CHANTILLY

Chantilly, because of its royal associations, properly finds its place in every traveller’s French itinerary. Not only did Chantilly come to its great glory through royal favour, but in later years the French government has taken it under its wing, the chateau, the stables and the vast park and forest, until the ensemble is to-day as much of a national show place as Versailles or Saint Germain. It is here in the marble halls, where once dwelt the Condes and the Montmorencys, that are held each year the examinations of the French Academie des Beaux Arts. And besides this it is a place of pilgrimage for thousands of tourists who, as a class, for a couple of generations previously, never got farther away from the capital than Saint Cloud.

Many charters of the tenth century make mention of the estates of Chantilly, which at that time belonged to the Seigneurs of Senlis. The chateau was an evolution from a block-house, or fortress, erected by Catulus in Gallo-Roman times and four centuries later it remained practically of the same rank. In the fourteenth century the chateau was chiefly a vast fortress surrounded by a water defence in the form of an enlarged moat by means of which it was able to resist the Bourguignons and never actually fell until after the taking of Meaux by the English king, Henry V.

Jean II de Montmorency, by his marriage with Marguerite d’Orgemont, came to be the possessor of the domain, their son, in turn, becoming the heir. It was this son, Guillaume, who became one of the most brilliant servitors of the monarchs Louis XI, Louis XII, and Francis I, and it was through these friends at court that Chantilly first took on its regal aspect.

In turn the celebrated Anne de Montmorency, Connetable de France, came into the succession and finding the old fortress, albeit somewhat enlarged and furbished up by his predecessor, less of a palatial residence than he would have, separated the ancient chateau-fort from an added structure by an ornamental moat, or canal, and laid out the pelouse, parterres and the alleys of greensward leading to the forest which make one of the great charms of Chantilly to-day.

Here resided, as visitors to be sure, but for more or less extended periods, and at various times, Charles V, Charles IX and Henri IV, each of them guests of the hospitable and ambitious Montmorencys.

Chantilly passed in 1632 to Charlotte, the sister of the last Marechal de Montmorency, the wife of Henri II, Prince de Conde, the mother of the Grand Conde, the Prince de Conti and the Duchesse de Longueville.

With the Grand Conde came the greatest fame, the apotheosis, of Chantilly. This noble was so enamoured of this admirable residence that he never left it from his thoughts and decorated it throughout in the most lavish taste of his time, destroying at this epoch the chateau of the moyen-age and the fortress. These were the days of gallant warriors with a taste for pretty things in art, not mere bloodthirsty slaughterers.

On the foundations of the older structures there now rose an admirable pile (not that which one sees to-day, however), embellished by the surroundings which were evolved from the brain of the landscape gardener, Le Notre. The Revolution made way with this lavish structure and with the exception of the Chatelet, or the Petit Chateau (designed by Jean Bullant in 1560, and remodelled within by Mansart) the present-day work is a creation of the Duc d’Aumale, the heir to the Condes’ name and fame, to whom the National Assembly gave back his ancestral estates which had in the meantime come into the inventory of royal belongings through the claims established by the might of the Second Empire.

Back to the days of the Grand Conde one reads of an extended visit made by Louis XIV to his principal courtier. It was at an expense of two hundred thousand ecus that the welcoming fête was accomplished. Madame de Sevigne has recounted the event more graphically than any other chronicler, and it would be presumption to review it here at length. The incident of Vatel alone has become classic.

To the coterie of poets at Rambouillet must be added those of Chantilly; their sojourn here added much of moment to the careers and reputations of Boileau, Racine, Bourdaloue and Bossuet. It was the latter, who, in the funeral oration which he delivered on the death of the Prince de Conde, said:

“Here under his own roof one saw the Grand Conde as if he were at the head of his armies, a noble always great, as well in action as in repose. Here you have seen him surrounded by his friends in this magnificent dwelling, in the shady alleys of the forest or beside the purling waters of the brooks which are silent neither day nor night.”

The Grand Conde died, however, at Fontainebleau. The heir, Henri-Jules de Bourbon, did his share towards keeping up and embellishing the property, and to him was due that charming wildwood retreat known as the Parc de Sylvie.

Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Minister of Louis XV at the commencement of his reign, had gained a fabulous sum of money in the notorious “Law’s Bank” affair, and, with a profligate and prodigal taste in spending, lived a life of the grandest of grand seigneurs at Chantilly, to which, as his donation to its architectural importance, he contributed the famous Ecuries, or stables. To show that he was persona grata at court he gave a great fête here for Louis XV and the Duchesse du Barry.

The last Prince de Conde but one before the Revolution built the Chateau d’Enghien in the neighbourhood, and sought to people the Parc de Sylvie with a rustic colony of thatched maisonettes and install his favourites therein in a weak imitation of what had been done in the Petit Trianon. The note was manifestly a false one and did not endure, not even is its echo plainly audible for all is hearsay to-day and no very definite record of the circumstance exists.

Chantilly in later times has been a favourite abode with modern monarchs. The King of Denmark, the Emperor Joseph II and the King of Sweden were given hospitality here, and much money was spent for their entertainment, and much red and green fire burned for their amusement and that of their suites.

The Revolution’s fell blow carried off the principal parts of the Conde’s admirable constructions and it is fortunate that the Petit Chateau escaped the talons of the “Bande Noire.” Immediately afterwards the Chateau d’Enghien and the Ecuries were turned over to the uses of the Minister of War, and the authorities of the Jardin des Plantes were given permission to transplant and transport anything which pleased their fancy among the exotics which had been set out by Le Notre in Chantilly’s famous parterres.

Under the imperial regime the Foret de Chantilly was given in fee simple to Queen Hortense, though all was ultimately returned to the Conde heirs after the Restoration. It was at this period that Chantilly received the visit of Alexander, Emperor of Russia, and the historian’s account of that visit makes prominent the fact that during the periods of rain it was necessary that an umbrella be carried over the imperial head as he passed through the corridors of the palace from one apartment to another.

The host of the emperor died here in 1818 and his son, spending perhaps half of his time here, cared little for restoration and spent all his waking hours hunting in the forest, returning to the Petit Chateau only to eat and sleep.

The Duc de Bourbon added to the flanking wings of the Petit Chateau and cleaned up the debris which was fast becoming moss-grown, weed encumbered and altogether disgraceful. The moats were cleaned out of their miasmatic growth and certain of the grass-carpeted parterres resown and given a semblance of their former selves.

Some days after the Revolution of 1830 the Prince de Conde died in a most dramatic fashion, and his son, the Duc d’Enghien, having been shot at Vincennes under the Empire, he willed the Duc d’Aumale and his issue his legal descendants forever.

Towards 1840 the Duc d’Aumale sought to reconstruct the splendours of Chantilly, but a decree of January 22, 1852, banished the entire Orleans family and interrupted the work when the property was sold to the English bankers, Coutts and Company, for the good round sum of eleven million francs, not by any means an extravagant price for this estate of royal aspect and proportions. The National Assembly of 1872 did the only thing it could do in justice to tradition bought the property in and decreed that it be restored to its legitimate proprietor.

It was as late as 1876 that the Duc d’Aumale undertook the restoration of the Chatelet and the rebuilding of the new chateau which is seen to-day. The latter is from the designs of Henri Daumet, member of the Institut de France.

In general the structure of to-day occupies the site of the moyen-age chateau but is of quite a different aspect.

The Duc d’Aumale made a present of the chateau and all that was contained therein to the Institut de France. From a purely sordid point of view it was a gift valued at something like thirty-five million francs, not so great as many new-world public legacies of to-day, but in certain respects of a great deal more artistic worth.

The mass is manifestly imposing, made up as it is, of four distinct parts, the Eglise, dating from 1692, the Ecuries, the Chatelet or Petit Chateau, and the Chateau proper the modern edifice.

Before the celebrated Ecuries is a green, velvety pelouse which gives an admirable approach. The architecture of the Ecuries is of a heavy order and the sculptured decorations actually of little esthetic worth, representing as they do hunting trophies and the like. Before the great fountain one deciphers a graven plaque which reads as follows:

Louis Henri de Bourbon Prince de Conde Fût Construire Cette Ecurie 1701-1784.

