joined in the revolt of Gaston d'Orleans against Richelieu, was captured and executed. His estates were forfeited, but were granted back to his three sisters, one of whom was married to the Prince de Condé. Thus began the connexion of that great name with Chantilly, though Louis XIII, till his death eleven years later, made free use of the Château, and probably annexed many of its finest contents. Like other kings before and since, he loved the place as a hunting-box, and one of his last letters says, 'je viens de tuer deux loups, et suis encore après un!' Louis died in 1643, three days before the young Duc d'Enghien-afterwards known as 'le Grand Condé-beat the Spaniards at Rocroy, and thus made everything easy for the boy-King, Louis XIV, and his mother, the Regent. Three years later the old Prince de Condé died, and d'Enghien succeeded to the title which he was to make illustrious. For us at the moment what matters in the history of this great man is neither the unhappy sequel of his forced marriage nor his achievements in war and politics, but his work and life at Chantilly, though, to be sure, that work is so interwoven in his political adventures that some reference to them is indispensable. For several years he was the great support of the Throne. Then came the labyrinthine quarrels of the Fronde, 'époque de folie, où le tragique le dispute au burlesque'; the imprisonment at Vincennes of Condé, his brother Conti, and his brotherin-law the Duc de Longueville; the forced seclusion of the Princesses at Chantilly, till they cleverly escaped by night; and finally, after a whole year, a temporary reconciliation and pardon. But another year saw Condé in still more open revolt, and in alliance with Spain, the King's enemy; his old friend Turenne, now the King's chief general, drove him into the Low Countries; in October 1652, the Royal army 'sacked' Chantilly-it is M. Macon's word—and the estate was once more confiscated. It was returned to its owner in 1659, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees-the King and his Court having stayed and hunted there during many seasons; and henceforth, except when he was again employed in the wars against the Dutch under the Prince of Orange (1672-4), Condé lived in tranquillity at Chantilly, where he died in 1686, at the age of sixty-five.

That comparative tranquillity did not mean isolation or idleness. On the contrary, the Château was perpetually thronged with a brilliant society, while designs and works of reconstruction of the buildings and the park and gardens followed one another with bewildering rapidity. For Condé was a man of the most active intelligence, deeply interested in literature, philosophy, and art, who loved to surround himself with men of talent and what men !-and to make his house and park as perfect as nature and art could make them. Of course, the mainstay of the society at Chantilly was with the great nobles and high officials, military and civil, clerical and lay; but there were also ambassadors and foreign visitors, such as the Chinese envoy who declared to Bourdelot, Condé's doctor and friend, that he had seen nothing in India or elsewhere that could compare with the Prince's house and garden. Of the really great men we have Bossuet, introducing Fénelon and La Bruyère, who found there Malebranche, described by the same Bourdelot as 'a man of subtle discernment, given to splitting hairs into four pieces.' Malebranche delighted the Prince both with his triumphant arguments with the Jesuits who were by no means excluded from the château, and by his rough handling of the poetasters of the company. Then there were poets as well as poetasters. Racine came, and the Prince's actors often played Molière. The great Boileau hoped that his verses might sometimes be read at Chantilly, and he himself was often an honoured visitor. Unluckily he there achieved another celebrity than that proper to a poet. He went out shooting; and when there was a talk of his coming again, the 'capitaine de chasses,' M. de la Rue, wrote: 'I feared that the return of M. Despréaux would ruin the whole of our country in powder and shot. He cost me a barrel of powder and a quantity of lead. And he killed not a single head of game!' Whether La Fontaine did better in the field, we are not told; he at least wrote enthusiastically about his host, comparing him to Cæsar, Alexander, and even to Achilles-except indeed for 'speed of foot.' Poor Condé all through these later years was a martyr to gout, which finally killed him.

A year or two previously, his restless love of building and re-planning had led him to call in the architect

