FONTAINEBLEAU.

FONTAINEBLEAU.CONCLUDED.Charleshad a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes. She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly: “If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame; it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed thebelle savantewith a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted the king’s more generous view of the case.At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying. The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his intention of following the procession ofCorpus Christinext day. The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he died at the Château of Rambouillet.The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the perilous duel. The serpentcoiled itself round the glistening blades, and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into a deed of supernatural prowess.The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau, aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe, and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château d’Anet.”Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II. was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicisachieved with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered round, and persecuted her quondamprotégéswith cold cynicism and ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man. Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens! one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind, and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken. How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France, and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead oflighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction, as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies; feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight; all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank, and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend, goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him; but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise, he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.” The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court. The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,” he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri, if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants, but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he flung it into the fire. “Parbleu, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied Rosny. Henri turned on hisheel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,” he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation, and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently, and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, exclaiming:“Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you.”The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title ofGrand Veneur,[127]attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with thegrand veneur; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnificentlyattired, and followed by acortégeof noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. Thefêtesgiven for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to thegalerie des cerfs, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with herentouragewhile the horrible tragedy was going on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invitationto the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau, called thePavillon des Poêles,[128]for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s most gorgeous pageantsof the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered:Commediante![129]Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.” Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile:Tragediante![130]The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets:commediante, tragediante. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: “I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general.Approach, General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the symbol passionately.“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon, was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters the date of the completion of the gallery—“in the 20th year of my reign!” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet, the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and varied hospitalities.We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part in the annals of the coming age.The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in thegalerie des cerfswith a little friend of his, the son of an officer of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,” persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve read it in a book.”This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid onvigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud, “and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’ neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed anybody?”

FONTAINEBLEAU.CONCLUDED.Charleshad a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes. She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly: “If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame; it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed thebelle savantewith a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted the king’s more generous view of the case.At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying. The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his intention of following the procession ofCorpus Christinext day. The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he died at the Château of Rambouillet.The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the perilous duel. The serpentcoiled itself round the glistening blades, and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into a deed of supernatural prowess.The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau, aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe, and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château d’Anet.”Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II. was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicisachieved with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered round, and persecuted her quondamprotégéswith cold cynicism and ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man. Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens! one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind, and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken. How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France, and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead oflighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction, as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies; feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight; all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank, and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend, goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him; but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise, he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.” The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court. The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,” he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri, if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants, but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he flung it into the fire. “Parbleu, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied Rosny. Henri turned on hisheel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,” he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation, and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently, and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, exclaiming:“Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you.”The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title ofGrand Veneur,[127]attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with thegrand veneur; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnificentlyattired, and followed by acortégeof noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. Thefêtesgiven for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to thegalerie des cerfs, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with herentouragewhile the horrible tragedy was going on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invitationto the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau, called thePavillon des Poêles,[128]for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s most gorgeous pageantsof the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered:Commediante![129]Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.” Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile:Tragediante![130]The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets:commediante, tragediante. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: “I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general.Approach, General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the symbol passionately.“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon, was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters the date of the completion of the gallery—“in the 20th year of my reign!” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet, the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and varied hospitalities.We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part in the annals of the coming age.The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in thegalerie des cerfswith a little friend of his, the son of an officer of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,” persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve read it in a book.”This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid onvigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud, “and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’ neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed anybody?”

CONCLUDED.

Charleshad a dangerous enemy in the person of the Duchesse d’Estampes. She was furious at his being allowed to enter France at all, and still more at his leaving it without paying such a ransom as his host might easily have enforced; but to all her arguments and blandishments Francis was nobly inexorable; he remained true, in this instance at least, to the instincts of his better nature and the promptings of knightly honor. He could not, however, resist saying to Charles, when presenting the duchess to him: “Here is a lady who advises me to undo at Paris the work done at Madrid.” To which the emperor replied coldly: “If the advice be good, you ought to follow it.” The story goes—a most improbable one, considering the position occupied by the Duchesse d’Estampes, whose jewels were worthy of a queen of France—that at supper that same evening, when, according to the complimentary custom of the times, she presented Charles with the urn of perfumed water to rinse his hands, he dropped a diamond ring at her feet, and, on her picking it up and handing it to him, replied: “Keep it, madame; it could not be in fitter hands.” Whether Charles bribed thebelle savantewith a diamond or any other device, it is certain that, before he left, they had become very good friends, and she had quite adopted the king’s more generous view of the case.

