was one which was supposed to
lead civilization into the wilderness. Innumerable traces of the Roman
occupation are to be found in the forest by those who know how to read
the signs; twenty-five different localities have been marked down by the
archeologists as having been stations on the path blazed by the Legions
of Rome.

After the Romans came the first of the kings as proprietors of the
forest, and in the moyen-age the monks, the barons and the crown itself
shared equally the rights of the forest.

Legends of most weird purport are connected with various points
scattered here and there throughout the forest, as at the Fosse Dupuis
and the Table Ronde, where a sort of "trial by fire" was held by the
barons whenever a seigneur among them had conspired against another.
Ariosto, gathering many of his legends from the works of the old French
chroniclers, did not disdain to make use of the Foret de Compiegne as a
stage setting.

During the reign of Clothaire the forest was known as the Foret de
Cuise, because of a royal palace hidden away among the Druid oaks which
bore the name of Cotia, or Cusia. Until 1346 the palace existed in some
form or other, though shorn of royal dignities. It was at this period
that Philippe VI divided the forests of the Valois into three distinct
parts in order to better regulate their exploitation.

The Frankish kings being, it would seem, inordinately fond of _la
chasse_ the Foret de Compiegne, in the spring and autumn, became their
favorite rendezvous. Alcuin, the historian, noted this fact in the
eighth century, and described this earliest of royal hunts in some
detail. In 715 the forest was the witness of a great battle between the
Austrasians and the Neustrians.

Before Francis I with his habitual initiative had pierced the eight
great forest roads which come together at the octagon called the Puits
du Roi, the forest was not crossed by any thoroughfare; the nearest
thing thereto was the Chaussee de Brunhaut, a Roman way which bounded it
on the south and east.

Louis XIV and Louis XV, in turn, cut numerous roads and paths, and to
the latter were due the crossroads known as the Grand Octagone and the
Petit Octagone.

It was over one of these great forest roads, that leading to Soissons,
that Marie Louise, accompanied by a cortege of three hundred persons,
eighty conveyances and four hundred and fifty horses, journeyed in a
torrential rain, in March 1807, when she came to France to