SAINT CLOUD AND ITS PARK

The historic souvenirs of Saint Cloud and its royal palace are many and varied, though scarcely anything tangible remains to-day of the fabric so loved by Francis I and Henri II, and which was, for a fact, but a magnificent country-house, originally belonging to the Archbishops of Paris.

To-day the rapid slopes of the hillsides of Saint Cloud are peopled with a heterogeneous mass of villas of what the Parisian calls the “coquette” order, but which breathe little of the spirit of romance and gallantry of Renaissance times. Saint Cloud is simply a “discreet” Paris suburb, and the least said about it, its villas and their occupants to-day, the better.

The little village of Saint Cloud which is half-hidden in the Forest of Rouvray, was sacked and burned by the English after the battle of Poitiers, and then built up anew and occupied by the French monarchs in the reign of Charles VI. It was he who built the first chateau de plaisance here in which the royal family might live near Paris and yet amid a sylvan environment.

After this came the country-house of the Archbishops of Paris that Henri II, when he tired of it, tore down and erected a villa in the pseudo-Italian manner of the day, and built a fourteen-arch stone bridge across the Seine, which was a wonder of its time.

The banker Gondi, after huddling close to royalty, turned over an establishment which he had built to Catherine de Medici, who made use of it whenever she wished to give a country fête or garden party. By this time the whole aspect of Saint Cloud was royal.

It was within this house that the unhappy, and equally unpopular, Henri III was cut down by the three-bladed knife of the monk Jacques Clement. The incident is worth recounting briefly here because of the rapidity with which history was made by a mere fanatical knife-thrust. With the death of Henri III came the extinction of the House of Valois.

As the king sat in the long gallery of the palace playing at cards, on August 1, 1589, his cloak hanging over his shoulder, a little cap with a flower stuck in it perched over one ear, and suspended from his neck by a broad blue ribbon a basketful of puppies, an astrologer by the name of Osman was introduced to amuse the royal party.

“They tell me you draw horoscopes,” remarked the king.

“Sire, I will tell yours, if you will, but the heavens are unpropitious.”

“Just over Meudon is a star which shines very brightly,” continued the astrologer, “it is that of Henri de Navarre. But look, your Majesty, another star burns brilliantly for a moment and then disappears, mayhap it is your own.”

“If ever a man had a voice hoarse with blood it is that astrologer,” said the king. “Away with him.”

“If the Valois Henri doesn’t die before the setting of another sun, I’ll never cast horoscope more,” said the astrologer as he was hustled across the courtyard and out into the highroad.

As he left, a man in a monk’s garb begged to be admitted to the king’s presence. It was Jacques Clement, the murderous monk, a wily Dominican, bent on a mission which had for its object the extinction of the Valois race.

While the king was reading a letter which the monk had presented the latter stabbed him deep in the stomach.

Swooning, the king had just time to cry out: “Ha! le mechant moine: Il m’a tue, qu’on le tue.”

The murderer in turn was struck down forthwith and his body, thrown from the windows of the palace, was ecartele by four white horses, which is the neat French way of saying “drawn and quartered.”

It was an imposing cortege which wound down from the heights of Saint Cloud and followed the river bank to Saint Germain, Poissy and thence to Compiegne, conveying all that was mortal of Henri III, the least popular of all the race of Valois. Following close behind the bier were Henri IV and his suite, the favourites d’Epernon, Laschant, Dugastz and an impressive soldiery.

After the death of Henri III, Henri de Navarre, who played a not unpicturesque part in the funeral ceremonies, installed himself in a neighbouring property known as the Maison du Tillet. Thus it is seen that the royal stamp of the little bourg of Saint Cloud was never wanting not until the later palace and most of the town were drenched with kerosene and set on fire by the Prussians in 1871.

The “Maison de Gondi” came, by a process of acquisition, and development, in time, to be the royal palace of Saint Cloud. Its overloaded details of Italian architecture were brightened up a bit by the surroundings planned and executed by the landscapist Le Notre and the life of the court in its suburban retreat took on a real and genuine brilliance which under the restraint of the gloomy walls of the Louvre and Paris streets could hardly have been.