At the close of 1546, Francis fell ill, and was supposed to be dying. The courtiers, true to the traditions of their race, immediately fled from Fontainebleau to greet the Dauphin, who was at Amboise. Francis was conscious enough to notice their disappearance, and to divine the cause of it. It stung him to the quick, and roused him to make a desperate effort to disappoint them. He rallied, and announced his intention of following the procession ofCorpus Christinext day. The doctors remonstrated, but in vain; nothing could shake the king’s determination. He dressed himself in his robes of state, had his pale cheeks brightened with rouge, and thus, under a mask of returning health, appeared in the midst of his astonished court, and held the canopy during the procession. But the ceremony was no sooner over than he fell exhausted into the arms of his attendants, and was carried back to bed. He remained for some time unconscious; on recovering his senses, his first exclamation was, “Well, at any rate, I will give them one more fright!” Four months after this childish piece of bravado, he died at the Château of Rambouillet.

The forest of Fontainebleau was infested during his reign with a quantity of noxious vermin—serpents eighteen feet in length, which did great damage, and filled the inhabitants with terror. One of these snakes, by his depredations on man and beast, earned the reputation for himself of a sort of mythological dragon. Some bold men had undertaken to combat him, but all had perished in the attempt. Francis declared at last that he would fight and kill the dragon himself. He equipped himself accordingly in a suit of armor covered all over with long blades as sharp as razors, and, thus armed, sallied forth to the perilous duel. The serpentcoiled itself round the glistening blades, and, in clasping his victim, cut himself to pieces. This fantastic exploit of Francis was magnified by the adulation of his courtiers into a deed of supernatural prowess.

The death of Francis was the signal for the downfall of the Duchesse d’Estampes, who retreated like a dethroned sovereign before the now transcendent star of Diana of Poitiers. Diana’s frailty was unredeemed by the intellectual gifts and native kindliness that distinguished her rival. There is no counterpart even in French history to the sway exercised by this Dalila over Henri II. Madame Du Barry’s is the nearest approach to it, but even that falls far short of the precedent. Diana not only ruled the king and the kingdom, but openly usurped the honors, prerogatives, and official state of a legitimate queen. Her cipher, interlaced with Henri’s, was carved and emblazoned on all the public monuments; not a door or gallery of Fontainebleau, aptly nicknamed by the people “the Temple of Diana,” that was not surmounted by the monogram H. D. It was to be seen in the stained glass windows of the chapel, as well as on the plate served on the royal table under the eyes of Catherine de Medicis. Diana appropriated the crown jewels, and appeared at all the public ceremonies decked in the hitherto sacred regalia of the queens of France. Catherine looked on and was silent—she could wait; her hour would come. It came sooner than either she or Diana anticipated. The king fell mortally wounded in a tournament given to celebrate the nuptials of his daughter, the Princesse Elizabeth, with the King of Spain (1559). He was carried to the nearest shelter; Catherine flew to his side, and gave orders that no one should be allowed to approach him; at this crisis, at least, the wife should be supreme. Diana soon presented herself at the door, but the guard refused her admittance; the queen had forbidden it. “And who dares to give me orders?” demanded Diana, with flashing eyes; “if the king breathes, I have no master yet.” Soon he had ceased to breathe, and Diana, without further protest, bowed to the queen’s command, which bade her “restore the crown jewels, and retire forthwith to her Château d’Anet.”

