The handsome tower-like château of St. Germains, when I saw it, was used as a caserne: the chapel was filled with military stores. We entered the apartment in which our James II. lived and died an exile, chased from his house and home by his son-in-law. History records many deeds more atrocious, but none more disgraceful, than this violation of family confidence,--of the pledge of good faith given and received. But, what is more disgraceful still, the English nation, besotted by prejudices, sees nothing disgraceful in the transaction. The palace of St. Cloud is an agreeable, and, according to the favourite English phrase, a comfortable habitation, splendidly, but not too richly furnished. The salle-à-manger particularly attracted my notice, being the first good specimen I had seen of a French dining-room. It is a room large enough for about forty persons to dine in it conveniently. A round table of mahogany, or coloured like mahogany, one fauteuil, and half a dozen chairs, seemingly not belonging to this room, but brought from another, standing round the table on a mat which went underneath it; a chandelier, or lustre, hanging over the tables;--such, with a few articles for the use of the attendants, was the furniture of the room. Instead of a sideboard, a painted shelf went round the room at about four feet from the floor. On one of the panes of the window, a thermometer, with the scale marked on glass, was fixed on the outside: thus the temperature of the outer air might be known without opening the casement. An English family of moderate fortune lives very much in the dining-room: a French family would as soon think of sitting in the kitchen as in the salle-à-manger at any other than eating hours. The English think it marvellous that a French lady should receive visits in her bed-room; but to this bed-room is annexed a cabinet; which conceals all objects that ought to be put out of sight: the bed is either hidden by the drapery, or covered by a handsome counterpane, with a _traversin_ or bolster at each end, which, as it is placed lengthways against the wall, the two ends resembling each other in the woodwork also, gives it, during the day-time, the appearance of a couch. The park of St. Cloud is not a park in the English sense of the word; it is a pretty pleasure-ground, with great variety of surface. If King George III. had been as much accustomed to the continental notion of a park as the king his grandfather probably was, he would not have expressed so much surprise, when, on his visit to Magdalen College, Oxford, he was asked if he would be pleased to see the park. "Park! what, have you got a park?"--"We call it a park, sir, because there are deer in it."--"Deer! How big is it?"--"Nine acres, an it please your Majesty."--"Well, well, I must go and see a park of nine acres: let us go and see a park of nine acres."