As she was passing in front of the mirrors, Rosanette stopped for a moment to smooth her headbands.
After passing through the donjon-court and the Saint-Saturnin Chapel, they reached the Festal Hall.
They were dazzled by the magnificence of the ceiling, which was divided into octagonal apartments set off with gold and silver, more finely chiselled than a jewel, and by the vast number of paintings covering the walls, from the immense chimneypiece, where the arms of France were surrounded by crescents and quivers, down to the musicians’ gallery, which had been erected at the other end along the entire width of the hall. The ten arched windows were wide open; the sun threw its lustre on the pictures, so that they glowed beneath its rays; the blue sky continued in an endless curve the ultramarine of the arches; and from the depths of the woods, where the lofty summits of the trees filled up the horizon, there seemed to come an echo of flourishes blown by ivory trumpets, and mythological ballets, gathering together under the foliage princesses and nobles disguised as nymphs or fauns—an epoch of ingenuous science, of violent passions, and sumptuous art, when the ideal was to sweep away the world in a vision of the Hesperides, and when the mistresses of kings mingled their glory with the stars. There was a portrait of one of the most beautiful of these celebrated women in the form of Diana the huntress, and even the Infernal Diana, no doubt in order to indicate the power which she possessed even beyond the limits of the tomb. All these symbols confirmed her glory, and there remained about the spot something of her, an indistinct voice, a radiation that stretched out indefinitely. A feeling of mysterious retrospective voluptuousness took possession of Frederick.
In order to divert these passionate longings into another channel, he began to gaze tenderly on Rosanette, and asked her would she not like to have been this woman?
“What woman?”
“Diane de Poitiers!”
He repeated:
“Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II.”
She gave utterance to a little “Ah!” that was all.
Her silence clearly demonstrated that she knew nothing about the matter, and had failed to comprehend his meaning, so that out of complaisance he said to her:
“Perhaps you are getting tired of this?”
“No, no—quite the reverse.” And lifting up her chin, and casting around her a glance of the vaguest description, Rosanette let these words escape her lips:
“It recalls some memories to me!”
Meanwhile, it was easy to trace on her countenance a strained expression, a certain sense of awe; and, as this air of gravity made her look all the prettier, Frederick overlooked it.
The carps’ pond amused her more. For a quarter of an hour she kept flinging pieces of bread into the water in order to see the fishes skipping about.
Frederick had seated himself by her side under the linden-trees. He saw in imagination all the personages who had haunted these walls—Charles V, the Valois Kings, Henry IV, Peter the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and “the fair mourners of the stage-boxes,” Voltaire, Napoleon, Pius VII, and Louis Philippe; and he felt himself environed, elbowed, by these tumultuous dead people. He was stunned by such a confusion of historic figures, even though he found a certain fascination in contemplating them, nevertheless.
At length they descended into the flower-garden.
It is a vast rectangle, which presents to the spectator, at the first glance, its wide yellow walks, its square grass-plots, its ribbons of boxwood, its yew-trees shaped like pyramids, its low-lying green swards, and its narrow borders, in which thinly-sown flowers make spots on the grey soil. At the end of the garden may be seen a park through whose entire length a canal makes its way.
Royal residences have attached to them a peculiar kind of melancholy, due, no doubt, to their dimensions being much too large for the limited number of guests entertained within them, to the silence which one feels astonished to find in them after so many flourishes of trumpets, to the immobility of their luxurious furniture, which attests by the aspect of age and decay it gradually assumes the transitory character of dynasties, the eternal wretchedness of all things; and this exhalation of the centuries, enervating and funereal, like the perfume of a mummy, makes itself felt even in untutored brains. Rosanette yawned immoderately. They went back to the hotel.
After their breakfast an open carriage came round for them. They started from Fontainebleau at a point where several roads diverged, then went up at a walking pace a gravelly road leading towards a little pinewood. The trees became larger, and, from time to time, the driver would say, “This is the Frères Siamois, the Pharamond, the Bouquet de Roi,” not forgetting a single one of these notable sites, sometimes even drawing up to enable them to admire the scene.
They entered the forest of Franchard. The carriage glided over the grass like a sledge; pigeons which they could not see began cooing. Suddenly, the waiter of a café made his appearance, and they alighted before the railing of a garden in which a number of round tables were placed. Then, passing on the left by the walls of a ruined abbey, they made their way over big boulders of stone, and soon reached the lower part of the gorge.
It is covered on one side with sandstones and juniper-trees tangled together, while on the other side the ground, almost quite bare, slopes towards the hollow of the valley, where a foot-track makes a pale line through the brown heather; and far above could be traced a flat cone-shaped summit with a telegraph-tower behind it.
Half-an-hour later they stepped out of the vehicle once more, in order to climb the heights of Aspremont.
The roads form zigzags between the thickset
