come timidly to court. The
rest is an idyll which is found set forth in all the history books at
considerable length, and at this particular moment it was a genuine
idyll, for the king had not then become the debauched roue that he was
in later life.

After Anne d'Autriche, Henriette, the widow of Charles I of England,
found at Saint Germain a comfortable and luxurious refuge.

From 1661 onward Louis XIV made frequent visits to Saint Germain and was
so taken with the charms of the neighbourhood and the immediate site
that he conjured six and a half million francs out of his Civil List, in
addition to his regular stipend, for the upkeep of this palace alone.
This was robbery: modern graft pales before this; candelabra by the
pound and writing tables by the square yard were known before the days
of machine politicians.

James II of England, in 1688, found a hospitable refuge at Saint
Germain, thanks to Louis XIV, and died within the palace walls in 1701,
as did his wife, Maria d'Este, in 1718.

Louis XV and Louis XVI gave Saint Germain scarce a thought, and under
the Empire it became a cavalry school, and later, under the Restoration,
sinking lower still, it merited only the denomination of a barracks. Its
culminating fall arrived when it was turned into a penitentiary.

Napoleon III, with finer instincts, here installed a museum, and
restorations and rebuilding having gone on intermittently since that
time the palace has now taken on a certain pretence to glory.
Practically the palace in its present form is a restoration, not
entirely a new building, but a rebuilding of an old one, first begun
under the competent efforts of the architect Eugene Millet, who sought
to reestablish the edifice as it was under Francis I. The great tower
has been preserved but the corner pavilions of the period of Louis XIV
have been demolished in accord with the carrying out of this plan.

For forty years Saint Germain has been in a state of restoration, and
like the restoration of Pierrefonds it has swallowed up fantastic sums.
The western facade has been rebuilt from the chapel to the entrance
portal and the last of Mansart's pavilions, which he built to please
either his own fancy or that of Louis XIV, have been demolished. Mansart
himself made way with the old _tourelles_ and the balustrade which
rounded off the angles of the walls of the main buildings and
substituted a series of heavy, ugly _maisonettes_, more like the
bastions