The restaurant in Normandy
Some party's own dejeuner sur l'herbe near the restaurant.
The hall of mirrors at the palace of Versailles
One of the more modest bedrooms
Louis XIV, the Sun King
The king's bed,
The queen's bed - why is hers much bigger? All will be explained below.
After Giverny we moved on to another part of Normandy for lunch at a picture-postcard restaurant on the banks of a river with a waterwheel. It was a very French lunch with plenty of red wine flowing. The wine was very powerful and it was soon obvious that a lot of the party were getting inebriated, including the Brazilian lady next to me who said, in very broken English, “I need coffee – coffee!” She was a lovely lady, on holiday with her lady friends while her husband stayed home in Brazil to make money (she conveyed this by rubbing her thumb and finger together). She hardly had any English but kept talking to me and I kept pretending to understand what she was saying - of course, I have no Portuguese at all. I told her I’m a fan of Brazilian music, especially Jobim. When the bus set off for Versailles many of the passengers started to nod off, affected by the strong wine, but the Brazilians all started singing, including some classic Jobim songs like Desafinado and Girl from Ipanema. Eventually, they too started drooping, for the trip to the palace was over an hour.
The palace of Versailles is in the town of the same name, which has around 100,000 inhabitants (I’d always assumed it was this massive complex in the middle of the countryside); it’s only about 20ks from the centre of Paris. As we drove through the streets we saw cafes everywhere, just like in Paris itself.
We knew the palace was going to be over the top and we weren’t disappointed – it’s staggering and you can see why the people were revolted with all that excess. Louis XIV redefined excess – the whole experience is mind-blowing, it’s almost hallucinatory in its ostentatiousness! As Louis, the Sun King said “Apres moi, le deluge” and so it was his great, great, great grandson, Louis XVI who copped it in the neck, along with his Austrian wife Marie Antoinette, she of the probably apocryphal “let them each brioche” quote, which, among many other things, stirred the French people on to revolution.
The hall of mirrors is breathtaking of course and the queen’s bedroom is stunning too. Her bed was much bigger than the king’s bed because the king was supposed to visit her in her bed and never the other way round. Louis XIV was a frisky old bugger so he was in the big bed most nights, at least when he wasn’t in the beds of his many mistresses, but Louis XVI was apparently a lot more reticent and it took him longer to get going. The sun king’s wife had 10 kids in 10 years!
The gardens are vast and magnificent and the fountains are completely over the top. There are “hedges” that must be 20 metres tall and a large lake where you could have yacht races if you wanted.
It was very hot that day, over 30 degrees and the place is incredibly crowded; as Yogi Berra might have said “nobody goes there anymore – it’s too crowded”.
The bus drove back via the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, which was a nice scenic addition.
Next post: the Opera House, the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne and the Pantheon.
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