t of _Allee Royale_, that is, Avenue Royal.

By the end of the sixteenth century the Garden of the Tuileries, which
was later to be entirely transformed by Le Notre, offered an interesting
aspect of the _parquet_ at its best. In "_Paris a Travers les Ages_" one
reads that from the windows of the palace the garden resembled a great
checker-board containing more than a hundred uniform _carreaux_. There
were six wide longitudinal alleys or avenues cut across by eight or ten
smaller alleys which produced this rectangular effect. Within some of
the squares were single, or grouped trees; in others the conventional
_quincunx_; others were mere expanses of lawn, and still others had
flowers arranged in symmetrical patterns. In one of these squares was a
design which showed the escutcheons of the arms of France and those of
the Medici. These gardens of the Tuileries were first modified by a
project of Bernard Palissy, the porcelainiste. He let his fancy have
full sway and the criss-cross alleys and avenues were set out at their
junctures with moulded ornaments, enamelled miniatures, turtles in
faience and frogs in porcelain. It was this, perhaps, which gave the
impetus to the French for their fondness to-day for similar effects, but
Bernard Palissy doubtless never went so far as plaster cats on a
ridgepole, as one may see to-day on many a pretty villa in northern
France. This certainly lent an element of picturesqueness to the
Renaissance Garden of the Louvre, a development of the same spirit which
inspired this artist in his collaboration at Chenonceaux. This was the
formula which produced the _jardin delectable_, an exaggeration of the
taste of the epoch, but still critical of its time.

The gardens of the Renaissance readily divided themselves into two
classes, those of the _parterres a compartiments_ and those of the
_parterres de broderies_. The former, under Francis I and Henri II, were
divided into geometrical compartments thoroughly in the taste of the
Renaissance, but bordered frequently with representations of designs
taken from Venetian lace and various other contemporary stuffs. There
were other _parterres_, where the compartments were planned on a more
utilitarian scale; in other words, they were the _potagers_ which
rendered the garden, said Olivier de Serres, one of "profitable
beauty." Some of the compartments were devoted entirely to herbs and
medicinal plants while others were entirely given over to flowers. In