Within the two wings may be stabled nearly two hundred horses. The Grand Ecuries at Chantilly are assuredly one of the finest examples extant of that luxuriant art of the eighteenth century French builder. Luxurious, excessively ornate and overpowering it is, and, for that reason, open to question. The work of the period knew not the discreet middle road. It was of Chantilly that it was said that the live stock was better lodged than its masters. The architect of this portion of the chateau was Jean Aubert, one of the collaborators of Jules Hardouin Mansart.

The characteristics of Chantilly, take it as a whole, the chateau, the park and the forest, are chiefly theatrical, but with an all-abiding regard for the proprieties, for beyond a certain heaviness of architectural style in parts of the chateau everything is of the finely focussed relative order of which the French architect and landscape gardener have for ages been past masters.

The real French garden is here to be seen almost at its best, its squares and ovals of grassy green apportioned off from the mass by gravelled walks and ornamented waters. The “tapis d’orient” effect, so frequently quoted by the French in writing of such works, is hardly excelled elsewhere.

All this shocked the mid-eighteenth century English traveller, but it was because he did not, perhaps could not, understand. Rigby, “the Norwich alderman” as the French rather contemptuously referred to this fine old English gentleman, said frankly of Chantilly: “All this has cost dear and produced a result far from pleasing.” He would have been better pleased doubtless with a privet or box hedge and an imitation plaster rockery, things which have never agreed with French taste, but which were the rule in pretentious English gardens of the same period. Rigby must indeed have been a “grincheau,” as the French called him, for this same up-country gentleman said of Versailles: “Lovely surrounding country but palace and park badly designed.” Versailles is not that, whatever else its faults may be.

Chantilly is more than a palace, it is a museum of nature, a hermitage of art and of history. The fantasy of its tourelles, its lucarnes and its pignons are something one may hardly see elsewhere in such profusion, and the fact that they are modern is forgotten in the impression of the general silhouette.

The adventurer who first built a donjon on the Rocher de Chantilly little knew with what seigneurial splendour the site was ultimately to be graced. From a bare outpost it was transformed, as if by magic, into a Renaissance palace of a supreme beauty. The Duc d’Aumale said in his “Acte de Donation de Chantilly”: “It stands complete and varied, a monument of French art in all its branches, a history of the best epochs of our glory.”

Among all the palatial riches neighbouring upon Paris, not forgetting Versailles, Compiegne, Fontainebleau, Pierrefonds and Rambouillet, Chantilly, by the remarkable splendour of its surroundings, its situation and the artistic treasures which it possesses, is in a class by itself. It is a class more clearly defined by the historic souvenirs which surround it than any other contemporary structure of this part of France.

Its corridors and gravelled walks and the long alleys of the park and forest may not take on the fête-like aspect which they knew in the eighteenth century, but they are not solitary like those of Fontainebleau and Rambouillet, nor noisily overrun like those of Versailles or Saint Germain.

The ornamental waters which surround the Chateau de Chantilly are of a grand and nearly unique beauty. It is a question if they are not finer than the waters of Versailles, indeed they preceded them and may even have inspired them.

The Chatelet, the chateau proper and the chapel form a group quite distinct from the Ecuries. The Cour d’Honneur is really splendid and one hardly realizes the juxtaposition of modernity. The pavilion attributed to Jean Bullant, the western façade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the Grand Vestibule, the Grand Escalier and the Gallerie des Cerfs and a dozen other apartments are of a rare and imposing beauty, though losing somewhat their distinctive aspect by reason of the objets de musee distributed about their walls and floors.

One of the landscape gems of Chantilly is the Pelouse, a vast esplanade of greensward now forming, in part, the celebrated race track of Chantilly. Sport ever formed a part of the outdoor program at Chantilly, but that of to-day is just a bit more horsey than that of old, a good deal less picturesque and assuredly more vulgarly banal as to its cachet than the hunts, the tourneys and courses of the romantic age.

Thousands come to Chantilly to wager their coin on scrubs and dark horses ridden by third-rate “warned-off” jockeys from other lands, but probably not ten in ten thousand of the lookers on at the Grand Prix du Jockey Club in May ever make the occasion of the spring meeting an opportunity for visiting the fine old historic monument of the Condes.

The “Races” of Chantilly may be given a further word in that they are an outgrowth of a foundation by the Duc d’Orleans in 1832. The track forms a circuit of two thousand metres, and occupies quite the best half of the Pelouse, closed in on one side by the thick-grown Foret de Chantilly and flanked, in part, on the other by the historic Ecuries, with the Tribune, or grand stand, just to the south.

