Visitors should not fail to drive in the Forest, 80 kilometers in circuit, and, if they return late, may look out for its black huntsman--"le grand veneur." ... The forest was a favorite hunting-ground of the kings of France to a late period. It was here that the Marquis de Tourzel, Grand Provost of France, husband of the governess of the royal children, fractured his skull, his horse bolting against a tree, when hunting with Louis XVI., in November, 1786. The forest is the especial land of French artists, who overrun and possess it in the summer. There are innumerable direction-posts, in which all the red marks--put up by Napoleon III., because so few peasants could read--point to town. St. Denis By Grant Allen [Footnote: From "Paris."] About six miles north of the original Paris stands the great Basilica of St. Denis--the only church in Paris, and I think in France, called by that ancient name, which carries us back at once to the days of the Roman Empire, and in itself bears evidence to the antiquity of the spot as a place of worship. Around it, a squalid modern industrial town has slowly grown up; but the nucleus of the whole place, as the name itself shows, is the body and shrine of the martyred bishop, St. Denis. Among the numerous variants of his legend, the most accepted is that in which the apostle of Paris carries his head to this spot from Montmartre. Others say he was beheaded in Paris and walked to Montmartre, his body being afterward translated to the Abbey; while there are some who see in this legend a survival of the Dionysiac festival and sacrifice of the vine-growers round Paris--Denis--Dionysius--Dionysus. However that may be, a chapel was erected in 275 above the grave of St. Denis, on the spot now occupied by the great Basilica; and later, Ste. Geneviève was instrumental in restoring it. Dagobert I., one of the few Frankish kings who lived much in Paris, built a "basilica" in place of the chapel (630), and instituted by its side a Benedictine Abbey. The church and monastery which possest the actual body of the first bishop and great martyr of Paris formed naturally the holiest site in the neighborhood of the city; and even before Paris became the capital of a kingdom, the abbots were persons of great importance in the Frankish state. The desire to repose close to the grave of a saint was habitual in early times, and even (with the obvious alteration of words) ante-dated Christianity--every wealthy Egyptian desiring in the same way to "sleep with Osiris." Dagobert himself was buried in the church he founded, beside the holy martyr; and in later times this very sacred spot became for the same reason the recognized burial place of the French kings. Dagobert's fane was actually consecrated by the Redeemer Himself, who descended for the purpose by night, with a great multitude of saints and angels.