Her beauty was marvellous, and lasted in all its bloom long after the meridian of life was past. Brantôme describes her at the age of sixty-five as “still beautiful as a girl.” The death of Henri II. was the signal for Catherine de Medicis’ real queenhood. Her reign lasted over thirty years, and may be justly styled, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, a reign of terror for the nation. Her first business was to create discord in the family as a prelude to civil war in the state. She imported into France, with the enlightened love of the arts imbibed at the court of the Medicis, their crafty Italian policy; a system of cabal and intrigue which worked well enough in the narrow compass of petty states, but was fruitful of the most disastrous results in a large kingdom where government can only be carried on successfully by well-organized institutions and strong and wise laws justly administered. Catherine was born with a genius for intrigue; her love for conspiracy amounted to a mania. The faculty of dissembling, with which nature had so pre-eminently endowed her, did her good service in the first years of her residence at Fontainebleau. It required all the tact of an accomplished dissembler to steer between the rival powers of the Duchesse d’Estampes and Diana of Poitiers—a feat which the wily pupil of the Medicisachieved with singular success. To the last day of their reign and her own thraldom, she contrived to remain friendly with both. Catherine’s ambition was unbounded, and drove her to excesses of wickedness that have few parallels in modern history. She systematically labored to corrupt the minds and hearts of her children, and to sow dissensions amongst them, so as to draw the power that should have been theirs into her own hands. Jealousy of one son, Francis II., drove her to espouse the cause of the Huguenots for a time; and, when his death placed the sceptre in the hands of his brother Charles IX., she veered round, and persecuted her quondamprotégéswith cold cynicism and ferocity. Five civil wars can be traced home to the dark intrigues of this unnatural mother—a woman who never took a straight road when she could find a crooked one, who regarded human beings as an apparatus composed of an infinite variety of tools to be used one set against another as the special nature of her work demanded. The massacre of S. Bartholomew was but another manifestation of the same spirit which had led her to stir up the Huguenots to revolt when she thought their rebellion would serve her aims. This sanguinary despot had most of the foibles of a woman, combined with the fiercer passions of a man. Her frivolity and extravagance knew no bounds; and when her ministers ventured to hint to her that the lavish prodigality of her expenditure was exasperating the people, and might lead to trouble, she shrugged her shoulders, and replied, with serene simplicity: “Good heavens! one must live.” The sweet, pathetic face of Marie Stuart appears for a moment at Fontainebleau in the earlier days of Catherine’s rule—a bright meteor flashing on a troubled sky; poor Marie, whose sky was gathering up the storm that was to break at no distant day over her young life, and beat it some twenty years with a fury that was only to be silenced by the great tranquillizer—death. Fierce and long-raging were the storms that swept over Fontainebleau through the same darkling years. Henri de Navarre bears down on it like a whirlwind, and forces the queen, with her son Charles IX., to fly before him and his Huguenots to Melun. They have not taken breath at Melun when the Duc de Guise meets them like a contrary wind, and blows them back to Paris. Soon follows the night of S. Bartholomew, that blackest of black nights, under whose pall, as it has been pithily put by a modern Frenchman, “a few scoundrels killed a few scoundrels.” Its gloom was still hanging over the city when Catherine and the king were bowling along the road to Fontainebleau—he shuddering, a Macbeth terrified at his share in the ghastly deed; she triumphant, unappalled by ghost or conscience, her sharp, elastic mind busy on the next step to be taken. How was she to undo the one awkward consequence of her triumph—the remorse and mistrust of this faint-hearted son? A hundred and fifty maids, miscalled of honor, were recruited from the beauty of France, and brought to Fontainebleau to aid in the task of soothing the king’s scruples and mending the queen’s nets. But her hold upon Charles was loosened, and not all the charms of all the houris of Mahomet’s paradise would lure it to her grasp again. Catherine, however, could accommodate herself to the decrees of fortune, and turn even her own blunders to account. Charles, obdurately sullen, refused to revoke the edict of the pacification of Amboise, thus quenching for once, instead oflighting, the smouldering flames of civil war. Catherine smiled bland approval on her blighted schemes, and was full of satisfaction, as if, instead of chaining the war-dogs, she had been allowed to let them loose. She received the ambassadors in regal state, and laid herself out to captivate all men by her smiles and honeyed courtesies; feuds and jealousies were lulled to sleep with soft music of delight; all the heads of all the factions, civil and religious, turned in the dance till they were giddy, carousing, and embracing, and pledging one another in loving cups, while their followers were cutting each other’s throats hard by; fireworks sent rockets blazing to the sky—merry rockets, red, white, and green; and Fontainebleau was once more a palace of Armida, an Arabian night’s dream, where men came and drank, and were inebriated. A dark and agitated scene is that which France presents at the close of Catherine’s reign. We turn from it with relief to see Henri de Navarre enter his “good city” of Paris. After the peace of Vervins, which put an end to religious wars in France, and allowed Europe to breathe once more, the gay Béarnais came to enjoy his well-won conquest at Fontainebleau. Sully, the true and trusty friend, goes with him, supreme, though not alone, in his influence with the soft-hearted monarch. Gabrielle d’Estrée contests the field with him; but, to Henri’s honor be it said, she is defeated. Gabrielle had, in a weak moment, extracted from the king a promise that he would make her Queen of France—a promise which, as a matter of course, he immediately confided to Sully. The minister burst out into indignant protest, and outswore the Béarnese himself in the vehemence of his indignation. They parted, as usual, in a rage, and, as usual, Henri soon calmed down, and declared that Sully was right. When Gabrielle recurred to the promise, he told her the result of his conversation with “my friend Rosny.” The lady flew into a tantrum, called Rosny hard names, and wound up by insisting that “that valet” should be dismissed from the court. The insolent appellation, coming from such a quarter, roused the king to a sense of his own disgraceful weakness. “Ventre S. Gris, madame,” he cried, “if I must needs dismiss either, it shall be you a thousand times rather than my faithful Rosny—my friend without whom I could not live!” Gabrielle saw that she had overstepped the mark; for Henri, if he had the faults of a man, was no emasculated puppet, like so many of his predecessors, to be bound hand and foot by a Dalila; he had still the spirit of a king. Gabrielle fell at his feet, and begged his pardon, and Sully’s too. Shortly after this incident, Sully’s fears on her account were put an end to by her death. Henri’s grief for a time was so violent as almost to deprive him of his reason. But his fickle heart soon found consolation in a new allegiance. Mlle. d’Entragnes was the next to captivate it. For this fair siren, Henri went so far as to draw out a written promise of marriage. Before, however, giving the document into the hands of the fair lady, he, of course, showed it to Sully, the dauntless Sully, who was the most discreet of confidants, but the most unmanageable of accomplices. This time he was too deeply moved for anger; he did not bully the king, but coolly read the paper twice over, and then, tearing it deliberately into four fragments, he flung it into the fire. “Parbleu, Rosny, you are mad!” cried the king. “Would to God, sire, I were the only madman in France!” replied Rosny. Henri turned on hisheel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri’s joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d’Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health—a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. “My wife,” he says, “dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!” Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.’s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron’s stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri’s signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall, and taken to prison, and eventually put to death, because he was overruled and circumvented by the iron will of his wife Marie with the “terribly robust constitution.”

