heel, and there was no more said about that marriage. He married finally Marie de Medicis. She gave birth to the Dauphin Louis XIII. at Fontainebleau. Henri's joy was unbounded. He made his wife a present on the occasion of the Château of Monceau with its beautiful park and grounds, which had formerly been a gift to Gabrielle d'Estrée. Marie de Medicis was blest with wonderfully robust health — a fact which her husband comments upon rather quaintly in a letter to Sully ten days after the birth of the Dauphin. "My wife," he says, "dresses her own hair, and talks already of getting up; my friend, she has a terribly robust constitution!" Sad pity that anything should spoil the attractive beauty of Henri IV.'s portrait as it hangs before us in the long gallery of royal sitters at Fontainebleau; but, alas! there it is, the black blot on the bright disk, the treacherous breach of hospitality perpetrated in his name toward an old companion and brother-in-arms. There is abundant proof that the arrest of Maréchal de Biron and his death were repugnant and painful to the king, and that for some days he combated both by every means in his power, stooping to tears and passionate entreaty with Biron, and pleading eloquently in his behalf with his own ministers; and that it was only after all his efforts had failed to convince the latter, or to wring from Biron's stubborn pride the confession which could have saved him, that Henri's signature was obtained for the death-warrant. This no doubt absolves him from the odium of a cold-blooded, premeditated act of vengeance; but it is a poor apology to say that he only consented to invite his old brother-in-arms to Fontainebleau, and let him be arrested in a dark corridor at nightfall,

and taken to prison, and eventual put to death, because he was ove ruled and circumvented by the ir will of his wife Marie with the "t ribly robust constitution."

The gardens of Fontainebleau a full of delicate and poetic memor. of Henri de Navarre in which Res plays a prominent part. The cou tiers looked on at the familiar, scho boy friendship between the king an his minister with envious eyes, a set to work with malignant diligen to loosen the bond. They succeeds in getting up such a plausible sto against Rosny that the king, w had been some time without seca him, was staggered; he examined t deed of accusation, and admitte that the circumstances looked back The minister was in Paris workin away for his master as hard as an galley-slave at the arsenal. Hem sent for him. When he arrived, th king was on the terrace surrounde by the court; he greeted his frien with a gracious formality foreign t the habitual free and easy mann of their intercourse. Sully was pain ed and mystified. But the restrain was equally intolerable to bot Henri called him aside presently and they walked up and down 21 alley in sight of the terrace, but ou of ear-shot. The king pulled ou the deed of accusation, and hande it to his friend. Rosny cast his ey contemptuously over the paper, and in a few words scattered all its con tents to the winds. Henri saw tha he had been the dupe of a bast designing jealousy, and broke ou into bitter self-reproach at having been led to doubt even for a mo ment the fidelity of his tried and faithful servant. He held out hi hand; Sully, overcome with emotion was about to fall on his knees t kiss it; but, quick as lightning, the king caught him in his arms, ex

care,

claiming: "Take Rosny! Those fellows yonder will fancy I am forgiving you."

The visit of the Spanish ambassador to Fontainebleau led to the construction of the large and handsome Chapel of the Trinity. After going all over the interminable galleries and halls of the vast edifice, they came to the chapel. It was very pretty, but quite out of keeping with the space and splendor of the rest of the building. Don Pedro's minister was scandalized at the irreverence implied in the contrast, and, with the impulse of a Spaniard, exclaimed, looking round at the narrow walls of the little sanctuary: "Your house would be perfect, sire, if God were as well lodged in it as the king." Henri was pleased with the outspoken rebuke, and at once set about building a temple worthier of the divine worship.

His ungovernable passion for the chase was a frequent cause of altercation between himself and Sully, who shared his master's love for the sport, but, unlike him, knew where to stop in the indulgence of it. The title of Grand Veneur ;* attached to the office of master of the royal hounds, dates from Henri's time, and takes its rise from a phantom which made its appearance in the forest in the shape of a man larger than life, dressed in black, and surrounded by a pack of hounds, and who vanished as soon as the spectator tried to approach him. Sally had long laughed at the story of this spectre, but, once coming to meet the king, he came face to face himself with the grand veneur; he owned to the fact, but was still sceptical, though unable in any way to explain away the mysterious apparition, which he took great pains to do.

Louis XIII. resided much at Fontainebleau, and continued the work of embellishment, which needed little now to make it perfect. Anne of Austria enriched the new chapel with many valuable paintings. For a period, Richelieu is the presiding genius of the grand old palace. Then he passes away, and makes room for Mazarin, who received here Henrietta of England with a splendor becoming her double majesty of misfortune and royalty.

The first time that Louis XIV. honored the palace with his presence was on the occasion of signing the marriage contract between Ladislas of Poland and Marie de Gonzagne (1645); the marriage itself was celebrated at the Palais Royal.