The brightest light shining over Saint Cloud at this time was the radiance shed by the brilliant Henriette d’Angleterre. Her reign as a social and witty queen of the court was brief. She died at the age of twenty-six, poisoned at the instigation of the Chevalier de Lorraine whom she had caused to be exiled. This was the common supposition, but Louis XIV was afterwards able to prove (?) his brother innocent of the crime.

The gazettes of the seventeenth century recount many of the fêtes given at Saint Cloud by Monsieur on the occasion of his marriage to the Princesse Palatine in 1671. One of the most notable of these was that given for Louis XIV, wherein the celebrated cascades an innovation of Le Notre were first brought to view.

Mansart was called in and a great gallery intended for fêtes and ceremonies was constructed, and Mignard was given the commission for its decorations.

Monsieur died within the walls of the palace to which he had added so many embellishments, as also did his second wife. Three royalties dead of ambition, one might well say, for their lives were neither tranquil nor healthful. They went the pace.

The regent journeyed out from Paris to this riverside retreat to receive the Tzar Peter in 1717, and in 1752 Louis Philippe d’Orleans set about to give a fête which should obscure the memory of all former events of a like nature into oblivion. How well he succeeded may be a matter of varying opinion, for the French have ever been prodigally lavish in the conduct of such affairs. At all events the occasion was a notable one.

The predilection of royalty for Saint Cloud was perhaps not remarkable, all things considered, for it was, and is, delightfully environed, and about this time the Duc d’Orleans secretly married the Marquise de Montesson and installed her in a habitation the “plus simple,” a mere shack, one fancies, costing six millions. The nouveau riche of to-day could scarcely do the thing with more eclat.

The Revolution took over the park of Saint Cloud and its appurtenances and donated them to the democracy “for the pleasure of the people,” read the decree.

On the eighteenth Brumaire, the First Republic blinked itself out in the Palais de Saint Cloud, and the Conseil de Cinq Cents installed itself therein under the Directoire. Bonaparte, returning from Egypt, arrived at Saint Cloud just as Lemercier was dissolving the Conseil. Seeing trouble ahead he commanded Murat to clear the chamber by drawn bayonets. He kept his light shining just a bit ahead of the others, did Napoleon. His watchword was initiative. Deputies clambered over each other in their haste to escape by stairway, door and window, and Bonaparte saw himself Consul without opposition for ten years for life.

The royal residences were put at Napoleon’s disposition and he wisely chose Saint Cloud for summer; Saint Cloud the cradle of his powers. As a restorer and rebuilder of crumbling monuments Napoleon was a master, as he was in the destructive sense when he was in the mood, and changes and additions were made at Saint Cloud which for comfort and convenience put it in the very front rank of French royal residences.

In March, 1805, Pope Pius VII baptised, amid a grand pomp and ceremony, in the chapel of the palace, the son of Louis Bonaparte, and five years afterwards (April 1, 1810), the same edifice saw the religious marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise.

On March 31, 1810, a strange animation dominated all the confines of the palace. It was the occasion of the celebration of Napoleon’s civil marriage with Marie Louise. They did not enter the capital until three days later for the ceremonial which united the daughter of the emperors who were descendants of the Roman Caesars, to the “Usurper,” who was now for the first time to rank with the other crowned heads of Europe.

The cortege which accompanied their majesties from Saint Cloud to Paris was a pageant which would take pages to describe. The reader of these lines is referred to the impassioned pages of the works of Frederic Masson for ample details.

A hundred thousand curiosity seekers had come out from Paris and filled the alleys of the park to overflowing. Music and dancing were on every hand. Mingled with the crowd were soldiers of all ranks brilliantly clad in red, blue and gold. “These warriors were a picturesque, obtrusive lot,” said a chronicler; “after having invaded Austria they acclaim the Austrian.”

In 1815 the capitulation of Paris was signed at Saint Cloud. The gardens were invaded by a throng which gave them more the aspect of an intrenched camp than a playground of princes. A brutal victor had climbed booted and spurred into the bed of the great Napoleon and on arising pulled the bee-embroidered draperies down with him and trampled them under foot. Was this a proper manifestation of victory?

At this period another great fête was given in the leafy park of Saint Cloud, a fête which French historians have chiefly passed over silently. The host on this occasion was the Prince of Schwartzenburg; the principal guests the foreign sovereigns, gloating over the downfall of the capital.

