On the night of the Feast of Saint Louis the gardens of the palace are
not locked as on other nights. The gardens are within the park, and the
park is within the forest. I walked on that hot, clear night amid the
parterres of flowers; and across shining water, over the regular tops of
clipped trees, I saw the long façades and the courts of the palace: pale
walls of stone surmounted by steep slated roofs, and high red chimneys
cut out against the glittering sky. An architecture whose character is
set by the exaggerated slope of its immense roofs, which dwarf the walls
they should only protect! All the interest of the style is in these
eventful roofs, chequered continually by the facings of upright
dormers, pierced by little ovals, and continually interrupted by the
perpendicularity of huge chimneys. The palace seems to live chiefly in
its roof, and to be top-heavy.
[Illustration: 0293]
It is a forest of brick chimneys growing out of stone. Millions upon
millions of red bricks had been raised and piled in elegant forms solely
that the smoke of fires below might escape above the roof ridge: fires
which in theory heated rooms, but which had never heated aught but
their own chimneys: inefficient and beautiful chimneys of picturesque,
ineffectual hearths! Tin pipes and cowls, such as sprout thickly on the
roofs of Paris and London, would have been cheaper and better. (It is
always thus to practical matters that my mind runs.) In these monstrous
and innumerable chimneys one saw eccentricity causing an absurd expense
of means for a trifling end: sure mask of a debased style!
*****
With malicious sadness I reflected that in most of those chimneys smoke
would never ascend again. I thought of the hundreds of rooms, designed
before architects understood the art of planning, crowded with gilt
and mahogany furniture, smothered in hangings, tapestries, and carpets,
sparkling with crystal whose cold gaiety is reflected in the polish of
oak floors! And not a room but conjures up the splendour of the monarchs
and the misery of the people of France! Not an object that is associated
with the real welfare of the folk, the makers of the country! A museum
now--the palace, the gardens, and the fountained vistas of lake and
canal--or shall I not say a mausoleum?--whose title to fame, in the
esteem of the open-mouthed, is that here Napoleon, the supreme scourge
of families and costly spreader of ruin,-wrote an illegible abdication.
The document of abdication, which is, after all, only a facsimile, and
the greedy carp in the lake--these two phenomena divide the eyes of the
open-mouthed.
And not all the starers that come from the quarters of the world are
more than sufficient to dot very sparsely the interminable polished
floors and the great spaces of the gardens. The fantastic monument is
preserved ostensibly as one of the glories of France! (_Gloire_, thou
art French! Fontainebleau, Pasteur, the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo, the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean Railway--each has been termed a _gloire_ of
France!) But the true reason of the monument’s preservation is that it
is too big to destroy. The later age has not the force nor the courage
to raze it and parcel it and sell it, and give to the poor. It is a
defiance to the later age of the age departed. Like a gigantic idol, it
is kept gilded and tidy at terrific expense by a cult which tempers fear
with disdain.