5/5/2017.   Mostly cloudy with some hazy sun.  63F

At last, after all these years: Versailles, which we had never seen. We walked from our hotel down to the Seine to catch the RER “C” line train from the Pont de l’Alma subway station that we scoped out the night before. Had a heck of a time getting tickets out of the ticket machines … it took about 5 tries to get them. The only saving grace was that even the locals were having problems too, so at least I didn’t feel like a total idiot. Then a subway employee warned us about shady characters hanging around the station; they are thieves, he said – be careful with your belongings. Great! Then my ticket would not get me through the gate into the station – a passerby counseled me to jump the gate! What? You can get arrested for doing that! But I had the ticket in my had, and after several failed attempts getting through, I said “to hell with it”, and jumped the gate. No one challenged me or batted an eyelash, and we continued on our way!

It took about 45 min on the RER train (the suburban train line) to get to the town of Versailles west of Paris, then we had a 15-minute walk from the village rail station, plus nearly an hour in the ticket-buying line. Once finally inside, there were some excellent exhibits showing the expansion of the castle from being a mere hunting lodge for Louis XIII to the greatest palace in the most powerful country in Europe under Louis XIV.

A little background: to understand Versailles, you have to understand the role of King Louis XIV. Louis XIV (known as Louis the Great, or Le Roi Soleil, the “Sun King”) acceded to the throne in 1643 at age 4 upon the death of his father, after which his mother Queen Anne and various clerics ruled as regents until 1661 when he took personal control of the government at age 22. Incidentally, Louis XIV was one of the longest ruling monarchs in the history of Europe – he reigned for over 72 years until his death in 1715. It was over 100 years later that the resentments of the tyranny of absolute monarchy by the common people erupted into the French Revolution in 1789, well after Louis XIV had departed the scene.  So he neatly avoided the consequences of his extravagance — he probably never dreamed that it could all come crashing down so completely in the coming revolution.

Construction of the earlier hunting lodge at Versailles by Louis XIV’s father (Louis XIII) dated from around 1630, but it wasn’t until over 30 years later, in 1661, when a young 22-year old newly-minted Louis XIV called for the first of four major expansions of the lodge into one of the largest palaces in the world. It would appear that even at that young age, Louis must have been plotting his power play to corral the French royal court outside of Paris. He started gradually moving the court to Versailles in 1678, and it was officially established there in 1682. The court and government remained at Versailles for over 100 years until these functions were moved back to Paris as a part of the French Revolution.

The Palace of Versailles lives up to its reputation for being vast and grand. Here are a few of the features that particularly caught our eyes:

The Royal Chapel at Versailles:
Photo 2418, the Royal Chapel at Versailles

The Royal Chapel is a neoclassical masterpiece out-of-step with the otherwise uniform architectural style of the rest of the palace which has been fit into a slot behind main palace buildings on the right side of the main palace entrance. What you see on the palace tour is the chapel interior which is visually stunning with its inlaid marble floors, white Corinthian columns and arched ceiling covered in art work. It was finished in 1710, late in Louis XIV’s reign, and became the focal point of court life.

The Hercules Room:

Photo 2432, Versailles, the Hercules Room

The Hercules Room: the marble, the fireplace, the parquet floors, the gilded frieze at the ceiling, and don’t forget the huge ceiling painting, “The Apotheosis [deification] of Hercules” by Francois Le Moyne. The work of this room took 12 years to complete, and was finished in 1736 after Louis XIV’s death … still well before the American Revolution.

The Hall of Mirrors:

Photo 2475, The Hall of Mirrors, Versailles

This is the most famous room at Versailles: windows at the left look out to the gardens; mirrors are to the right. The room was used by Louis XIV, as well as subsequent kings down to current governments for state functions. The arches of the mirrors echo the opposite arched windows. Use of the mirrors was a statement of extreme wealth as they were among the most expensive items one could own at the time of construction. The Republic of Venice had a monopoly on the manufacture of mirrors, but the French reportedly enticed some mirror craftsman into coming to France to make these mirrors, as everything in the palace was to be made in France. According to legend as related in Wikipedia, the Venetians, in order to preserve the monopoly, and to discourage other workers from doing the same thing, sent assassins to poison the craftsman who went to France to do this work. This room is also famous for being the place of signing the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which ended World War I.  For extravagance, this one pretty much tops them all.

The Gardens of Versailles:

Photo 2563-3 Versailles Gardens

The gardens outside are IMMENSE … they dwarf the palace! The Grand Canal is about a mile long in the E-W direction with a “transept” canal nearly as long in the N-S direction. The above photos, clockwise: the Orangerie (orange garden) where citrus trees are kept in pots so they can be moved out of the weather in winter; the Latona Fountain with the Grand Canal in the distance – the tiny specks on the canal are dozens of boats; and the Apollo Fountain looking up the hill to the chateau. The arched windows you see are in the Hall of Mirrors.

We walked through the gardens on one of the diagonals trying to reach the Hameau de la Reine (the Queen’s Hamlet), i.e. Marie-Antoinette’s staged peasant village, but this approach was blocked by a fence. That portion of the garden consisted of pathways through what amounted to un-maintained woods (to the right in the Grand Canal photo above), and even that limited section was immense. By the time we walked back out to the main walkway we had gone about a mile out of our way and were getting tired with Cheryl’s back starting to give her problems again. And when we reached the Grand Canal, we were not even halfway to the Petit Trianon, and it was getting late … past 5. After all this, renting a golf cart no longer seemed like such a frivolous way to get around the vast site!

In view of the hour, we decided to leave the Grand Trianon and peasant village for a future visit and headed back, stopping periodically along the way to get photos. An interesting feature of the gardens was that music emanated from the woods that sounded like Mozart … classical music which added more elegance to the scene, if that is possible.