Let Them Take A Hike

Beautiful sunny day today. I stuck my head outdoors and decided that it made sense to wear a short-sleeved shirt and my jacket today.

Probably could have gotten away with it if I'd just stayed with only my head out the window, and then on an inside courtyard.

It's a lesson that has been offered to me more than a time or two, and I have not yet quite learned it.

So, I thought I'd go out to Pere-Lachaise Cemetery today -- that's not quite Kelli's thing, I know -- she would accompany me, but it's not really her preference.

Only, the cemetery is free, and I cracked open the Museum pass yesterday without thinking very far ahead -- it's good for three consecutive days, and that means I had to find something to do that used the pass, but that also got my light-grey self out of doors.

Undauanted, I set off for the Metro, and the RER station at Invalides. It really didn't take very long for me to realize that I was underdressed -- despite the sunshine, it was very breezy, and the wind seemed to be able to cut right through my jacket.

Ah, well. I was committed now (by which I mean: I was at the bottom of those 85 stairs. Reluctant to go back upstairs? I could not even see "reluctant" in my rear view mirror. Into the breach.....

The decision of the day was to go to Versailles. Not the Palais, that's something to do with Kelli. No, I just thought I'd head out there and see a couple of the "outbuildings" and take a little walk through the gardens.

There are no words, there are no photographs, there is nothing that can begin to tell you the scope and size of Versailles.

I'm not going to succeed, but I'll give it a shot. The sunny and shady photograph is my attempt.

If you have a Paris guidebook anywhere, you've probably seen the map of Versailles. A big building, gardens, a skinny little canal crossed part-way down by a somewhat fatter canal. Some other buildings on the periphery. Can't be much, it all fits on a page of the Michelin Green Guide.

OK, I'm going to have this tattooed on the back of my hands in bold lettering:

Maps are 2D

Life is 3D

This thoroughly obvious fact continues to elude me.

(Sorry if the font suddenly has gotten bloated -- this looked fine when I was writing it, but when I previewed the post, this area seemed to be written slightly larger than See Spot Run.)

So, I took the train to Versailles. It's not so far out of town -- just a couple of stops past Paris proper, but, much like New York City, when you get even a few feet outside of the urban core, it seems like you are in the country immediately. The view from the commuter train reminds one of New Jersey, except for the areas that have detached homes with back yards that abut on the railroad. Many of those homes have intensively cultivated French Gardens full of vegetables. Passed chard 3 feet tall, and sprawling vines of potiron, which are not used here to make les Jacques d'lanterne (yeah, I made that up).

Surprise #1: Versailles is a city. Not a country town, not a suburb, a city. The city hall (Hotel de Ville) is larger than the one in Avignon, and in its gardens grow ranks of golden-stalked swiss chard. Don't know if the gardeners eat it or not, but it's beautifully maintained. Anyway -- the street outside the station is about 6 lanes wide and full of trucks and busses and pedestrians and tons of cars (at $6.50+ a gallon).

Surprise #2 -- Versailles, the attraction, is not right across the street, like the Guide Michelin rather suggests. You walk 3 blocks east (past the Hotel de Ville, which is so big that I at first thought it might be part of the palais) to a rather enormous boulevard with side streets separated by a walking esplanade. Turn north, and about 4 blocks up the hill (there's that 3D thing coming into play) is a big ol' fence, and a cobblestone courtyard large enough to accomodate perhaps 600 busses. By cracky, that looks like a palace driveway to me!

Up the hill we trudge. (Nearing a palace, I now feel justified in using the royal "we" to describe my feet, which are considering manning the barricades and beginning their own revolution momentarily).

The courtyard is somewhat larger than it appears -- oddly, even though I was facing it, apparently I was viewing it through my right-hand mirror, and things are always "goofier than they appear in this mirror".

When I finally get there, I begin to get some sense that this place is rather larger than I suspected. Built in a very elongated "U" shape with the two arms pointing toward me, I realize that there's a damned big church (cathedral/basilica sized) hiding along one of the arms.

Turns out, the palace has about 4 entrances for tours, none of which are open today. That's fine, I'm headed for the garden.

On the way through the porte cochere that leads towards the orangerie on the east side of the complex I pass a sign explaining that the exterior woodwork is undergoing a major restoration project -- they are replacing the windows with hand-blown burglar-proof glazing, and repairing all the woodwork in and around the windows, at a price of millions of Euros. The sign informs me that the windows were last painted with an oil-based gray paint in 1980, and that one of the reasons this project is taking a while is that the building's facade is somewhat more than 700 meters long.

Gnaw on that for just a moment, OK? 2150 feet. four-tenths of a mile. Now, this was a translation, and the word "facade" could mean the entire outside surface of the building, which, as you remember, is a rather extended "U" shape.

No matter. Scroll back up and look at the photo again. The tiny structure in the distance is the SHORT side of the palace. I am standing, at this point, at the north end of the esplanade of lawn that leads to the Canals. That's right, I'm not actually TO the canals yet.

If you look along the right side, in the shadows, you can see about a dozen plinths, larger than a person, which are either holding statuary or decorative urns large enough to display Sherwood Forest in each one. That patch o'lawn in the photo is a LONG par 4 -- about 435 yards end to end (I paced it off), and I had to play from the back tees.

