uld 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 fete-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 facade, the ancient Petit Chateau, the