Fontainebleau is a royal town in a forest, and the combination is irresistible. The château grew over seven centuries from a medieval hunting lodge into a palace of great beauty, and François I turned it into a showpiece of the Renaissance, importing Italian artists to decorate its galleries. Napoleon was fond of it, too, and it was in the horseshoe staircase courtyard that he said farewell to his Old Guard in April 1814, before leaving for exile on Elba. The courtyard is called the Cour des Adieux, and visitors still stand on those steps for photos.
The forest surrounding the town is enormous, more than twenty thousand hectares of oak, beech and pine, with great grey sandstone boulders scattered through the trees like toys left by a giant. Climbers love it, and a local style of bouldering began here, so you will see people with crash pads and chalk-white hands. In the nineteenth century, painters lived in the village of Barbizon, on the edge of the forest, and worked outdoors, a precursor to the Impressionists. The ride's backroads through the Brie countryside and the coffee stop at Meaux set up a day of gentle riding in the cheese country east of Paris, so arriving at Fontainebleau at the end gives a fine finish.
For a rider, Fontainebleau is a good, easy place to rest. The town has nearly twenty thousand people, and Avon next door has more, so fuel, food and coffee are all easy, with bakeries open from early in the morning. Roads in the forest are smooth and gently curving, with big trees on both sides, but in places they are narrow, and the speed limits are low. Cyclists and walkers are everywhere on weekends, and deer and wild boar can cross at dusk. Leaves can lie thick on the road in autumn and make the bends slippery, so take it slowly.
The town centre fills with visitors in summer and the palace queues are long, but the forest is big enough to absorb everyone. Walk along a sandy track among the boulders for a few minutes, and you will see why the kings chose to hunt here, and why they never left.