Mansart; and that destructive reformer continued to work for several years for the great Condé's son, who, according to Saint Simon, spent prodigious sums in altering and spoiling the château. We can form some idea of his achievement by comparing M. Macon's plates of the house as Chambiges left it with the ugly pile, neither Gothic nor classical, figured in Aveline's engraving of 1685. The same engraver shows us what the château was in the 18th century, after another architect had worked his will upon it, as to which one's natural comment is that, if it looked like that, the Revolution may be forgiven for destroying it. No doubt it was better designed for the vast entertainments which the Condé princes went on organising and giving to the end, and that, after all, was what the nobles of the 18th century most cared for. When, for instance, the young Louis XV was returning from his Coronation at Reims (November 1722) he stayed five days at Chantilly, then in possession of the Duc de Bourbon, great-grandson of La Grand Condé. This prince is known to history as having been for six years under the dominion of Madame de Prie, and, guided by her, the defeated enemy of Cardinal Fleury. He was not yet disgraced when the boy-King came as his guest, and he lavished on the five days' entertainment all that art could provide or money pay for. A water-fête showed Thetis and the Tritons (Thetis being Mlle Antier of the Academy of Music, 'whose voice was so beautiful that it seemed to equal the voices of all the sirens together'); she presented the King with a wonderful fishing-line, adorned with pearls and coral, and then made way for Orpheus, whose violin drew from the forest a troop of acrobats disguised as lions, tigers, and bears, who presently performed antics 'de souplesse inconcevable.' Then there was a light collation in the château, and afterwards a ballet in the presence of the King, the Regent, and the Court, and two thousand lords and ladies. Next day came a stag-hunt, where Diana and her nymphs received the King, presented to him a marvellous bow and quiver, and then turned to deal with an impudent Acteon, whose place was suddenly taken by a real stag, on whom a pack of real hounds was at once let loose. We are not surprised to read that never was a rendezvous de chasse so thronged,

especially as there were free drinks and free confectionery for all-fines pâtisseries, massepains, confitures sêches, etc. The King stayed four days, and during the time there were consumed 60,000 bottles of wine, and 55,000 pounds of butcher's meat.'

So things went on till the crash came in 1789. Seven years before, fêtes almost rivalling that just described were given for the Grand Duke Paul of Russia, travelling under the name of the Comte du Nord; and at all times untold sums of money were being spent on alterations and reconstructions, especially in the gardens, the lakes, and the park. Then, not without warning, the blow fell. In November 1788 discontent and disturbance had become so prevalent on the Chantilly estate that the Prince (Louis-Joseph) obtained a troop of soldiers to help him to keep order; eight months later he and his family emigrated; and at once the Paris Republicans seized the Prince's private arsenal and carried off thirty cannon. It was the beginning of a campaign which ended in devastating the place, though the château was not actually destroyed. After nearly three years of local anarchy, the whole property of the Prince was formally confiscated under the law of February 1792, and in 1793 the château was assigned as a prison to the 'suspects' of the Department. After some months the prisoners were taken elsewhere, and most of the land and buildings disposed of to private buyers. In 1799 the château and the outlying buildings were sold by the Government to a certain Gérard and his partner Boulée, entrepreneurs de démolition-we should now call them housebreakers - who proceeded to demolish the Orangery, the theatre, and the Temple of Venus, and to attack the château itself. But, as they were behindhand in their instalments due to the State, the contract was cancelled, and the château remained defaced, but not destroyed. All through the time of the Directorate and the first Empire Chantilly was made to serve one or other military purpose, until in 1811 the estate-which apparently had in some fashion been recovered by the Government-was awarded as a kind of dowry to Queen Hortense, mother of the boy who was destined to become the Emperor Napoleon III. But a more memorable incident, seven years earlier, links the name of the first

Napoleon with Chantilly. It was the murder, under the forms of military law, of the young heir, the Duc d'Enghien, kidnapped, tried and shot in the moat of Vincennes by the Emperor's order.

The Restoration brought back the émigré Prince de Condé, now aged 78, and his son the Duc de Bourbon, who was only twenty years younger. The place was, of course, in a lamentable condition, but a number of the tapestries and works of art were easily recovered from the public offices where the Revolution had installed them, and one by one various bits of the estate fell into the Prince's hands. He died, however, in 1818, and his son, the Duc de Bourbon, having escaped from a compromising connexion with a certain Englishwoman, entered upon his inheritance, which he enjoyed and to some extent enriched till his death in 1830.

The last Prince de Condé, dying childless, left his great possessions to a boy eight years old-Henri d'Orléans, Duc d'Aumale, fifth son of the Louis-Philippe d'Orléans who in that very year was chosen King of the French. It was a fortunate selection, for the Prince, after a studious youth, a fine though brief career as a soldier, and many years passed as an exile in England, devoted himself to Chantilly with a zeal, an intelligence, and an industry which never failed or flagged, and finally left to the Institut de France, in trust for the nation, a splendid new château, filled with fine books and precious works of art. He was rich, and the death of his father in 1850 and of his mother in 1866 made him very rich indeed; death, little by little, robbed him of sons and daughters; his favourite son, the very promising young Prince de Condé, died of typhoid in Australia in 1866; and finally his well-loved wife, Caroline de Bourbon, a Neapolitan princess, left him a lonely widower in 1869. The new Empire had exiled him, and he lived for many years at Orleans House, Twickenham, buying pictures under the advice of Dominic Colnaghi, but forbidden to enter France or to take part in the struggle with Germany in 1870. Finally, the fall of the Empire made his return possible; he was even elected to the National Assembly, restored to his military rank, and chosen to succeed Montalembert in the French Academy.