The gardens of Fontainebleau are full of delicate and poetic memories of Henri de Navarre in which Rosny plays a prominent part. The courtiers looked on at the familiar, schoolboy friendship between the king and his minister with envious eyes, and set to work with malignant diligence to loosen the bond. They succeeded in getting up such a plausible story against Rosny that the king, who had been some time without seeing him, was staggered; he examined the deed of accusation, and admitted that the circumstances looked badly. The minister was in Paris working away for his master as hard as any galley-slave at the arsenal. Henri sent for him. When he arrived, the king was on the terrace surrounded by the court; he greeted his friend with a gracious formality foreign to the habitual free and easy manner of their intercourse. Sully was pained and mystified. But the restraint was equally intolerable to both. Henri called him aside presently, and they walked up and down an alley in sight of the terrace, but out of ear-shot. The king pulled out the deed of accusation, and handed it to his friend. Rosny cast his eye contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its contents to the winds. Henri saw that he had been the dupe of a base, designing jealousy, and broke out into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a moment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out his hand; Sully, overcome with emotion, was about to fall on his knees to kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, exclaiming:“Take care, Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you.”

The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro’s minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: “Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king.” Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.

His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master’s love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title ofGrand Veneur,[127]attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri’s time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sully had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with thegrand veneur; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.

Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.

The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.

Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraordinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnificentlyattired, and followed by acortégeof noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. Thefêtesgiven for the royal Sappho’s entertainment were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria’s appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance—that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to thegalerie des cerfs, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with herentouragewhile the horrible tragedy was going on close by. Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then impatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, “What! thou art not yet dead?” and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face “with that hand,” says Voltaire, “which had loaded him with benefits.” Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that “she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else.” It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as “fantastic and awkward.” Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invitationto the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin’s apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.

Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis’ pavilion at Fontainebleau, called thePavillon des Poêles,[128]for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceful gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.

Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard saying to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: “What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!” A great deal has been built on this exclamation—regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.

Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o’clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon’s wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon’s most gorgeous pageantsof the melodramatic and sentimental kind—for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could, “with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted” amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll—Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered:Commediante![129]Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he “paused for a reply.” Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile:Tragediante![130]The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets:commediante, tragediante. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewell representation. It is a little past mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horse-shoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic—a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! He waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.

“Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell!... For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me—but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together....” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: “I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general.Approach, General Petit.” The general advances, and Napoleon clasps him in a long embrace. “Bring me the eagle!”

They bring it. He gathers the colors to his heart, and kisses the symbol passionately.

“Dear eagle! May these kisses find an echo in the hearts of every brave man!... My children, farewell.” The voice that had electrified them on a thousand battle-fields ceased to speak; it has stirred those brave hearts to their depths; the veterans sob like women. Napoleon descends the monumental steps of the horse-shoe, and passes through the midst of them in silence. Bertrand is waiting for him at the gate. He gets into his carriage, and drives away. Thus the unrivalled actor took his leave of the world-stage on which he had figured so long and so brilliantly. The colors which he clasped in that last touching embrace were henceforth treasured as a sacred thing; half a century later, they were laid on his tomb at the Invalides.

The gallery of Diana, which had been left unfinished by Napoleon, was completed after the restoration of the Bourbon. Louis XVIII. has commemorated the achievements on a slab bearing in golden letters the date of the completion of the gallery—“in the 20th year of my reign!” And on the table on which Napoleon signed his abdication he caused the following to be engraved: “The 5th of April, 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte signed his abdication on this table in the king’s cabinet, the second after the bedroom, at Fontainebleau.” With the singular mixture of obstinacy and simplicity which characterized his Bourbon mind, he systematically ignored in conversation and in all official deeds the reign of Napoleon altogether, and continued to the last to date as if that stormy meteor had never broken in upon the dull horizon of his sovereignty. Those inscriptions are the only two traces of Louis XVIII.’s passage which are to be found at Fontainebleau.

Charles X. never resided there, and seldom even visited the palace. It fell into sad neglect, but was entirely restored by Louis Philippe, not only the edifice, but the pictures and costly works of art with which a long line of sovereigns had so magnificently endowed it.

Under the Empire, Fontainebleau came in for the share of imperial favor which was so impartially divided amongst the still habitable castles of France. Every autumn it was the scene of brilliant hunting-parties and varied hospitalities.

We will close this fragmentary record of the past of Fontainebleau by an incident, which, though not yet within the range of history, may one day take its place there, and be quoted with interest as an indication of the character of one destined, for aught we know, to play his part in the annals of the coming age.

The Prince Imperial, then a mere child, was playing one day in thegalerie des cerfswith a little friend of his, the son of an officer of the household. Suddenly, in the midst of their game, the latter rather irrelevantly remarked: “This is where Queen Hortense killed a man.” “Queen Hortense was my grandmother,” retorted the young prince indignantly; “she never killed anybody!” “Oh! but she did, though,” persisted his companion; “she killed one somewhere hereabouts; I’ve read it in a book.”

This was too formidable an argument to be met by mere words; the descendant of the injured Hortense clenched his little fist, and laid onvigorously to the traducer of his grandmother. The noise of the battle soon drew the attention of some ladies who were at the other end of the gallery; they ran to separate the combatants, and inquire the cause of the row; but the young prince, crimson with rage, and with the big tears rolling down his cheeks, broke away from them, and rushed to his mother, who was somewhere in the neighborhood.

“He says that my grandmother killed a man,” cried the child out loud, “and I say it is a lie!” Then, throwing his arms round the empress’ neck, he whispered: “It’s not true, is it, that she ever killed anybody?”

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