f sight of Saint Cloud to-day.
Historical souvenir plays little part in the minds of those who only
visit a monumental shrine to be amused, and so the falling waters of
Saint Cloud's cascade, like the gushing torrents of Versailles'
fountains, are the chief incentives to a holiday for tens of thousands
of small Paris shopkeepers who do not know that a royal palace was ever
here, much less that it had a history.

There is an upper and a lower cascade, an artificial water ingeniously
tumbled about according to the conception of one Lepaute, an architect
of the time of the reign of Louis XIV.

[Illustration: _The Cascades at Saint Cloud_]

Mansart designed the architectural attributes of the lower cascade and
scores considerably over his colleague. Circular basins and canals
finally lead the water off to a still larger basin lower down where it
spouts up into the air to a height of some forty odd metres at a high
pressure. This is the official description, but it is hard to get up any
sympathy or enthusiasm over the thing, either considered as a work of
art or as a diversion. Frankly, then, Saint Cloud's chief charm is its
site and its dead and half-forgotten history. The "Tramp Abroad" and
"Rollo" and "Uncle George" knew it better than we, because in those days
the palace existed in the real, whereas we take it all on faith and
regret (sometimes) that we did not live a couple of generations ago.

Bellevue, on the banks of the Seine, just before reaching Saint Cloud,
owes its origin (a fact which the great restaurant of the Pavillon Bleu
has made the most of in its advertisements), to a caprice of Madame de
Pompadour. She liked the point of view (as do so many diners on the
restaurant terrace to-day), and built a "_rendezvous-chateau_" on the
hillside, a half-way house, as it were, where Louis XV might be at his
ease on his journeyings to and from the capital.

The Pompadour was able to borrow a force of eight hundred workmen from
the king for as long as was necessary to carry out her ambitious
projects at Bellevue and on November 25, 1750, she had a house-warming
in her modest villa (demolished in 1794) and _pendit la cremaillere_
with a ceremony whose chief entertainment was the dancing of a ballet
significantly entitled "L'Amour Architect."

Neighbouring upon Saint Cloud is a whole battery of hallowed, historical
spots associated with the more or less royal dwellings of the French
monarchs and their favourites. It