ry, Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiegne
and received Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal
lady's costume was of such a grotesque nature, and her speech so
_chevaleresque_, that she caused even a scandal in a profligate court.
Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiegne practically a prisoner; another
_menage a trois_ had been broken up.

The most imposing event in the history of Compiegne of which the
chronicles tell was the assembling of sixty thousand men beneath the
walls by Louis XIV, in order to give Madame de Maintenon a realistic
exhibition of "playing soldiers." At all events the demonstration was a
bloodless one, and an immortal page in Saint-Simon's "Memoires"
consecrates this gallantry of a king in a most subtle manner.

Another fair lady, a royal favourite, too, came on the scene at
Compiegne in 1769 when Madame du Barry was the principal _artiste_ in
the great fete given in her honour by Louis XV. She was lodged in a tiny
chateau (built originally for Madame de Pompadour) a short way out of
town on the Soissons road.

Du Barry must have been a good fairy to Compiegne for Louis XV lavished
an abounding care on the chateau and, rather than allow the architect,
Jacques Ange Gabriel, have the free hand that his counsellors advised,
sought to have the ancient outlines of the former structure on the site
preserved and thus present to posterity through the newer work the two
monumental facades which are to be seen to-day. The effort was not
wholly successful, for the architect actually did carry out his fancy
with respect to the decoration in the same manner in which he had
designed the Ecole Militaire at Paris and the two colonnaded edifices
facing upon the Place de la Concorde.

This work was entirely achieved when Louis XVI took possession. This
monarch, in 1780, caused to be fitted up a most elaborate apartment for
the queen (his marriage with Marie Antoinette was consecrated here), but
that indeed was all the hand he had in the work of building at
Compiegne, which has practically endured as his predecessor left it. The
Revolution and Consulate used the chateau as their fancy willed, and
rather harshly, but in 1806 its restoration was begun and Charles IV of
Spain, upon his dethronement by Napoleon, was installed therein a couple
of years later.

The palace, the park and the forest now became a sort of royal appanage
of this Spanish monarch, which Napoleon, in a generous