Christina of Sweden furnishes one of the most thrilling chapters in the history of Fontainebleau. This eccentric woman, whose ambition it was to entwine the laurels of Sappho with the jewels of her crown, gave up the throne of Sweden to wander about the world like an Arab. That sort of eccentricity being rarer in those days than in our own, it passed for genius, wisdom, anything the owner chose to call it. Christina gained the reputation of possessing extraor dinary erudition, and a mind gifted with the powers of a man, as well as adorned with the graces of an accomplished woman. Anne of Austria was filled with admiration for the queen who cast away a crown to go in pursuit of science and philosophy; and, when Christina announced her intention of visiting France, the regent made preparations to receive her which surpassed anything that Fontainebleau had witnessed since the reception of Charles V. by Francis I. Christina made her entry on horseback, surrounded by a guard of honor composed of the highest nobles of the kingdom, all magnifi

cently attired, and followed by a cortége of noble dames, some riding on horses caparisoned in housings of cloth of gold and silver, others drawn in chariots of state. The fêtes given for the royal Sappho's entertainment ́were on a scale equal to the splendor of this reception. She showed her sense of Anne of Austria's appreciation of her superior merits by making herself very agreeable to her; but she earned the dislike of the young king by ridiculing openly his boyish love for Marie Mancini, and pointing an epigram at the fair Italian. Lo, when, on her return from Italy, she intimated her intention of again coming to France, Louis sent word that he placed the Palace of Fontainebleau at her disposal, but begged she would not show herself in Paris. During this second visit, Christina committed the crime which has so irretrievably damned her memory.. Monaldeschi, who had been her pampered favorite for years, rightly or wrongly incurred her displeasure. Christina determined that he should die, and did not pause to consider that it was adding a darker hue to her crime to perpetrate it under the roof of a brother king. The hour suited her vengeance-that was enough. The whole thing was planned with a business-like coolness worthy of Louis XI. in his best days. The queen ordered her victim to be taken to the galerie des cerfs, and herself gave the most minute instructions as to how he was to be killed, and by whom: he was not to be despatched by one or even a few successive blows, but struck a great many times and at short intervals, in hopes of extracting certain avowals from him. Christina then retired to an adjoining room, and remained in animated conversation with her entourage while the horrible tragedy was going on close by.

Occasionally she sent in to ask if Monaldeschi were dead; when the answer again and again came back that he was still struggling, she expressed first surprise, and then inpatience, and at last, unable to brook the delay, she rose and opened the door of the gallery; Monaldeschi, on beholding her, stretched out his arms in an attitude of supplication, but the queen exclaimed sharply, "What! thou art not yet dead?" and, walking up to where he lay writhing on the ground, she slapped him on the face" with that hand," says Voltaire, "which had loaded him with benefits." Monaldeschi had cried out for a priest to help him to die, and this last grace had been granted. Christina stood by till her victim was dead, and then quietly paid the assassins, and went back to her conversation. The news of the abominable deed of blood travelled quickly to Paris; as soon as Mazarin heard it, he sent her a peremptory order to leave Fontainebleau and France forthwith, adding that the King of France harbored no assassins as his guests; to which Christina returned the contemptuous reply that "she was queen wherever she was, and took no orders from the King of France, and was accountable for her acts neither to him nor any one else." It is curious to observe how little horror seems to have been produced in the public mind by this execrable murder, committed under circumstances which rendered it tenfold more revolting; the ladies and courtiers of the time make no more than a passing mention of it in their letters, and, in speaking of Christina, reserve their sharpest criticism for her style of dressing her hair and her manner of dancing, which they condemn as "fantastic and awkward." Two years after this event, we find Christina abjectly begging for an invita

tion to the carnival ballet in which Louis XIV. was to dance! The fact of the invitation being granted is perhaps as significant as that of its being asked for. It was accompanied, however, with the condition that the Queen of Sweden should only remain in Paris the three days that the ballet lasted; this she agreed to, and Mazarin's apartments at the Louvre were placed at her disposal.

Louis XIV. restored Catherine de Medicis' pavilion at Fontainebleau, called the Pavillon des Poêles,* for Mary of Modena, and fitted it up in a style of elegance and splendor befitting rather a royal bride of France than an exiled queen. But all his graceul gallantry to the beautiful exile, and professions of brotherly love to her husband, did not prevent Louis from signing in 1698 the treaty whereby he pledged himself to recognize the Prince of Orange, and not to disturb him in the possession of his kingdom.

