for artistic
surroundings, those old fellows of the sword and cloak; a much more
pretty taste than their descendants, the steam-heat and running-water
partisans of to-day. Louis XV and Empire drawing and dining-rooms are
everywhere advertised as the attractions of the great palace hotels, and
some of them are very good copies of their predecessors, though one
cannot help but feel that the clientele as a whole is more insistent on
telephones in the bedrooms and auto-taxis always on tap than with regard
to the sentiment of good taste and good cheer which is to be evoked by
eating even a hurried meal in a room which reproduces some historically
famous Salle des Gardes or the Chambre of the OEil de Boeuf of the
Louvre, if, indeed, most of the hungry folk know what their surroundings
are supposed to represent.

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 resume 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, _fetes-champetres_ and outdoor spectacles of all kinds. Add
these stage settings to the