l, is Chatou which has a
royal reminder in its Pavilion Henri IV, or Pavillon Gabrielle, which
the gallant, love-making monarch built for Gabrielle d'Estrees. Formerly
it was surrounded by a vast park and must have been almost ideal, but
to-day it is surrounded by stucco, doll-house villas, and unappealing
apartments, until only a Gothic portal, jutting from a row of dull house
fronts, suggests the once cosy little retreat of the lovely Gabrielle.

The height of Louveciennes, above Bougival, closes the neck of the
peninsula and from it a vast panorama of the silvery Seine and its
_coteaux_ stretches out from the towers of Notre Dame on one hand to the
dense forest of Saint Germain on the other.

The original Chateau de Louveciennes was the property of Madame la
Princesse de Conti, but popular interest lies entirely with the Pavilion
du Barry, built by the architect Ledoux under the orders of Louis XV.

Du Barry, having received the chateau as a gift from the king, sought to
decorate it and reembellish it anew. Through the ministrations of a
certain Drouais, Fragonard was commissioned to decorate a special
pavilion outside the chateau proper, destined for the "_collations du
Roi_."

The subject chosen was the "Progres de l'Amour dans le Coeur des
Jeunes Filles." Just where these panels are to-day no one seems to know,
but sooner or later they will doubtless be discovered.

Fragonard's famous "Escalade," or "Rendezvous," the first of the series
of five proposed panels, depicted the passion of Louis XV for du Barry.
The shepherdess had the form and features of that none too scrupulous
feminine beauty, and the "_berger gallant_" was manifestly a portrait of
the king.

Perhaps these decorations at Louveciennes were elaborations of these
smaller canvases. It seems quite probable.

Sheltered snugly against the banked-up Forest of Saint Germain, on the
banks of the Seine, is Maisons-Laffitte. Maisons is scarcely ever
mentioned by Parisians save as they comment on the sporting columns of
the newspapers, for horse-racing now gives its distinction to the
neighbourhood, and the old Chateau de Maisons (with its later suffix of
Laffitte) is all but forgotten.

Francois Mansart built the first Chateau de Maisons on a magnificent
scale for Rene de Longueil, the Superintendent of Finance. In a later
century it made a most effectual appeal to another financier, Laffitte,
the banker, who parcelled out the park and stripped the ch