s of conventional travel.

France, even to-day, the city and the country alike, is the paradise of
European monarchs on a holiday. One may be met at Biarritz on the shores
of the Gascon gulf; another may be taking the waters at Aix or Vichy,
shooting pigeons under the shadow of the Tete de Chien, or hunting at
Rambouillet. This is modern France, the most cosmopolitan meeting place
and playground of royalty in the world.

French royal parks and palaces, those of the kings and queens of
mediaeval, as well as later, times, differ greatly from those of other
lands. This is perhaps not so much in their degree of splendour and
luxury as in the sentiment which attaches itself to them. In France
there has ever been a spirit of gayety and spontaneity unknown
elsewhere. It was this which inspired the construction and maintenance
of such magnificent royal residences as the palaces of Saint
Germain-en-Laye, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Compiegne, Rambouillet,
etc., quite different from the motives which caused the erection of the
Louvre, the Tuileries or the Palais Cardinal at Paris.

Nowhere else does there exist the equal of these inspired royal
country-houses of France, and, when it comes to a consideration of their
surrounding parks and gardens, or those royal hunting preserves in the
vicinity of the Ile de France, or of those still further afield, at
Rambouillet or in the Loire country, their superiority to similar
domains beyond the frontiers is even more marked.

In plan this book is a series of itineraries, at least the chapters are
arranged, to a great extent in a topographical sequence; and, if the
scope is not as wide as all France, it is because of the prominence
already given to the parks and palaces of Touraine and elsewhere in the
old French provinces in other works in which the artist and author have
collaborated. It is for this reason that so little consideration has
been given to Chambord, Amboise or Chenonceaux, which were as truly
royal as any of that magnificent group of suburban Paris palaces which
begins with Conflans and ends with Marly and Versailles.

Going still further afield, there is in the Pyrenees that chateau, royal
from all points of view, in which was born the gallant Henri of France
and Navarre, but a consideration of that, too, has already been included
in another volume.

The present survey includes the royal dwellings of the capital, those of
the faubourgs and the outlying districts far en