The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars
and all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with
graceful branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It
was from this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with
the white water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and
narrow slender ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as
light as a nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman.
Beyond rose the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone
courses and copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of
small leaded panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond
points, but hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade
toward the Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the
castle except in the centre building, from which projects a stately
portico with double flights of curving steps, and round balusters
slender at their base and broadening at the middle. The main building
is surrounded by clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with
galleries and vases more or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear
Nathan! These heterogeneous erections are wrapped, so to speak, by
various evergreen trees whose branches shed their brown needles upon
the roofs, nourishing the lichen and giving tone to the cracks and
crevices where the eye delights to wander. Here you see the Italian
pine, the stone pine, with its red bark and its majestic parasol; here
a cedar two hundred years old, weeping willows, a Norway spruce, and a
beech which overtops them all; and there, in front of the main tower,
some very singular shrubs,--a yew trimmed in a way that recalls some
long-decayed garden of old France, and magnolias with hortensias at
their feet. In short, the place is the Invalides of the heroes of
horticulture, once the fashion and now forgotten, like all other
heroes.