Louis XVIII, after removing the traces of this desolate invasion, took up his residence here on June 18, 1817, and in the following year built the stables and the lodgings of the Gardes du Corps. In 1820 the chapel begun by Marie Antoinette was finished and the Jardin du Trocadero constructed.

Charles X in his brief reign built, on the site of an old Ursulin convent, further quarters intended for the personnel of the court. The ensemble ever took on an increasing importance. At this time were laid out the gardens between the cascades and the river, which, to some slight extent, to-day, suggest the former ample magnificence of the park as it faced upon the river. Leading through this lower garden was the Avenue Royale extending to the chateau.

Saint Cloud for Charles X, in spite of his first interest therein, could have been but an unhappy memory for here he signed the abdication which brought about his fall. He left his palace at Saint Cloud on July 30, 1830, at three o’clock in the morning, just as day was breaking through the mists of the valley. He succumbed, the last of the Bourbons, on the same spot on which Henri IV, as chief of the house, had first been saluted as king.

Louis Philippe divided his time between Neuilly and Saint Cloud, and lent his purse and his enthusiasm to elaborating to a very considerable extent both the palace and its surroundings.

Napoleon III made Saint Cloud his preferred summer residence, and was actually beneath the palace roof when the Prussian horde commenced its march on the capital of Clovis. He left Saint Cloud on July 27, to take personal command of the Army of the Rhine at Metz.

As did Charles X, Napoleon III ceased to be sovereign of the French by enacting the final scene in his royal career in the Palais de Saint Cloud. Never again was the palace to give shelter to a French monarch. The empress left precipitately after the disaster of Woerth, and two months after the torch of arson made a ruin of all the splendour of the palace and its dependencies. The inhabitants of the little city, which had grown up around the confines of the palace, fled in refuge to Versailles during the armistice. Scarcely an old house was preserved in all the town.

Among the chefs d’oeuvres of art which perished in the flames were the fine works of Mignard above all, the magnificent Galerie d’Apollon the paintings of LeMoyne, Nacret, Leloir, the marines of Joseph Vernet and innumerable objects of art which had been gathered together for the embellishment of Saint Cloud by the later monarchs. Some few treasures were saved by the care of the Crown Prince of Prussia, and some vases, chairs and statues were appropriated and packed off across the Rhine as the plunder of war.

The park of Saint Cloud to-day contains nearly four hundred hectares, the public park and the “preserve.” From it spreads out one of the loveliest panoramas in the neighbourhood of Paris, alleyed vistas leading seemingly to infinity, with a sprinkling of statues still flanking the Jardin du Trocadero.

From the town one enters the park through a great iron gate from the Place Royale, or by the Avenue du Chateau, which lands one on the terraces where once stood the royal palace.

From Ville d’Avray and from Sevres there are also entrances to the great park, while to the latter runs an avenue connecting the “preserve” of Saint Cloud with the wilder, more rugged Bois de Meudon.

Actually the surroundings of Saint Cloud’s great park are the least bit tawdry. Here and there are booths and tents selling trashy souvenirs, and even more unpleasant-looking articles of food and drink, while fringing the river, and some of the principal avenues approaching the cascade, are more pretentious restaurants and eating houses which are royal in name and their prices if nothing else.

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

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

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

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

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

Neighbouring upon Saint Cloud is a whole battery of hallowed, historical spots associated with the more or less royal dwellings of the French monarchs and their favourites. It was but a comparatively short distance to Versailles, to Saint Germain, to Maintenon and to Rambouillet, and the near-by Louveciennes was literally strewn with the most charming country-houses, which, in many cases, kings paid for and made free use of, though indeed the accounts for the same may not have appeared in the public budgets, at least not under their proper names.

At the summit of the hill which gives the town its name was a chateau belonging originally to Madame la Princesse de Conti, and opposite the railway station of to-day, with its prosaic and unlovely surroundings, was a magnificent property belonging to Marechal Magnan, and the Pavillon du Barry, built by the architect Ledoux to the orders of Louis XV, who would provide a convenient nest in the neighbourhood of Saint Cloud for his latest favourite. To-day the pavilion exists in name, somewhat disfigured to be sure, but still reminiscent of its former rather garish outlines, so on the whole it cannot be said to have suffered greatly from an esthetic point of view. The property came finally to be included as a part of the estate of Pierre Laffitte, though still known, as it always has been, as the Pavillon du Barry.