We return along the other track to the Sleeping Beauty’s Castle--_le Château de la Reine Blanche_, as the people prefer to call it. It is no castle at all, in fact, but a small hunting-lodge belonging to the Prince de Joinville. A tradition runs that, in 1227, the mother of St. Louis had a chateau here. Six hundred years later, the last of the Condés built the chateau of to-day, with its four white turrets, the exaggerated ogives of its windows, and its steep grey roof. ’Tis the romantic Gothic of Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo, the Gothic of 1830, more poetic than antiquarian. For all its lack of science, there is a homely grace about this ideal of our grandfathers, a scent, as it were, of dried rose-leaves, and a haunting, as of an old tune--“Ma Normandie,” perhaps, or “Combien j’ai Douce Souvenance.” The mill-race rushes loud under the Gothic arches. A blue lilac flowers near the hall-door. It is very silent, very peaceful, very deserted. The Castle of St. Louis would not have seemed so old-world as this. We must make a long road home by the _Table Ronde_, or we shall not have seen the best of the Forest of Chantilly. There is still the village to visit, and the castle, and the charming country that stretches on either side of the long village street. I remember one walk we went. A row of steps leads steeply down the market-place to the banks of the Nonette, which runs demurely, as befits its name, between an overspanning arch of lofty poplars. They quite meet at the top above the narrow river. But the river is richer than it looks, and as sometimes we see a meek-faced, slender little woman mother of some amazing Hebe of a beauty, so the small Nonette supplies the sources of yon great oblong sheet of artificial water, more than two miles long and eighty metres wide! A stone’s-throw beyond the poplar walk, it glitters, it shines, it dazzles in the valley, visible from the windows of the castle on the hill. A bridge crosses the bright expanse, and leads to a beautiful meadow caught in between the water and the forest, which rises steeply here into a long low hill. There we found a score of white-bloused, bareheaded workmen, lying on the grass, dreaming away their dinner hour. Chantilly is not picturesque, but at every turn the place is full of pictures.