Many tourists arrive at Chantilly by auto, stop brusquely before the Grande Grille, rush through the galleries of the chateau, do “cent pas” in the park, give a cursory glance at the stables and are off; but more, many more, with slower steps and saner minds, drink in the charms which are offered on all sides and consider the time well spent even if they have paid “Boulevard Prices” at the Restaurant du Grand Conde for their dejeuner.

It has been said that a museum is a reunion of objets d’art brought about by a methodical grouping, either chronologically or categorically. The Duc d’Aumale’s Musee de Chantilly is more an expression of personal taste. He collected what he wished and he arranged his collections as suited his fancy.

The famous Musee de Chantilly, which is the lodestone which draws most folk thither, so admirably housed, was a gift of the Duc d’Aumale who, for the glory of his ancestors, and the admiration of the world, to say nothing of his own personal satisfaction, here gathered together an eclectic collection of curious and artistic treasures, certainly not the least interesting or valuable among the great public collections in France. The effect produced is sometimes startling, a Messonier is cheek by jowl with a Baron Gros, a Decamps vis a vis to a Veronese, and a Lancret is bolstered on either hand by a Poussin and a Nattier. Amid all this disorder there is, however, an undeniable, inexplicable charm.

There are three distinct apartments worth, more than all the others, the glance of the hurried visitor to the Musee Conde at Chantilly. In the first, the Santuario, is the Livre d’Heures of Etienne Chevalier, by Jean Fouquet, considered as the most important relic of primitive French art extant.

The Cabinet des Gemmes comes second, and here is the celebrated “Diamant Rose,” called the Grand Conde.

Finally there is the Galerie de Psyche, with forty-four coloured glass windows, executed for the Connetable de Montmorency in 1541-1542.

The great collection of historical and artistic treasures stowed away within the walls of Chantilly the Duc d’Aumale selected himself in order to associate his own name with the glorious memory of the Condes, who were so intimately connected with the chateau.

The Duc sought to recover such of the former furnishings of the chateau as had been dissipated during the Revolution whenever they could be heard of and could be had at public or private sale.

In this connection a word on Chantilly lace may not be found inapropos. The Chantilly lace of to-day, it is well to recall, is a mechanically produced article of commerce, turned out by the running mile from Nottingham, England, though in the days when Chantilly’s porcelains rivalled those of Sevres it was purely a local product. One may well argue therefore that the bulk of the Chantilly lace sold in the shops of Chantilly to-day is not on a par with the admirable examples to be seen in the glass cases of the museum.

A wooded alley leading to the great park runs between the main edifice and the Chateau d’Enghien, a gentle incline descending again to the sunken gardens in a monumental stairway of easy slope, the whole a quintessence of much that is best of the art of the landscape gardener of the time.

To the left extends the vast Jardin Anglais a veritable French Jardin Anglais. Let not one overlook the distinction: On conventional lines it is pretty, dainty and pleasing, but the species lacks the dignified formality of the Italian garden or the ingenious arrangement of the French. Its curves and ovals and circles are annoying after the lignes droites and the right angles and the broderies of the French variety.

The Foret de Chantilly covers two thousand four hundred and forty-nine hectares and extends from the Bois de Herivaux on one side to the Foret de Senlis on the other. The rendezvous-de-châsse was, in the old days, and is to-day on rare occasions, at the Rond Point, to which a dozen magnificent forest roads lead from all directions, that from the town being paved with Belgian blocks, the dread of automobilists, but delightful to ride over in muddy weather. The Route de Connetable, so called, is well-nigh ideal of its kind. It launches forth opposite the chateau and at its entrance are two flanking stone lions. It is of a soft soil suitable for horseback riding, but entirely unsuited for wheeled traffic of any kind.

Another of the great forest roads leads to the Chateau de la Reine Blanche, a diminutive edifice in the pointed style, with a pair of svelte towers coiffed candle-snuffer fashion. Tradition, and very ancient and somewhat dubious tradition, attributes the edifice as having belonged to Blanche de Navarre, the wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated the more mundane, work-a-day mill. The Duc de Bourbon restored the whole place in 1826 that it might serve him and his noble friends as a hunting-lodge.