This, after descending through about 200 yards of terraced fountains, which are nearly invisible between the building and the lawn.

I can't even put a scale to this. The "garden", the back yard to this building that is at least two blocks wide, is about the size of Golden Gate Park.

The photo above (I've just figured out that the photos don't display in the order that I post them -- they are "bottom up") shows the view from the center of the fountain terrace back out to the "little" canal, and the Grand canal crossing it.

Out at the right-hand end of the Grand Canal are the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon -- a couple of "outbuildings". The Grand Trianon house General deGaulle when he was President of the Republic, and has hosted receptions for Presidents Carter and Reagan, as well as the monarchs of Great Britain and Holland, aka The Netherlands, known to the French as "The Low Countries" (Les Pays-Bas).

Louis XVI had a little Austrian-styled town built out back of the Petit Trianon to amuse Marie-Antoinette Hapsburg, daughter of the Empress of Austria, Marie-Therese Hapsburg. Marie-Antoinette was married off to Louis at the very young age of 14. She was barely literate when she was spirited off by coach across Europe, and handed over on an island in the Rhine river that was half in the Austrian Empire and half in France, in a building that was built for the occasion that was half in Austria and half in France, that had doors on each end, that had to be opened in a special way so that only the young princesse, the Dauphine - to be, would cross from one country to the other at the right time. Louis, but a year older at the time and described as "fat, indolent and shy", suffered from a condition known as phimosis, which I will allow you to Google and define on your own; suffice it to say, he was not alone in his suffering for many years, until it was surgically corrected when he was 22.

I wondered what "Trianon" meant, and a docent explained to me that there was a town there, called Trianon, at one time. It sort of got replaced, but memorialized in the names of the buildings.

If memory serves, les Trianons were built by Louis XIV, and were regularly used by Louis XV to house his paramours, notably Madame du Barry and les Pompadour, whose real name was Madame Poisson, or Mrs. Fish. One of the more interesting things in the Trianons is to see the sculptures of the three women central to it's existence -- Marie Antonia, who changed her name to Marie Antoinette to be a bit more "French" (it failed -- she was known as l'Autricienne, "the Austrian", for her entire lifetime in France -- even accused by the population of being a spy for a country she never again saw after age 14. Her response was admirable, if ineffective -- "I am NOT a daughter of Austria, I am the Mother of France!") -- anyway, Antoinette is always portrayed in a demure way, with no decolletage -- partly because she was well known to be rather modestly endowed. duBarry in particular, and Pompadour, to a lesser extent, are depicted with seins en avant, rather prominent (and, shall we say, chilly?) breasts, particularly in the bisque and marble busts found in many of the rooms, but also in paintings. I discussed this with a docent at some length, and, as I suspicioned, their sexuality was accented because of their well-known position in the King's inner circle, while Marie-Antoinette was shown as demure and nearly sexless because she was "barren" for so many years early in the marriage.

The photo with the large malachite bowl perched on gilded carved feet shows but one of several such monumental malachite items in what is rather ingeniously known as the "Malachite Room". The ranks of brilliantly-colored chairs (what color is that? Heliotrope? Fuchsia? Hideous Plum?) prove that someone, most likely someone of royal blood (or imperial, since the multitudes of Napoleons lived here, too), was tragically taste-impaired, color-blind, or both, and suffered discussions of the subject rather badly, if at all.

That last photo is one taken in the village itself. I walked there -- I thought I was taking a short-cut and wound up outside the park. Interestingly, somewhere they rent bicycles to get around the place; wearing expensive cuffed woolen pants, I probably would have passed. They also rent electric golf carts for $32 an hour. I saw one in use today. As God is my witness, it was being piloted by a couple from Texas -- he was clapping his hands, driving without touching the steering wheel, yelling "yee-haw" and telling his pretty li'l filly they'd just "git some lunch 'round 3:00", which shows they haven't been in-country too long, no matter how "country" they seemed to be.

Anyway, the village was charming, even if I did have to walk around the perimiter of Versailles for a couple of miles to get across the moat that somehow insinuated itself between me and my goal. A lot of work is being done on the forests and gardens within Versailles -- apparently there was a massive storm here on December 26, 1999, that leveled trees hundreds of years old. It's just not a happy date -- the great tsunami last year was on Dec. 26, and anyone who has ever tried to return a Christmas gift to Costco on that date knows exactly why in Britain it's called Boxing Day.

At the end of the day, after walking through the back of the Grand Trianon and missing it entirely the first time by resolutely turning left at the corner of the building without even bothering to look the other way, I went down a lengthy stairway to the canal. The Grand Canal is, in fact, pretty grand. The final photo is an attempt to show you its actual size....note the person, and the automobile, in the photograph. The little man-made ditch designed for a little pleasure boating and naval battle re-enactments is about the size of the Seine near the Ile St. Louis in the heart of Paris.

Finally, for the last chapter of your history lesson for today -- l'Autricienne did not say "let them eat cake" when informed that the rabble was marching in search of affordable bread. What she actually said was "They want bread? They should have bread. Let them eat cake, too", which might not have been the best way to show she was sympathetic to their problem, but it sure is different from what people think she said.

All for now -- I'm starting to get pretty pissed off with you people back in the Bay Area, with your 80-degree weather and all. I thought I was going to freeze to death out there today -- it was about 42 degrees with a constant 20 mph wind.