THE OLD PARK OF ST. CLOUD 



obstinate capital yonder away. The Lanteme de Diogene, 

 in its white stone and clear outline against the trees, 

 offered too distinct a mark to the answering gunners to be 

 tolerated. It had to be levelled. It was never 

 rebuilt, I could find nothing appertaining to it 

 but the grass bordered slabs of its founda- 

 tions. . . . 



Lost, too, to me was the particular alley re- 

 dolent of the memory of both Reinette and 

 Tremble; no doubt absorbed in some of the 

 metalled motor roads that now traverse the 

 park. 



The Grande Cascade, however, which Lepautre, 

 by order of Louis XIV, devised for the 

 glorification of the Duke of Orleans' future 

 home, was still there. Its tiers of white stone 

 steps over which the water, on Grandes Eaux 

 days, used to pour down, foaming yet dis- 

 ciplined, in symmetric balustered channels, 

 between ranks of allegoric statues standing 

 like guards and lacqueys upon a royal stairway still de- 

 scend, framed by huge umbrageous elms, from the middle 

 height of the hill to the wide marble bassin on the river level. 

 How fully the great garden designers of the Roy Soleil 

 understood the life-giving virtue of moving waters in their 

 grandiose if freezing conception of the formal landscape ! 

 Here, in the midst of the nature-made beauty of the old 

 Park where there had been forests, more or less wild, ever 

 since Gaulish days these architectural waters have a 

 startling effect / incongruous no doubt, but the artificiality 

 of the stone-work has been mellowed by two centuries 



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