Fourth Day in Paris

We rose about 7am this morning. We find we are going to bed quite early because of the jet lag and wake up early. We decided to take on Versailles today. We enjoyed a breakfast of baguettes, croissants, quiche, orange juice and coffee. We booked the tickets to Versailles online and downloaded them to our phones. We walked the 3 minutes to Tuileries Metro Station and bought a return ticket to Versailles. We caught two metro trains and then an RER (suburban) train to Versailles.

We arrived at Versailles station at about 9:30am. It is about a ten

minute walk from the station to the front gate of the Palace. Leaving the station you turn left and walk about 2 minutes without seeing a hint of the palace, although the Hotel de Ville on the right is impressive enough. Then you turn left and immediately the palace comes into view up a long boulevard. The first thing that strikes you in the bright morning sunshine is the glint of the gold off the gates, fences and the trimmings on the building. The enormous scale of the buildings also leaves you with a sense of awe. This must have been an extraordinary sight in the 1700s when it was first built.

Getting through the first gate is relatively painless. It is only a security bagcheck. Then the huge forecourt is full of people and we realise this is one long serpentine queue of thousands of people all trying to get in through the one entrance. So we wait in line for about 60 minutes. The line gets a lot longer as we move towards the entrance. I suspect the wait is more like 90 minutes by the time we enter.

We purchased an English audioguide with our ticket so we grabbed these at the entrance. These guides provided some helpful information on each room as we went through the palace. The most amazing rooms were the hall of mirrors, the kings bedchamber and the cabinet and throne room. It is truly a spectacular place which relates to a bygone era when royalty was controlled wealth and power beyond what we are used to seeing in a democracy.

Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, because he was like a god and he did his best to project that kind of a mythical image of himself. He spared no money in creating a Palace of absolute opulence. The extravagance led ultimately to the peasants revolting in 1789. Whilst the King and Queen sat in this palace with every luxury imaginable, the common folk were starving in the streets outside the gates. That could only go on for so long in the changing world of the late 18th century when countries like America and England were already established democracies.

Once we had completed the tour of the palace and were still somewhat awestruck by what we had seen, we moved into the gardens. This was no less surprising. The gardens are huge. There

is nothing to compare to this. It is really about six botanical gardens joined together. And there is a huge man-made lake on which there are about 50 boats that people are rowing about in. The paintings indicate that there were full-size sailing boats on this lake when the king lived here. There are fountains everywhere. Marble statues and marble urns in rows. There are ponds and garden rotundas spread out everywhere. It would take days to explore it all.

We walked for about 20 minutes to get to the king and queen's smaller residences at the other end of the estate. These are two smaller palaces that provided more private accommodation. These were amazing in their own right. Marie Antoinette also had her own English village built for her and an English-style farm where she could see farm animals and vegetables being grown for her interest and amusement. Apparently she had seen these kinds of homesteads in English paintings and she wanted a house and farm

of her own. This is an extraordinary part of the development of the site. This also involved making huge man-made ponds, waterways and bridges in this area.

Versailles is more than a Palace, it is a huge estate built for royalty at the height of the era when kings could build whatever they wanted. The fact that this has all been preserved is an amazing opportunity for us to time-travel into history and marvel at how kings and queens lived in the 18th century prior to the French revolution.

We left Versailles at about 4:30pm feeling like we had walked a marathon. It is a huge day of walking but it is worth it for sure.