I think we most enjoyed seeing palaces about the closing-hour. There are seldom any other visitors then, and the fading afternoon sunlight in the vacant rooms softens their garish emptiness and seems, somehow, to bring nearer the rich pageant of life and love and death that flowed through them so long, and then one day came to an end, and now it is not passing any more. It was really closing-time when we arrived at the palace, but the custodian was lenient, and for an hour we wandered through gorgeous galleries, and salons, and suites of private apartments, where kings and queens lived gladly, loved madly, died sadly for about three hundred years. Francis I built Fontainebleau, on the site of a mediæval castle. He was a hunter, and the forests of Fontainebleau were always famous hunting-grounds. Louis XIII, who was born in Fontainebleau, built the grand entrance staircase, from which, a hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte bade good-by to his generals before starting for Elba. Other kings have added to the place and embellished it; the last being Napoleon III, who built for Eugénie the bijou theater across the court. It may have been our mood, it may have been the tranquil evening light, it may have been reality that Fontainebleau was more friendly, more alive, more a place for living men and women to inhabit than any other palace we have seen. It was hard to imagine Versailles as having ever been a home for anybody. At Fontainebleau I felt that we were intruding--that Marie Antoinette, Marie Louise, or Eugénie might enter at any moment and find us there. The apartments of the first Napoleon and Marie Louise tell something, too, but the story seems less intimate. Yet the table is there on which Napoleon signed his abdication, while an escort waited to take him to Elba, and in his study is his writing-table; and there is a bust by Canova; but that is marble, and does not encourage the thought of life. For size and magnificence the library is the most impressive room in Fontainebleau. It is very lofty, very splendid, and it is two hundred and sixty-four feet long. Napoleon III gave great hunting-banquets there. Since then it has always been empty, except for visitors. The light was getting dim by the time we reached the pretty theater which Louis Napoleon built for Eugénie. It is a very choice place, and we were allowed to go on the stage and behind the scenes and up in the galleries, and there was something in the dusky vacancy of that little play-house, built to amuse the last empress of France, that affected us almost more than any of the rest of the palace, though it was built not so long ago and its owner is still alive. It is not used, the custodian told us--has never been used since Eugénie went away. I believe nothing at Fontainebleau gave more delight to Narcissa and the Joy than this dainty theater.