There are four parts to the Versailles experience and it all depends
on how much you want to pay and how far you're willing to walk. We
paid full price and walked all day, we saw it all, and I'm here to
tell you that the best thing is right at the end. I would not have
chosen to go to Versailles, but I'm glad Sumana suggested it as our
day trip.
I took lots of pictures of this stage, but afterwards I realized 5000
other people had taken the same photos that day, so I won't show most
of them. I will show the big Hall of Mirrors, which was really
intimidating back when mirrors were an advanced technology, but which
now kind of feels like a tinpot dictator showing you his Hall of
Integrated Circuits.
There was a big gallery of paintings of French military victories,
from which I took this dyptich I call "Leonard's Two Moods":
There's a restaurant (a branch of Angelina, a famous Paris
hot-chocolate joint) in the main Château. Their croque monsieur was
the only bad food I ate between the time I got off the plane at De
Gaulle and the time I got back on the plane a week later. Generally
museum restaurants are not great, so not too surprising. However the
hot chocolate was excellent! And it's hard to beat the ambience; it
called to mind a Ken MacLeod quote about how "our children giggle and
eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers."
This part of Versailles is free, so if you're a cheapskate
and just want to have a day in the park, this is for you. It's also
the part of Versailles with the most replay value. Lots of kids
running around eating ice-cream. You can rent a bike or a boat.
Near the entrance you see this fountain full of statues of frogs,
and statues of people being turned into frogs. There's an implied
threat that the king might himself turn you into a frog. (He had the legal right to do this, though it was rarely exercised.)
A lot of the gardens operate on the hedge-maze principle. You leave
the beaten path, wander around in the trees and eventually stumble
into a fountain or statue grouping. Unfortunately, although you're
free to wander through the mazes, the fountains and whatnot are all
caged behind gates, so you can't get a good look at them! Kind of
spoils the fun.
You can't really see it in that picture, but the latticework on
that gate says "XIIII XIIII XIIII XIIII".
A lot of people call it a day after seeing the main chateau and a
bit of the gardens, but we pressed on! We took in the Grand Trianon,
the palace that Louis XIV had built to get away from it all. This
was the exact reason he'd had Versailles built, but when
you're the king, truly "getting away from it all" would require
delegating important decisions to someone else, and Louis XIV was
not the delegating type, so he brought "it all" with him wherever he
went. If he'd lived longer he would have probably built another
palace even further away.
Because of this history the Grand Trianon made for a disappointing
sequel to the Château. It is a little more informal, though; you get to see Louis's
man-cave, where he would bro down for some billiards.
While
you're over here you can check out the Petit Trianon, originally
built for Madame de Pompadour but later occupied by Marie
Antoinette, of unhelpful-suggestion fame. This is still more
informal, a little closer to something a modern person might be able
to live in. And if you're undeterred by the fact that it's now well
into the afternoon and you've been walking all day, you can step
outside the Petit Trianon into the Queen's Hamlet. And this is where it gets freaky.
I had of course heard that Marie Antoinette had "dressed up as a
milkmaid", but there were a lot of slanders going around about ol'
Marie, so a) I wasn't sure this had
really happened, and b) I'd assumed it had maybe
happened once, at the sort of party you see nowadays where
frat boys dress like they're homeless.
Well, I'm here to tell you that it didn't happen once. It happened
all the friggin' time, and the Queen's Hamlet is where
it happened.
The backyard of the Petit Trianon is pretty normal, with winding paths through a
natural-looking constructed environment. Trees, bridges, a theater,
a "temple of Love"; what the French would consider an English-style
park. Then you enter the Hamlet, a working replica of a farming
village.
You know in
Constellation Games where Tetsuo Milk creates the Ip Shkoy
Replica Village with its convenience store and printing press, then
goes around pretending to be all the inhabitants? It's like that, but it happened for real, in the 1700s, and it wasn't even the first time someone had done this. It was a fad!
There's a barn-type building with chickens and other farm animals.
There's a little pond with its own fairy-tale lighthouse.
There's a mill that doesn't do anything.
There are many other single-use buildings--a dairy, a "boudoir" whose only purpose seems to be to let Marie have a conversation in private, etc.
Over the centuries the Hamlet has fallen into disrepair and been
restored with modern techniques. Here's the main house, which we
couldn't enter because it's undergoing renovation. That's right,
we're restoring the replica farmhouse to recreate the effect of the
original replica.
And it works! It's clearly fake, but the part of my brain that likes this sort of thing doesn't care. Even with tourists and kids running around, the Hamlet
is a nice relaxing place to be. There's something deeply appealing
about these tidy replicas of rural life. It reminds me of watching
Peter Jackson's Hobbiton. Sumana called it the "Pinterest mom" look.
In general we found the French attitude towards Marie Antoinette
confusing. The Versailles gift shop was full of kitsch indicating a
demand for the pomp and decadence of pre-revolutionary
France, and the doomed queen in particular. But most tourists, having gotten
within a mile of her really nice Minecraft base, were not
willing to walk out here, to what, in our opinion, is the highlight of the park.
So we asked a French friend about history's final judgement
on Marie Antoinette, and he thought about it a long time and said,
"Well... she wasn't French." 'Nuff said!
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "2 comments")
(2) Sun Jun 19 2016 16:39 Paris Pictures: Versailles:
I'm back with another Paris trip photoessay! This time we venture to
Château Versailles, a short train trip from Paris. Versailles is a
small commuter city whose major attraction is the residence (and occasional prison) of kings; sort of if
New Rochelle used to be the capital of the United States.
Let's start at the Château proper. This was... a big palace with
a lot of history. You get in a big line, which goes through a metal
detector and then shuffles as a single unit through one extravagant
room after another. It's not what the original architects had in mind
but it does instill the intended sense of being dutiful and oppressed.
"Yeah, it's all on one chip, no big deal."
In a sop to the non-bloodthirsty, the gallery of military prowess was balanced by a
hall of statues honoring humanists and statesmen who "spread the glory
of French civilization without drawing the sword." They were able
to get some big names, like Descartes (left).
In the many Versailles gift shops we learned that
Frédéric Lenormand wrote a series of mystery novels
staring Voltaire, including Le diable s'habille en Voltaire
(The Devil Wears Voltaire), which according to the back-cover
copy is the book that finally delivers the long-promised
Voltaire-Satan grudge match! I don't read French well enough to read a
historical-fiction novel, but I'd love to see some translations of
these.
Speaking of which, let's move on to part two of the Versailles
Journey, the gardens! This is a park about twice the size of Central
Park, all done in the perfect shaved-trees geometric format that seems kinda
creepy to me but it's just the way the French do parks. We took some
establishing shots for Sumana's mom just so she could see we made it.
under a Creative Commons License.