Chantilly
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Chantilly

CHANTILLY, a small town 40km north of Paris, is associated mainly with horses. Some 3000 thoroughbreds prance the forest rides of a morning, and two of the season’s classiest flat races, the Jockey Club and the Prix de Diane, are held here. The old château stables are given over to a horse museum.

Trains take about thirty minutes from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Chantilly. Occasional free buses pass from the station to the château, though it’s an easy walk away. Footpaths GR11 and 12 pass through the château park and its surrounding forest: following them makes a peaceful and leisurely way of exploring this bit of country.

The château and the Musée Vivant du Cheval
The Chantilly estate used to belong to two of the most powerful clans in France: first to the Montmorencys, then, through marriage, to the Condés. The present Château (July & Aug daily 10am–6pm; March–June, Sept & Oct daily except Tues 10am–6pm; Nov–Feb Mon & Wed–Fri 10.30am–12.45pm & 2–5pm, Sat & Sun 10.30am–5pm; E7; park open daily same hours, E3) was built in the late nineteenth century on the ruins of the so-called Grand Château built for the Grand Condé, who helped Louis XIV smash Spanish power in the mid-seventeenth century. It’s a beautiful structure, graceful and romantic, surrounded by water and looking out over a formal arrangement of pools and pathways designed by Le Nôtre, Louis XIV’s gardener. The entrance is across a moat, past two realistic bronzes of hunting hounds. The visitable parts are mainly made up of an enormous collection of paintings and drawings owned by the Institut de France. Stipulated to remain as organized by Henri d’Orléans (the donor of the château), the arrangement is haphazard by modern standards, but immensely satisfying to eclectic appetites. Some highlights can be found in the Rotunda of the picture gallery – Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci and Raphael’s Madone de Lorette – and in the so-called Sanctuary, with Raphael’s Three Graces displayed alongside Filippo Lippi’s Esther et Assuerius and forty miniatures from a fifteenth-century Book of Hours attributed to the great French Renaissance artist Jean Fouquet. Pass through the Galerie de Psyche with its series of sepia stained glass illustrating Apuleius’ Golden Ass, to the room known as the Tribune, where Italian art, including Botticelli’s Autumn, takes up two walls, and Ingres and Delacroix have a wall each.

A free guided tour will take you round the apartments of the sixteenthcentury wing known as the Petit Château. The first port of call is the wellstocked library, where a facsimile of the museum’s single greatest treasure is on display, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the most celebrated of all the Books of Hours. The illuminated pages illustrating the months of the year with representative scenes from contemporary (early 1400s) rural life – like harvesting and ploughing, sheep-shearing and pruning – are richly coloured and drawn with a delicate naturalism. The remaining halfdozen rooms on the tour mostly show off superb furnishings, with exquisite boisieries panelling the walls of the Monkey Gallery, wittily painted with allegorical stories in a pseudo-Chinese style. A grand parade of canvases in the long gallery depicts the many battles won by the Grand Condé. Five minutes’ walk back towards town along the château drive, the colossal stable block has been transformed into a horse museum, the Musée Vivant du Cheval (April–Oct Mon & Wed–Fri 10.30am–5.30pm, Sat & Sun 10.30am–6pm; May & June also open Tues 2–5.30pm; July & Aug also open Tues 10.30–5.30pm; Nov–March Mon–Fri 2–5pm, Sat & Sun 10.30am–5pm; E8, or E14 combined ticket with château and park; www.musee-vivant-du-cheval.fr). The building was erected at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the incumbent Condé prince, who believed he would be reincarnated as a horse and wished to provide fitting accommodation for 240 of his future relatives. In the vast main hall, horses of different breeds from around the world are stalled, with a central ring for demonstrations (April–Oct 11.30am, 3.30pm & 5.15pm; Nov–March weekends 11.30am, 3.30pm & 5.15pm, weekdays 3.30pm only).