In the year 1561, Martial de Loménie was seigneur of Versailles, and was frequently honored by the visits of Henri de Navarre, who went out to hunt the stag in his subject’s swampy wilderness. De Loménie sold it to Albert de Gondy, Maréchal de Retz, who in his turn was honored by the presence of his sovereign, Louis XIII., there. Louis was in the habit of indulging his favorite pastime at Versailles, but, beyond placing his land and his game at the disposal of the king, the maréchal seems to have shown scant hospitality to the royal hunter. Saint‐Simon tells us that during these excursions Louis usually slept in a windmill or in a dingy inn, whose only customers were the wagoners who journeyed across that out‐of‐the‐way place. Of the two lodgings he inclines to think the windmill was the most comfortable. Louis probably found neither quarters very luxurious, for in 1627 he purchased a piece of ground which had been in the Soisy family since the fourteenth century, and built himself a hunting‐lodge on the ruins of an old manor‐house there, to the great discomfiture of a large colony of owls who had made themselves at home in the moss‐grown ruin. Bassompierre deplores the vandalism which swept away the venerable shelter of the owls, and declares that after all the lodge was but a sorry improvement on the windmill, being “too shabby a dwelling for even a plain _gentilhomme_ to take conceit in.” Such as it was, it satisfied the king, and remained untouched till it was swallowed up in the great palace which was to embody all the glories of the ensuing reign. When Louis Quatorze conceived the design of building Versailles, he confided the execution of his vast idea to Mansard, laying down, however, as a primary condition that the shabby little hunting‐lodge of the late king should be preserved, and comprised in the new structure. Mansard declared that this was impossible, to which Louis, with true kingly logic, replied coolly: _Raison de plus_.(66) No argument of artistic beauty or common sense could move him from his resolution, or induce him to sanction the demolition of the quaint little building that his father had raised. Rather than be guilty of such an unfilial act, he said he would give up the notion of his new palace altogether. Mansard had nothing for it but to give way, and pledge himself that the ugly red‐brick lodge should stand somehow and somewhere in the magnificent pile that was already reared in his imagination. The only concession he obtained was that it should be concealed, if this were possible. Mansard swore he would make it possible, and he kept his word. The lodge of Louis XIII. was swallowed up in the elaborate stone‐work of that part of the palace facing the Avenue de Paris, and remains to this day an enduring if not a very sensible proof of the filial respect of Louis XIV. This was the one solitary impediment that Louis threw in the architect’s way; in everything else he gave him _carte