ascended the hill, palace-wards. It
never failed to draw the same crowd to the same doorsteps. Estaffettes
clattered hourly along the narrow paved streets, on their way to and
from Paris; glittering, clinking, full of official importance, and with
an eagerness no doubt wholly uncalled for by any existing necessity.
All that colour and bustle and pleasant make-believe of strength and
“tradition,” was typical of all one has since learned to associate with
that Empire on the high road to ruin. But it had its attractive side for
those who had not found it out; and, seen through the prism of distance,
a picturesqueness that modern France, so systematically democratized, is
scarce like to know again.
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