Versailles - apres nous le deluge

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.

Monet's Garden at Giverny

Today we acted like normal tourists again and went on a tour: an all-day excursion to Claude Monet’s house and garden in Giverny in Normandy, 80 ks from Paris and then back towards Paris to the palace at Versailles. As with last Saturday, the weather was warm in the morning and it got very hot during the day. We boarded our bus just near the Louvre, on Rue Rivoli. The tour group consisted mainly of Aussies, Brazilians and Japanese, which reflects the three main nationalities in Paris at the moment, besides the French of course. Paris has long been the favourite tourist destination for the Japanese and the number of Aussies and Brazilians reflects the current strength of both those countries’ currencies. The two tour guides spoke English and Spanish - Brazilians are usually adept at Spanish even though their language is Portuguese. The two languages have similarities but are still quite different. Portuguese sounds like a mixture of Spanish and French. The main Portuguese word we learnt today was “obrigado”, which means thanks, very different to the Spanish gracias.

It was a buzz to be driven down the Champs Elysee and go around the huge and seemingly anarchic roundabout. It wasn’t long before we were in the green and pleasant French countryside, following the course of the Seine as it flows towards the English Channel or la Manche as the French call it.

Monet moved to Giverny at the age of 43 and lived there for 43 years. After years of abject poverty, he’d finally made enough money from his painting to buy the house and establish the magnificent garden, with its waterlilies, which he painted for the rest of his life.

If you love Monet’s work, you’ll adore this place. Even if you don’t care about art but love gardens, you’ll adore this place – it’s gorgeous. Everything is so lush and plentiful and there are flowers everywhere; it’d be very difficult to establish a garden like this in most of Australia, with our lack of water and our poor soils. The colours in the garden are just like Monet’s paintings. The house is wonderful, with all the original furniture and reproductions of his paintings all over the alls. The walls also feature many original Japanese woodcut prints from the Edo era, including some Utamaros and Hokusais. The waterlily garden is across the street – of course, there was no street when Monet lived there - and it’s gorgeous too, with many scenes that feature in some of Monet’s best paintings, including the green, arched bridges.

Montmartre, Metro, Marais and Les Places des Vosges

Most of Paris is flat and easy to walk around but it gets hilly just north of our street as one enters Montmartre. The streets narrow and become cobble-stoned and it all reaches a zenith at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, a gigantic, ornate church built on the highest spot in Paris by the French government in the 1870s after the misery of the Franco-Prussian War, when thousands of Parisians starved to death after the Prussians laid siege to the city. The people ended up eating the edible animals in the zoo, including the elephants! Montmartre had also been the scene of the worst excesses of the government’s suppression of the Paris Commune, which had come into being after the removal of Louis-Napoleon as emperor.

Montmartre is a bit of a tourist trap and the touts at the entrance to Sacré-Cœur are persistent (though still nowhere near as aggressive as the ones I encountered in Bali 13 years ago). A young Senegalese man blocked my path, immediately started attaching some coloured twine to my wrist and proceeded to braid it, all the time keeping up a steady patter: “Where you from? Australia? Kangaroo! I am from Senegal, my name is Daouda. Do you like football? Ah, rugby? No? Ah, rugby league! Yes! Do not be concerned sir, this will not hurt you..” When he finished his handiwork he suggested that his remuneration could only be in the form of a Euro note and not any coins. The smallest denomination of Euro in notes is 5, which is a bit steep for some twine in the colours of the Senegalese flag braided round one’s wrist. Luckily I only had some coins so he had to be content with them. Annette managed to resist the efforts of all the other touts plying the same routine, mainly by being very adamant in her refusals.
We started to climb the steep steps but it was warm and muggy again so we thought the funicular would be fun (it would have to be, given its first three letters). The church is spectacular inside with a huge undecorated dome, the exterior of which can be seen all over Paris. It looks like a strange, Romanesque-Byzantine structure and its colours - a sort of beige or off-white - are the colours of Paris itself.
We wandered the streets below randomly, while still heading in the general direction of Rue Cadet, and stumbled across Le Bateau-Lavoir, so-called, in the early 20th century, because the houses there looked like old washing boats. Some of the famous painters who have lived around this place include Picasso, Gris, Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Derain, Modigliani and Utrillo; also writers such as Jacob, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Jarry, Cocteau and Gertrude Stein.

