#Tourism #travel #France - The Palace of #Versailles is the Versailles of Palaces. :) It's a convenient day trip from #Paris and a monument that is justifiably famous for its architecture, furnishings, gardens, art, and much more.
Versailles is 55 miles from Saints, all the way on the other side of Paris, so it takes an hour in no traffic, or 1.5 hours for us. Once there, we park on a long downslope in the forest in the outskirts and walk downhill past the Lycee Jules Ferry (Jules Ferry High). Our first sign of civilization is a small rolling billboard for Burger King. I suppose this is where King Louis XIV, the Sun King, and absolute monarch of France, ate on a special night out.
Our first impression of Versailles is the long line that threads across the cobblestone courtyard by the golden gilded wrought iron gate. It takes 38 minutes to get inside to security. Versailles is like the Versailles of Palaces. This place is palatial. It feels like a veritable palace. It’s also very crowded with lots of tourists, but that’s to be expected. Not too many are Chinese, which is not expected. Wasn’t this the home of the Mattress King?
Entry (20 Euros/person) also comes with a free audio guide. The entry covers the gardens too, but not on days like this when there will be a magic fountain show with music and moving fountains. That’s a shame. It should. Barcelona has its amazing magic fountain every night for free!
Upon entry, a nicely done CGI video shows the evolution of the palace, from relatively modest brick chateau to new additions, exterior stonework, the chapel and more. Over the years, Versailles was transformed from a stately brick hunting lodge into the palace it became. Louis XIV was its transformer.
Louis XIV moved the royal court from the Louvre, in Paris, to these outskirts for several reasons. The ones that come to mind are twofold: get away from the Parisian rabble who would one day kill his great grandson (?) Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and much of the rest of the Parisian nobility. And to get the court retinue and many nobles away from Paris to Versailles where the King could keep tight watch over them. Thus he really centralized his government. Not for naught did Louis XIV say “The State (Nation) is me.” Louis XIV ruled forever, further increasing his influence, and France crested in size and power in a way it would not again until Napoleon roughly 100 years later.
Speaking of Napoleon, he spent a good deal of time at Versailles as well, though his primary residence was the nearly equally resplendent Chateau de Fontainebleau, south of Paris.
Versailles is synonymous with Baroque and decoration. Or at least it should be. The walls are paneled, plastered and/or wall papered. So many decorations along the ceiling and elsewhere are gilded in gold. (Is that redundant?) Ceilings have extraordinary tromp d’oeil, painted optical illusions making the ceilings seem much higher than they are with great figures painted up in the sky overhead. There are royal galleries with portraits of a remarkably unattractive set of princesses, many of whom stayed unmarried since there weren’t enough good Catholic princes to go around in Europe’s royal houses.
We learn interesting facts, such as that before the French Revolution, France’s national anthem was Louis, Louis.
It’s like a palace in here. We visit rooms. Many rooms. Many rooms without a single indoor toilet. Yes, in the golden age of palaces, people were still using chamber pots. And it’s still that way, even for the visitors. Rooms were typically built as suites: four or five rooms in a row, all linked by a corridor that didn’t link rooms from the outside, but that simply, efficiently, ran through all of them, robbing any and all of privacy. Thus Princess So and So might have five rooms. The outer room had the most people who could come to it. To continue into the subsequent rooms one went past guards and had to get permissions. Last would be the bedroom. These suites lacked kitchens or toilets, and I would view them as palace-like prisons.
The suite occupants must have had fairly sad lives. Moreover, the totality of square footage for one of these princesses would have been under 2,000 square feet. This isn’t exactly worth scoffing at, but it’s not exactly palatial on a per person basis.
The Hall of Mirrors is stunning. What's also stunning is there is absolutely zero mention of all the history of this amazing room. Among other things, World War I ended here. So did the American Revolution, kind of.
Leaving the Palace of Versailles, we walk to near the cathedral of Saint Louis, sit at a little roadside café for a salad and light refreshments. We enjoy watching the world go by and relax, semi-oblivious to the fact that we are delaying our departure into rush hour.
The ride home is through thick rush hour traffic, full of motorcycles that zoom between lanes, police cars doing who knows what, etc. We end up making a pit stop for gas then driving in the dark, and 2.75 hours after leaving the café, we’re back at home.
