MEMORIES OF FRENCH PALACES.* the whichever side one turns, the
memories recalled in this book are melancholy,—dead people, dead ambitions, dead hopes. St. Cloud was already burnt when the pages devoted to its story were written, and since then the Tuileries has gone too ; while 'the half-destroyed Palais Royal stares with its clockless facade Japan its opposite neighbour, the gutted wing of the Louvre, like the blind giant of an old fable whose one eye has been remorse- lessly extinguished by his bitterest foe.
The story of each building is told by Mrs. Chilies with plenty -of spirit, and we remember no book so well calculated to give the young generation amusing pictures of the former inhabitants. The Bourbons and the Bonapartes flit through its pages like the gay phantasmagoria of a dream ; and perhaps our children will be philosophically indifferent to personages whose memories yet arouse in many hearts a passion of affection or of hatred, of triumph or -of regret. Wo cannot yet dissociate ourselves from the historical .current which flowed through these famous walls. Every one takes one side or the other, and regards the palaces of France .either as symbols of the country's greatness or as relies of tyranny and pride. But should the Republic, one and indivisible, ever -succeed in rooting itself, there may come a day when the whole tragedy may move the people as little as this generation is moved by the execution of Charles I.
From the better known buildings about which our newspapers have been writing for the past year we turn to one or two which are loss seldom visited. For instance, we have found many travellers who had never been inside the Chateau of St. Germain, though it was long the home of an historic group of Englishmen. It is some distance from Paris, contains no pictures, and had for 150 years a gaunt dreariness about its angular brick pavilions which was anything but inviting to the ordinary tourist. These pavilions form no part of the original structure ; they were added by Louis XIV, to the beautiful building erected by Francis I. and dlis daughter-in-law Catherine de Medieis ; and before the unhappy war of 1870 an active restoration was being carried out, which -consisted in chipping off the brick excrescences and restoring the -chateau of the Renaissance. The architect was M. Millet, who -seems to have caught Viollet le Duc's genius for the restoration of the French architecture of the middle ages, for so much as was -completed a year ago was very fair to look on. Then, for twelve months, the place was entirely deserted, until a fortnight ago, when a faint sound of hammers began, and we hear that a few work- men have been put on. But with twopence-halfpenny to pay on 4every letter from town to town, it may be surmised that the public purse will not allow much to be spent on artistic restorations. The Empire had, however, placed in the completed part of the =chateau a very noble museum of Celtic and Gallo-Roman antiquities.
In immediate proximity to the Chateau of St. Germain is the -church containing the tomb of our James II. The present build- ing and the marble monument are only forty years old. Bah the -one and the other are in good Roman taste, and over the tomb of the king is a fresco of St. George of England, while the little -chapel is all embroidered with the royal initials and the arms of England. Be our opinions what they may, the arms of England -cause the heart to thrill when one meets them in a foreign church, and sees our patron saint careering on what appear to be the
4 Memories of French 'Maces. By A. B. Ohalihni. London: Bradbury and wane. sands of Dover. It is curious that on this tomb of James II. are several tolerably fresh wreaths of imnmortellcs, and two withered bouquets. Since even the last Laird of Gask is gone to his rest, who is there to freshly decorate a Stuart's tomb ? Did he bequeath a fund for masses for his soul ? None such, it seems to us, could have withstood the sweep of the first French Revolution. Or do the clergy of the church bestow this touching little attention ? At any rate, there are the yellow crowns and there are the withered bouquets, and on searching our memories we are inclined to think that it must be the present Due FitzJatnes who thus visits the grave of his remote ancestor and keeps it green.
In a large chapel a stone's-throw from the church, used for reli- gious meetings and the children's catechism, is a magnificent altar, which belonged to the royal chapel in the chateau. It is of the date of Louis XL1.1.,and has his monogram with that of Anne of Austria at each side. Standing before it, we felt as it were an oppression of the two dreary dull lives of kings which it had witnessed. Louis XIII. was one of the dreariest mortals ever born ; and James II. was made so by sad fate from youth to age. Mrs. Chal- lice quotes a passage in a letter of the Grande Mademoiselle's in which she says that the Duke of York, then a boy, and living hero with his widowed mother, begged a ride in her coach as far as Poissy, about six miles off. The King of England also wanted to go, "but I would not allow of it, remarking that the Duke of York was only a boy, and that therefore there was no harm in my taking him." Alas ! in addition to that youthful ride to Poissy, in the Grande Mademoiselle's pumpkin coach (she was not bad com- pany, that plump, long-nosed, energetic lady of Bourbon blood, who snubbed her cousin the great King, and was essentially what modern slang would call jolly), how many leagues was not James of York destined to roll backwards and forwards over the stately roads around St. Germain's! In his old age he and Louis XIV. interchanged visits upon the serene heights whereon they dwelt above ordinary mortals, and the Stuarts' coach, with the scarlet uniforms of England might be seen descending the great slope towards the Seine, and winding up again iu the long curve towards the aqueducts of Marty, and so along the broad road across the hill-top, now looking like any other road, but which two years ago still retained its pave and its bordering elms. Hot and heavy must have beau his peruke in the summer days ; and once at Versailles there was no easy chair for him ! And when the other king, in all the plentitude of his state and untouched authority, set out' from Versailles, what a sight it was ! In those days, sensible, prudent Madame de Maiuteuon was seated by his side, or followed in another coach to herself, and each had their "people," and all these people had their wigs. There are a dozen of pictures of battlefields at Versailles where you may see the coach and the man and the wig painted to the life. And when they all got to St. Germain's, what a commotion in the town, yet so unaltered How the dark chateau filled for the moment with the life-blood of a monarchy unexiled, and the Court of St. James did its best to royally receive the Court of St. Louis! The Grande Mademoiselle was dead within five years of the arrival of the English King, but the two old men who had been young together went on with their ceremonies and reminiscences, until the death of James left Louis aloue in his glory, on the pinnacle where he survived for some fifteen years more.
The reader will find much that is interesting in the other historical notices in this book, especially Malmaison and Fon- tainebleau, containing details which we do not remember to have seen before. If we have singled out St. Germain's, it is because King James is BO completely forgotten that there are perhaps many of our readers who when in Paris have never cared to go and see that little bit of England's belonging, on whose marble front it is inscribed in gold that it was "On royal ashes by a royal care bestowed."
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