On Boulevard Clichy is the Moulin Rouge, which was worth a corny photo or two. Plenty of other tourists were taking snaps of it as well. The streets of Montmartre are full of interesting sights such as an old guy with an organ grinder singing Parisian-style songs.

The florists in Paris all have stunning wares to sell so I took a photo-op while Net bought some trendy sandals in a nearby shop and made friends with the Algerian lady serving her.

Many of the streets of Paris are named after famous artists, writers and musicians. Just near our hotel is Andre Breton Place - he's the bloke who founded Surrealism:

Apres dejeuner we caught the Metro down to the Marais district, which we’d explored yesterday while approaching the Pompidou Centre. We got off at the Bastille Metro station but there’s no sign of the prison whose destruction by the people in 1789 sparked the French Revolution. We wanted to see Les Places des Vosges, a charming little park with some of the only public lawns Parisians are actually allowed to sit and lie on. The park has a statue of Louis XIII and is surrounded by the houses of the super-rich, including DSK, who’s been in the news somewhat in the last few months, much to the embarrassment of the average French person.

It’s a trendy area with expensive arty shops full of expensive artworks for rich people to decorate their homes with. We saw quite a few impressive small sculptures using all sorts of media but most of the paintings were pretty woeful. As we headed back to the Bastille Metro via the narrow and medieval looking back streets I took a photo of a house front and one of those funny tiny cars one sees a lot in Paris and an elderly gentleman, walking with more purpose than us, started to engage us in conversation. He could see we were tourists but for some reason thought we were Spanish and wanted to tell us a bit about the building I’d just photographed. Eventually we conveyed our Australian-ness to him and I asked him if there was any part of the Bastille left and he said “no, it was all made into rubble in 1789”. Another encounter with a really nice Parisian! We’ve only got two days left to find an archetypal arrogant Frenchman! Maybe we should provoke one.

The Metro was extremely crowded on our trips to and from the Bastille. It carries almost 1.5 billion people a year, the busiest in western Europe - only Moscow’s metro carries more. There are so many different types of people of all ages and many are representative of the countries France used to rule in its imperialist heyday: Africans and Indochinese especially and probably some Polynesians as well.

Tomorrow, Versailles and Giverny.

Musée de l'Orangerie, Les Invalides, Napoleon's Tomb, Musée de l'Armée and the Pompidou Centre

At petit-dejeuner we bid farewell to the lovely family from Victoria - they were setting off for other European countries after a day at the Normandy beaches (father and son) and Versailles (mother and two teenage daughters). One of the daughters, Sasha, is a very talented artist.
Once again, we took the Metro to the Louvre, then walked through the Tuileries to the Musée de l'Orangerie. Its collection is just as impressive as the Orsay's, with two rooms of Monet's huge canvases of waterlilies and many works by Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, Modigliani and Soutine and many others (if you're into Derain, which I'm not particularly, this is the place to be). The Monet waterlilies or Nymphéas are superb and the two rooms have a wonderfully contemplative atmosphere.

The highlight for me was the Picassos. He was the greatest draughtsman since the Renaissance in my book and there are some great works from his "Rose Period" and into the monumental nudes of the 20s.

We repaired back to our digs utilising the Metro, buying a couple of baguettes on the way at Opera Metro for lunch. Then we sortied on to Les Invalides, a huge building on the Left Bank which contains Napoleon's tomb and the Musée de l'Armée. If you're interested in war, this is a great place.

The Musée contains a colossal amount of old armour from the Hundred Years War onwards - room after room of it:

Weird helmets:

Decorative cannons:

And blokes on horses:

Further along is Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb, housed under a massive golden dome:

The little Corsican is ensconced in this gigantic coffin:

And there is a magnificent chapel under the enormous domed roof:

Les Invalides' gardens are gorgeous:

And the golden dome is superb:

We took the Metro back under the Seine to Saint-Sébastien-Froissart and walked, or trudged, as we were completely exhausted by this stage, through the ancient streets of Le Marais to the Pompidou Centre, the apotheosis of Late Modernist High-tech architecture:

Unfortunately, I hadn't left enough time to explore this incredible place - there is a fabulous collection of paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Delaunay and other modern masters. The entrance is dramatic: you ascend via escalators that are on the outside of the building. The roof has spectacular views of Paris:

Somehow we gained our second winds and walked all the way back home via some of the loveliest and most fruitful people-watching parts of Paris.
Tomorrow: Montmartre.