3 August 2018

On Friday, we visit the Palace of Versailles. So does half of France. It is the third most visited monument in the country, after the Eiffel Tower and Mt. St. Michel. The crowds outside on the cobblestone courtyard are so huge they seem as though they have been airbrushed in, or assembled for a filming or re-enactment so we can visualize just how immense–and populated—this 17^th century estate really was. Really, people? It’s barely 10 a.m. and that looks like a three-hour wait to me. The smart tourists have brought umbrellas to protect themselves from the blazing sun.

The mot du jour is indeed “sun.” It was the Sun King, Louis XIV, who expanded his father’s old hunting pavilion into this enormous domain: outside, the gardens, paths, groves, and fountains on which the palace sits covers an area of 87,728,720 square feet, or 2,014 acres. Wouldn’t want to be their lawn boy! Inside, the housekeeper isn’t much better off: 721,182 square ft, with 700 rooms, more than 2,000 windows, 1,250 fireplaces and 67 staircases. It is the largest residential palace in the world. So buck up, girls, we have a lot to see!

Smarter tourists have bought their tickets in advance. C’est moi! It is our first test of the “Coupe Ligne” passes we picked up in Paris yesterday. At the Tourist Office. Supposedly, we are going to be able to flash these little puppies and walk right in—or cut the line. Sophie doesn’t have one, as she is 16 and therefore free to every museum but a handful of curmudgeons all over Paris. It’s free entrance for under 18 internationally and ages 18-26 European citizens. She bears instead a killer camera and the eager, receptive look of a student-adventurer, ready and willing for anything and without a clue (because of the language barrier) what is about to occur or what we shall do next. It is a look that serves our many line-cutting entrees well. Bummer for Ellie, we are both card-carrying adults. Legal. And entitled to spend a third of our lives waiting in tourist lines. It’s hard to travel on a budget when your age betrays you!

Nevertheless, we are five of maybe 2000 folks who decided today was a good day to visit Louis. I think perhaps they are diverting bus tours from the closed Tour Eiffel?? Where, even, is the front of that line? Sure enough, we find it. We find the guard there. We have the passes and Claude and Irene, because of handicap, have special passes, as well. In we go. Just like that. It’s true, we are ushered through into another very short line of going through security. That’s something new in France, I find, coming back this time around. At almost every place we enter, St Chapelle most of all because it is still housed in the Courts of Justice, there is an elaborate security screening. The juxtaposition of a modern TSA-worthy airport scanner in a 5- and 600-year-old entrance hall is not lost on me. In the former, we were all but patted down. At this one, it’s a look-see at my pack (water bottles, anyone?) and a pass through. And then we are in, just like that. It’s still crowded, unpleasantly so—in fact, in some of the rooms we are shoulder to shoulder and have a difficult time seeing the displays from the waist down, but I am so grateful to be out of the hot sun I don’t even care.

I was trying to read my edu-guide to the girls as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, moving from room to room, but it was more like being carried along on a coursing people stream. It was very hot in the stone mansion. How exactly would you air condition 721 thousand square feet, even if it had occurred to them to try? In many of the rooms, the heavy velvet drapes are drawn to keep damaging sunlight off the paintings, and so it is dark and hot, with the 40-foot ceilings providing little relief. No costumed interpreters ala Williamsburg here, for they would surely expire of heat stroke. Instead, a mildly annoyed-looking attendant is posted on a folding chair at each doorway, outfitted with a floor fan that rattles softly in the non-moving air, ready to press back photo-obsessed foreigners with all the charm of a S.W.A.T team. It was hot. Did I mention that it was hot? So we made our hot and body-pressing way through Louis’ private Chapel, drawing room, fake bedroom, real bedroom, until we came to the other half of the palace rooms.

