Day 11: Chateau de Versailles

Today was the only organized event with the tour company we used to book our trip.  In the morning we had a bus tour around Paris, with about 4 stops at various places.  There were 13 of us in the tour group, all from the U.S.  It was funny, two of the other couples who were also staying at our hotel were from San Jose and Sacramento.  Although we had been warned that the tour guide would be a substitute, not the regular guide (who was traveling), the tour guide was really excellent.  He's obviously been doing this for a long time, so he knows how to handle himself.  He was friendly and talkative, and had just an amazing amount of knowledge about the history and interesting facts relating to everything we saw.

One generic thing he told us is about all of the statues around the city that were gilded with gold in the 1700s and 1800s.  The government wants them to look nice, so they have ongoing projects to re-gild various statues, but it is very expensive.

The guide, Luron, was also mentioning that many of the "monuments" were originally intended to be temporary structures, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Grand and Petit Palais, etc., but they became permanent.  He also pointed out that the glass peace structure in front of the L'ecole Militaire (photo shown with the Eiffel Tower) was also temporary, and he added, "thank God!".  Hmm... we'll see if they truly stay temporary...

Here's one picture of Isako and our bus at one of the stops:

In the afternoon we had a tour of Versailles (click for web site) with the same tour group and same tour guide.  Again the guide was just terrific.  He really worked hard to give us perspective on what we were seeing, and to try to help us imagine what things must have been like when these places were first built and bustling in the 1800s.

One interesting thing he told us had to do with flowers.  He had us looking out the window of one room and mentioned that while all of the plants are planted in the ground now, back in the days when royalty was living in Versailles all of the plants were in pots.  There were 1000 gardeners on the grounds, and when the king woke up each morning he would inform someone what color he liked that day, and in the time it would take the king to get out of bed, get dressed, and have breakfast, the gardeners would furiously move thousands of pots around so when the king first looked out the window of his sitting room he would see a sea of the color he wanted to see that day.  Wow.

Another interesting story had to do with Louis XVII.  He was in the royal family and expected to be king someday, except the French Revolution happened.  Louis XVII was 7 years old, and he was thrown into prison in solitary confinement for several years.  The word was that he had died in prison.  But there were always rumors that he hadn't died in prison, that he had survived and eventually gotten out and had a family, and after the revolution many teenagers popped up claiming to be him, many with plausible stories.  No one knew for sure what had happened.  Well, just a few years ago it was discovered that a doctor who had been around Louis XVII, I believe he did the autopsy, had kept the boy's heart and hidden it somewhere in a jar full of alcohol with a note explaining what it was.  The jar and note were discovered recently, and DNA tests confirmed that the heart was a son of Marie Antoinette (using hair samples left of Marie Antoinette, queen to Louis XVI and mother of Louis XVII), so it seems Louis XVII did in fact die in prison.  (Click here for more of the story on this.)

One more thing, our guide pointed out how short the beds were, and said that it is not because people were shorter then.  Back in the 1700s in France it was considered a bad thing to lie flat while sleeping, because then you would look too much like a dead body.  So people actually slept in a near-sitting position.

Versailles was, of course, built when the king started getting nervous about living in Paris, that he could be attacked by his people, so he wanted to remove himself.  Though this eventually helped contribute to the French Revolution, since living way out in Versailles (maybe 20 miles from the city), the royalty lost touch with the people.

Anyway, here is the main courtyard at Versailles: 

Below are close-ups of the statue in the picture above.  I thought they did an excellent job making the horse life-like:

Below is looking in the opposite direction.  The two buildings were originally the Versailles stables, housing over 2000 horses.  They're now office buildings.  (As per our guide, "What was good enough for the horses then is good enough for us now, eh?")

In the pictures below you can see the incredible ornamental detail everywhere you look inside the buildings.

This is the chapel inside the palace, where Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were married.  As the palace was open to the public, everybody was on the ground floor during the Masses, while the king and the queen sat on the second floor (where the photo is taken from):

Isako wanted me to take the photo of this gold-gilded door.  "How opulent!" she huffed.

Marble, gold and paintings everywhere... ("No wonder Parisiens revolted, sheesh," said Isako, while walking around):

The famed "Hall of Mirrors" where the Versailles Treaty was signed.  It was amazing standing in this room and trying to imagine the treaty ending World War II being signed right there.  The gardens would be to the right:

Here are the gardens, which in the Versailles heyday spanned over 30 square miles (more area than the city of Paris covers today).  Only a fraction is maintained now.  The canal you see beyond the first patch of grass was used to import water into Versailles while it was being built.  After that, they used it to cruise around in boats, and also hold mock battleship battles to keep the nobility entertained.  This palace grounds also has a mock peasant cottage so the nobility could pretend they were peasants and have fun (yeah right... a darn wealthy peasant!).  Unfortunately we didn't have time to visit the structures beyond the main complex.  The place was simply too large for a 1/2-day tour.  ("We'll save it for the future," said Isako.)

We thought the trimming of these shrubs was cute, especially the one with a little pigtail sticking out the side (fourth shrub from the front):

And of course I had to take pictures of the police on horseback.  The main palace building is in the background of the first picture.