oon after his ruin,
from chagrin, and in apparent poverty, which seemingly established his
good faith with his creditors. Under the First Empire the domain was
bought by, or for, the Princesse Borghese, who here gave many brilliant
fetes at which the emperor himself frequently assisted. On the occasion
of the marriage of Napoleon to Marie Louise a series of fetes took place
here which evoked the especially expressed encomiums of the emperor.

In 1815 Wellington made it his headquarters and here had his first
conference with Blucher. Upon Wellington quitting Saint James the
property was pillaged by the Iron Duke's own troops and actually
demolished by the picks and axes of the soldiery.

Near the Passy entrance of the Bois is La Muette, a relic of a royal
hunting-lodge which took its name from the royal pack of hounds
(_meute_) which was formerly kept here.

The Chateau de la Muette was the caprice of Francois I, who, when he
came to Paris, wished to have his pleasures near at hand, and, being the
chief partisan of the hunt among French monarchs, built La Muette for
this purpose.

The Chateau de la Muette is thus classed as one of the royal dwellings
of France though hardly ever is it mentioned in the annals of to-day.

Rebuilt by Charles IX, from his father's more modest shooting box, La
Muette became the centre of the court of Marguerite de Navarre, the
first wife of Henri IV; after which it served as the habitation of the
dauphin, who became Louis XIII.

During the regency, Philippe d'Orleans took possession of the chateau
until the enthronement of Louis XV. The latter here established a little
court within a court, best described by the French as: "_ses plaisirs
prives_." It was this monarch who rebuilt, or at least restored, the
chateau, and brought it to the state in which one sees it to-day.

In 1783 Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the court took up a brief
residence here to assist at the aerostatic experiences of De Rosier, and
in 1787, ceasing to be a royal residence, La Muette was offered for sale
after first having been stripped of its precious wainscotings, its
marbles and the artistic curiosities of all sorts with which it had been
decorated. The chateau itself now became the property of Sebastian
Erard, who bought it for the modest price of two hundred and sixty
thousand francs.

Somewhat farther from Paris, crossing the peninsula formed by the first
of the great bends of the Seine below the capita