of a fortress than any adjunct to a princely dwelling.

The courtyard of the chateau is curiously disposed; "so that it may
receive the sun at all times," was the claim of its designer. It, too,
has been brought back to the state in which it was originally conceived
and shorn of its encumbering outhouses and odds and ends which served
their purposes well enough when it was a barracks or a prison, but which
were a desecration to anything called by so dignified a name as a
chateau or a palace. This courtyard is to-day as it was when the lords
and ladies in the train of Charles IX strolled and even gambolled
therein.

The Chapelle de Saint Louis (1240) is in every way remarkable,
especially with respect to its great rose-window, which was found by
Millet to have been walled up by Louis XIV.

The military museum of to-day, which is enclosed by the palace walls,
possesses a remarkable collection of its kind, but has no intimate lien
upon the history of the palace.

The _parterre_ before the palace is cut off from the forest of Saint
Germain by three ornate iron gates. It was relaid, a transformation from
designs originally conceived in 1676, by Le Notre, modified in 1750 and
much reduced in size and beauty in the nineteenth century, though later
enlarged by taking three hectares of ground from the forest and turning
them into the accepted form of an English garden.

A peninsula of a superficial area of over ten thousand acres snugly
enfolded in one of the great horseshoe bends of the Seine contains the
Foret de Saint Germain. A line drawn across the neck of the peninsula
from Saint Germain to Poissy, following the Route de Poissy, completely
cuts off this tongue of land which is as wild and wooded to-day as in
the times of Francis, the Henris and the Louis.

The _routes_ and _allees_ of the forest are traced with regularity and
precision, and historians have written them down as of a length of
nearly four hundred leagues, a statement which a glance at any map of
the forest will well substantiate.

High upon its plateau sits this historic wildwood, for the most part of
a soil dry and sandy, with here and there some great _mamelon_
(Druidical or Pagan, as the case may be) rising somewhat above the
average level. Francis I, huntsman and lover of art and nature, did
much to preserve this great forest, and Louis XIV in his time developed
its system of roads and paths, "chiefly to make hunting easy," says
history, though i