Palace and Forest of Fontainebleau

Fontainebleau is thirty-seven miles southeast of Paris. Kings lived and issued royal edicts from the old Chateau of Fontainebleau five hundred and fifty years before Louis XIV. held his brilliant Court at Versailles, 1680. But what Versailles was to Louis XIV., Fontainebleau had been to Frances I. (1515-1547.) Each transformed a mediaeval chateau of his forefathers into the most gorgeous palace of the age. Each palace was the hobby of a great king, where he loved to lavish his treasures, and where he strove to reproduce the glories of Classical Art; and each palace has still its historic associations of deep interest to the world, reaching down through the nineteenth century. Even the word Fontainebleau has a history, for what is now known as the great Forest of Fontainebleau was in the ninth century called the Forest de Bierre, from a Danish warrior who encamped there with his army in 845, after having committed terrible ravages in France. His thirsty soldiers discovered a fine spring where the town now stands. When the Danes were driven off, the spring became celebrated for its delicious water, under the appellation Fontaine belle Eau. The title of the spring, contracted, gives the origin of the name of the great Forest, Town and Palace of Fontainebleau. The march of civilization has leveled most of the grand old forests of France, but Fontainebleau, the favorite hunting-ground of kings, has been spared. It is an immense tract of Government land, about fifty miles in circuit, and covering an area of sixty-four square miles. It has still its hundreds of acres of magnificent trees of every variety; it has its rocky promontories, from which have been obtained most of the paving and building-stone of Paris; it has its valleys, ravines, and plains covered with brown heather; it has twelve hundred miles of road and pathway; and it has its historic sites and picturesque views. It did have its hermit saints, its ghostly spectres, and the Weeping Rock, to which pilgrimages were made for its curative properties, especially for sore eyes; it had its band of robbers and tales of mysterious murders; an obelisk still marks the spot where Henry IV. saw "the spectral huntsman" just before his assassination. But its superstitious associations soon vanished when it became the favorite camping-ground of kings in the sixteenth century. It is now an Elysian field for painters.

Nearly ten centuries of history are bound up in Fontainebleau, since the time when Robert the Pious built a Hermitage there in 996. But passing over five hundred years, during which time kings were born and lived and died in the Chateau Fontainebleau, the present Palace of Fontainebleau was the palace of the Monarch of the Renaissance, Francis I. It was added to even as late as Henry IV., but nothing was demolished until the Revolution, when, with other royal palaces, it was despoiled of its furniture and left desolate. Napoleon I. spent $1,200,000 upon its restoration, and Louis Phillipe, in 1831, completed the restoration at an enormous expense. But, like Versailles, it is now little else than an Art Museum, though the President of the Republic has his apartments there during the summer.

The Palace contains nine hundred apartments, all of which were designed and decorated by the best living artists of the sixteenth century, and, under Napoleon I. and Louis Phillipe, were refurnished and restored by the best French artists of the first half of the nineteenth century. The Entrance Court, separated from the street by a high iron railing, is known as "the Court of Adieus." It was here that Napoleon Bonaparte, April 20th, 1814, after his abdication, summoned the officers and soldiers of his army, the "Old Guard," and bade them his ever memorable Adieu.