Louis XV. was married in the chapel at Fontainebleau to Marie Leczinska (1725). He never cared for the palace as a residence, and merely used it as a hunting-lodge. His first-born son died there. Shortly before his death, the young prince, leaning over a balcony from one of the upper rooms of the palace which looked towards Paris, was heard say ing to himself with a deep-drawn sigh: "What delight the sovereign must feel who makes the happiness of so many men!" A great deal has been built on this exclamation-regrets for the blighted promise which the feeling that prompted it held out to France. But twenty years before, Louis XV. had said as much, and felt it, very likely, just as sincerely. Fontainebleau was spared the shame of the saturnalian orgies that profaned

Pavilion of Stoves.

Versailles and Trianon under the reign of Du Barry. The grim towers that had sheltered Francis, and the Medicis, and Henry de Navarre had many tales to tell that were better left untold, but at their worst they showed white beside the vulgar blackness of the Pompadour and Du Barry chronicles.

Louis XVI., who seldom visited Fontainebleau, has left no mark of his passages there. Under the Revolution, it was used as the military. school which has since been transferred to St. Cyr. ferred to St. Cyr. Napoleon compensated the royal old château for the neglect of his predecessors; he preferred it, next to St. Cloud, to all the other palaces of which France. had given him temporary possession, and repaired it with elaborate magnificence, adhering rigidly to the original style in every detail. He also added a stirring chapter to its history. When, by his orders, General Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal at three o'clock in the morning, and, attended by a band of soldiers, brutally dragged Pius VII. from his bed, it was to Fontainebleau that the venerable pontiff was conveyed; here he was kept in close confinement, and fed upon the bread of insult, with which it was Napoleon's wont to nourish his captives; but Pius VII., disarmed, isolated from friends and. counsellors, surrounded by spies paid to interpret his every word and gesture according to the interests and wishes of their paymaster, broken in bodily health, his mind bending under the accumulated weight of every torture that ingenious cruelty could devise, was still a greater conqueror, in the noblest sense of the word, than Napoleon ever was on the field of battle. Moreover, a day of reckoning was at hand. Fontainebleau, which had been the theatre of so many of Napoleon's most gorgeous pageants

of the melodramatic and sentimental kind-for he could be sentimental, this great butcher of men and despoiler of crowns; he could," with delicate forethought, and at vast expense, cause a multitude of pine-trees to be planted" amidst the elms and the oaks of the sombre Medicean forest, in order that his young Austrian bride might find some reminiscence of home when she walked out for her evening stroll-Fontainebleau was to witness the going down of his sun. Fortune, exasperated at last by the excesses of her spoilt child, plucked the brilliant meteor from the sky, and cast it out into the darkness. Once, in an interview with Pius VII. during his captivity, Napoleon, after lavishing all his art of flattery on the pope, stooping to tender caresses and the most winning attitude of supplication to wrest from his captive the coveted concession of the Concordat, presently paused to see the effect of the experiment. Pius VII. was silent awhile, then, looking up at the emperor with a smile of withering scorn, he answered: Commediante !* Like lightning the tactics were changed; curses rained where kisses had been showered; threats and gestures fierce as blows succeeded to bland entreaties; the actor struck his forehead with clenched fists, stamped, grew red and white in turn, and swore that a thunderbolt should be hurled by the Tuileries at the Vatican which should crush her defiant pride, and bury all Christendom under its ruins. Again he "paused for a reply." Pius raised his eyes, and, looking fixedly at Napoleon, murmured, this time with no smile: Tragediante ! The whole life and character of the man are summed up in those two epithets: commediante, tragediante. But if Bonaparte played comedy well, tragedy was his

forte, and his last appearance at Fontainebleau was a splendid farewel representation. It is a little pas mid-day. A bright April sun pours down from a cloudless sky upon the courtyard of the palace; the horseshoe staircase, bathed in the unmitigated sunshine, gleams white and majestic-a stage of the antique fashion well suited for the closing act about to be played upon it. The audience are already gathered to the place; thousands of the inhabitants have flocked in from the town and neighborhood, but the inner circle, the reserved seats, are filled by the grenadiers of the guard, the Old Guard of a hundred battles and as many victories, and by the marines of the young guard. The time seems long, for every heart is beating in sympathetic emotion with the coming crisis. At last the curtain rises. The doors opening on the horse-shoe staircase are thrown back, and Napoleon comes forward. A cry goes up to him from the depths of those many thousand hearts. But hush! waves his hand for silence. He is going to speak. The crowd sways to and fro, a human wave ebbing at the base of an adamantine rock, whence its idol of twenty years looks down upon it.

He

"Officers, non-commissioned officers of the Old Guard, I bid you farewell! . . . For twenty years you have given me satisfaction. Be faithful to the new sovereign whom France has chosen. Grieve not for my fate; I might have died, nothing would have been easier to me— but, no; I shall to the last tread the path of honor. I will write what we have done together. . . .” Sobs, such as break the stout hearts of warlike men, interrupt him. He waits for a moment, and then resumes: "I cannot embrace you all, but I will embrace your general.