Madame de Tracy relates that one day she read Mademoiselle de Clermont and wept for a solid hour. Madame de Coigny then said to her: "But all that is not true." Madame de Tracy answered: "_What has that to do with it, if it seems true?_" And Madame de Tracy was right.... Today it seems a little less true, and I do not promise my female readers, if they take the fancy of reading Mademoiselle de Clermont, that they will weep for an hour. It is even possible that in certain places they might have more desire to laugh than to weep. Nevertheless, it is a pleasant bit to read under the trees of Chantilly, this tiny romance printed by Didot, and which Desenne illustrated with fine and childish little designs, where we see gentlemen in wigs and ladies in curls in surroundings of Empire style; a lovable and opportune anachronism, for it has marvelously translated the character of this sentimental novel, which never had any history back of it. XV. THE CHÂTEAU OF WIDEVILLE. |IN a little valley, between Versailles and Maule, at the end of an immense green carpet where a few old garden statues still stand, the château of Wideville deploys its beautiful façade of red brick framed in white stone. The harmonious lines of the uneven roofs show up against the background of the wooded hillside. Around the building, wide moats filled with running water form a square, and at each angle of the platform projects a square bastion topped by a watch tower. This parade-armor harmonizes well with the robust elegance of the construction. On beholding the admirable mixture here produced by the reminiscences of the feudal manor, the graces of the Renaissance and the majesty of classic architecture, we immediately think of that magical line of Victor Hugo: It was a grand château of the day of Louis Treize. To tell the truth, we know no other architectural work in France which expresses with more delicacy and seduction the noble and chivalrous charm of the period when order and discipline had not effaced all traces of fancy. And as, by rare good fortune, Wideville still belongs to descendants of him who built it, and as its possessors have preserved it and repaired it with jealous care and perfect taste, it is a living image of French art of the time of Louis XIII which we have before our eyes. At the commencement of the seventeenth century, the manor of Wideville was a square fortress, flanked with towers and rising upon a mound; it was doubtless restored at the time of the Renaissance, for magnificent mantels of this period were moved into the new château which Claude de Bullion built in 1632 at the bottom of the valley, after he had bought the estate of Wideville from René de Longueil, Marquis de Maisons.