It may be the girls’ first exposure to architecture like this. To grandeur on an epic scale. We did go to the Biltmore one spring break. I don’t remember anyone rendered speechless, snapping photo after photo of the walls, the chandeliers, the gilded trim on every window, wall, and door, the parquet floor. It is a selfie-extinguishing environment, this; just as it was in the Sun King’s day, so it is in ours. The “Gallerie des Glaces”: a hall entirely of windows and glass, 240 feet long by 40 feet high. Seventeen floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the gardens, and on the wall opposite, seventeen matching full-length mirrors containing 357 panes of mirrored glass. Like nothing the world had ever seen. I looked but couldn’t find the cost to build such magnificence at the time, but 20^th century renovations done 10 years ago cost the country 12 million Euros. No wonder that gold gilt looks so sparkly. No wonder old Louis launched a revolution of starving and malcontent peasantry whilst he donned his drawers every morning in a royal dressing ceremony before a court audience. And we (along with the 100 or so other folks squeezed into each chamber as we inch slowly though) are as much as we can be, in wonder and awe.

Irene, in her late 70s and Claude, about to turn 80 this fall, have probably visited this palace 50 times in their lifetime. Maybe more. It is in the next town over, end of the intercity train line, and a very hopping modern ville at that—shopping centers, movie theaters, many quiet normal neighborhoods, although this grand historic Disneyland of sorts provides much of the economy. So we could have come alone, we three. I am touched that they wanted to spend the day with us, and to visit a monument not an inch of which is new to them. But we are a slow-moving bunch. Hot, thirsty, not really hungry on account of the heat, but certainly ready for a sit, we find a wonderful outdoor café in an orange grove and decide that this is a perfect lunch stop. “La Flotille” is just about as classic French as it gets – green metal chairs and tables placed about in a shaded grove, with light filtering through from the trees overhead and glinting on the glass beer and wine bottles on nearby tables. I refrain from ordering a Perrier or—heaven forbid, a little glass of wine. I’m so hot and tired that any alcohol and I would collapse in a fountain. Sophie takes matters into her own hands and orders up a Cocoa Cola—TWICE! (We are dying here. Jet lag is not entirely behind us. And there are acres in front). I make the conscious decision, in studying the Versailles map when I am done with the menu, NOT to share the “recommended time of walking around the grounds”: four hours!!

But walk we did. There are water fountains that play to music at timed intervals and many statues, monuments and special groves to see, with little printed sun’s rays on the map indicating sights “not to be missed.” That’s what the English version says. “Not to be missed.” Claude walks slowly, with a cane, I am carrying three pounds of lukewarm tap water, and the girls are already fatigued in the sun. No sunglasses among us, no umbrellas, no hats. If we don’t get tired of walking we surely will of squinting. To be honest, Louis, we might miss an acre or two of your 2000.

It is in one of the only shaded alleys between groves that Claude and I have a very unfortunate episode. We are walking together, a far bit behind the girls, who stride faster than us. As he says in laughing French afterward, we were “baptized” together, there in the Girandole Grove. It took me a minute to realize that the warm squirting stuff that hits my back and shoulders is not fountain water but bird dropping from the trees overhead. I never see or hear the bird. My first thought is that some naughty little French boy with a water pistol has got behind me and is playing tricks. At least that’s what I want it to be. But then it happens again, a warm gentle splat. Hits Claude, too. It is a shocked and horrified stop to our promenade. I can smell it, but I can’t see it, as it is down my back and in my hair. A kind Chinese woman and her son hurry over to help, she is shaking her head and babbling; I believe she must have seen it happen. She has baby wipes in her bag, she helps get most of it off, and I help Claude. We are laughing, but I am sickened and slowed in my enthusiasm for sights not to be missed. For the rest of that hot and dusty walk, the smell stays with me. Ruining an entire outfit on day three will not be good for the economy of wardrobe I brought from VA.

After the visit we are exhausted to epic proportions and Sophie doesn’t seem to notice being bent, folded and wedged into the back seat of car that has heated to the temperature of the sun. For a fleeting moment, there is talk of a shopping mall on the way home. The girls are getting antsy to check out some souvenirs for friends. But I have bird poo on my back and I’m sure Claude’s legs and feet are singing with pain. We agree that a shower and a brief rest will be the best thing. It is well after 7 pm and still the earliest night we call it quits, retire, or eat, for the entire 10 days we are there. If Louis XIV was the sun king, then we are the walk queens.