is concerned.

The Foret de Marly is very picturesque, but of no great extent. Formerly
it enclosed many shooting-boxes belonging to the nobles of the court, of
which those of Montjoie and Desert de Retz were perhaps the most
splendid.

On the Versailles road was the Chateau de Clagny, a royal _maison de
plaisance_, of an attractive, but trivial, aspect, though its
architecture was actually of a certain massiveness. Its gardens and the
disposition of its apartments pleased the king's fancy when he chose to
pass this way, which was often. He is said to have personally spent over
two million francs on the property. It must have been of some
pretensions, this little heard of Chateau de Clagny, for in a single
year ten thousand _livres_ were expended on keeping the gardens. To-day
it is non-existent.

CHAPTER XIV

SAINT CLOUD AND ITS PARK

The historic souvenirs of Saint Cloud and its royal palace are many and
varied, though scarcely anything tangible remains to-day of the fabric
so loved by Francis I and Henri II, and which was, for a fact, but a
magnificent country-house, originally belonging to the Archbishops of
Paris.

To-day the rapid slopes of the hillsides of Saint Cloud are peopled with
a heterogeneous mass of villas of what the Parisian calls the "coquette"
order, but which breathe little of the spirit of romance and gallantry
of Renaissance times. Saint Cloud is simply a "discreet" Paris suburb,
and the least said about it, its villas and their occupants to-day, the
better.

The little village of Saint Cloud which is half-hidden in the Forest of
Rouvray, was sacked and burned by the English after the battle of
Poitiers, and then built up anew and occupied by the French monarchs in
the reign of Charles VI. It was he who built the first _chateau de
plaisance_ here in which the royal family might live near Paris and yet
amid a sylvan environment.

After this came the country-house of the Archbishops of Paris that Henri
II, when he tired of it, tore down and erected a villa in the
pseudo-Italian manner of the day, and built a fourteen-arch stone bridge
across the Seine, which was a wonder of its time.

The banker Gondi, after huddling close to royalty, turned over an
establishment which he had built to Catherine de Medici, who made use of
it whenever she wished to give a country fete or garden party. By this
time the whole aspect of Saint Cloud was royal.

It was within this house that the unhap