Some formalities were necessary for the trip to Fontainebleau: admission into the palace requires a special pass (see Figure 2.4, Palace of Fontainebleau). On my friends’ advice, I appealed directly to the royal secretary, Baron Fain, with a note, and on the same day, received a pass to enter into the palace and gardens of Fontainebleau, signed by the royal intendant, Count Bondy. Madame Conrad, with her son, took advantage of the opportunity to see this site, famous in so many respects. We decided to travel, not by omnibus, but by regular diligence and purchased three seats in the front cabriolet, or coupe. The road to Fontainebleau is not interesting. We drove through Villejuif, Fromenteau, Essonne, Ponthierry, Chailly—what vibrant-sounding names! Just like from vaudevilles performed in the Mikhailovsky Theatre, but how pathetic these little towns in the vicinity look! They are cold, dull, dead. Paris devours everything. Before reaching Fontainebleau, we enter the local forest in which French kings, from Francis I to Charles X, would go hunting. I believe that even Napoleon went hunting here, but rarely: he liked to hunt game of a different kind. The locale of this forest was, very likely, the site of some powerful natural cataclysm several centuries ago: masses of granite are scattered through the forest. A large portion of the raw material for paving roads in Paris is mined from this area.— On the way to Fontainebleau, I did not have such talkative and obliging commentators as on the way to Versailles: we relied only on the printed sources with which we had provided ourselves for the trip. The following is what I found in the books about the history of the palace. Fontainebleau is the oldest of all the royal palaces in France. Its chapel was sanctified in 1169. Louis IX (Saint Louis) often would reside in Fontainebleau for extended periods of time.5 He called that palace—amidst forests—his desert. Back then, the Palace of Fontainebleau was a gloomy castle surrounded by a moat, with towers in the corners, and it looked like a Medieval dungeon. Francis I renovated the palace and decorated it with the finest works of Renaissance art. Emperor Charles V visited Fontainebleau in 1539.