In the Gardens of the Sun-King

The day after Chartres, Rachel and I again armed ourselves with pastries--this time a pain au chocolat, an almond croissant, and a baguette with some Edam cheese we'd brought from Holland--and took the train to Versailles.  The palace at Versailles was the base of operations for France's autocratic King Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century ego-maniac who proclaimed himself to be the "new Apollo," the "Sun-King" of Versailles.

  This is the gilded gate leading into the palace.  The building is oriented along an east-west axis that lines up with the rising and setting sun at certain times of the year.  Louis XIV's apartments were also situated along this axis, and each morning and evening some of the aristocrats "imprisoned" at Versailles--Louis ordered hundreds of them to live in the palace so that he could keep an eye on them and stop potential rebellions--would ceremonially greet the Sun-King as he rose from sleep and went to bed, like the rising and setting sun.

The line to get into the palace was enormous, and so Rachel and I decided to just visit the gardens.  "Just" is relative since the gardens are extremely extensive.  I had been inside the palace before, and Rachel had seen various imitations of Versailles in other places, including southern Germany.  Seventeenth-century European rulers who visited Louis XIV were overwhelmed by the majesty of his palace and tried to copy it when they got home.  None of these imitations are quite as grand as Versailles, though.  Few rulers were able to decimate the resources of their nations quite like Louis did.  By the time his grandson, Louis XVI, came to the throne, however, the French had had enough, and he and his wife, Marie-Antoinette, were carted off to the guillotine.

On the weekends Versailles turns the fountains on in the gardens and plays Baroque music, so you can imagine what it must have been like to be a visitor to Versailles during the seventeenth century--or an aristocratic prisoner at the palace for that matter!  It was a very hot day, and I was forced to wear sunscreen.  It was the first time that year that I had broken down and put on sunscreen.  I hate sunscreen, and my normal plan of attack is to just avoid the sun by moving quickly from one shady area to another or else venturing into tree-less areas after about 5:00 pm.  As you might imagine, though, there is very little shade in the gardens of the Sun-King.  There is a lot of sun, and there was no hope of running from shade tree to shade tree!

Here is a view from the back of the palace looking out past the Latona and Apollo fountains to the Grand Canal where the king and his prisoners could go boating.  When Louis XIV showed visitors around the gardens, his servants would operate a system of flags to alert each other when the royal party was approaching.  That way they could make sure the water was running in the correct fountains as the Sun-King and his guests approached.  The fountains still don't all operate at once--certain ones are only for certain hours of the day on the weekends.

The court at Versailles was regimented with strict codes of ceremony.  Art historians like to discuss how even the architecture has a stern sense to it, as if the buildings were meant to inspire a fearful awe in France and its king.  In fact, Louis was famous for saying, "l’état, c’est moi," or "I am the state."  Scholars have further noted that the gardens give this same impression of autocratic power.  The shrubs are all rigorously clipped in neat, geometric designs, as if the Sun-King could even control nature!

Looking down on the orangerie, where hundreds of potted trees created a transportable citrus grove that could be wheeled inside during the winter.

This is the Latona fountain.  It narrates a tale from Greek mythology in which Latona, who is standing at the top of the fountain, angrily transforms a crowd of people into frogs.

Here you can see one of the unfortunate people who already has the face of a frog.  There are turtles at the base of the fountain.

The Neptune fountain is a fabulous example of seventeenth-century style.  Baroque artists loved drama, optical illusion, and theatrical, multi-media displays that mixed together things like marble statues, stucco, metalwork, paint, natural sunlight, and water.  Here the dragon sprays water into the air, and the sculptures have been submerged so that it looks like the pool is full of sea monsters swimming threateningly towards viewers like Rachel and me!

Several caves have been created in this rock to house sculptures of Apollo and his attendants.

Sadly, they had turned off the water for the Apollo fountain by the time we arrived--no network of hidden servants with flag signals for the likes of Rachel and me!  When the fountain is on, the water creates the Baroque illusion that Apollo and his sun chariot have just sailed down from the heavens and landed in the pool with a splash of waves.

Rachel and I walked a good ways to get to the Grand and Petit Trianons.  These are small, "resort" palaces--a kind of "home away from home" for the royal family.  They are only about a thirty-minute walk from the palace, but Rachel and I were fairly exhausted from the summer heat by the time we got there, and I guess if you were wearing heavy wigs and gold brocade jackets, you'd be too tired to make it back home for several days!  Usually they charge admission, but on the day Rachel and I were there, it was free!

The Grand Trianon is the king's "cottage," and here is his bedroom.  This room was later used by Napoleon's mother during the years when her son ruled as emperor of France.

This is a "rustic" version of the famous Hall of Mirrors in the main palace.

More rooms in the Grand Trianon. 

I've been told that during the winter, Louis would sometimes take visitors to the Grand Trianon during the afternoon.  Even though there was sometimes snow and temperatures below freezing, the Sun-King would demand that his servants plant the grounds around the Trianon with flowers.  Although the gardens would be in bloom when Louis entered the Grand Trianon, by the time he and his guests were ready to leave, the flowers would have frozen and died, so the servants had to replant to ensure that things would look acceptable for the return journey to the palace.  The flowers in this picture have been here all summer!

The Petit Trianon was the "cottage" for the queen.  Later queens used it as well, and Marie-Antoinette, the ill-fated wife of Louis XVI, particularly like the Petit Trianon.  This room was part of her apartments.

Not far from the Petit Trianon is the Hameau de la Reine, or the "Hamlet of the Queen."  This garden was created by Marie-Antoinette to be a kind of idealized peasant village.  When she tired of the ceremony and formality of palace life, she could visit her hamlet, dress up as a farmer, and pretend to work in the vegetable garden and take care of animals.

It's a very beautiful garden, but there are definitely too many rose-covered trellises and irises growing picturesquely from thatched roofs to be anything like a peasant village!  Marie-Antoinette tried to make it authentic, though, and unbelievably, she even had cracks painted onto the walls of some of the buildings!

The potted geraniums lining the balconies and the arbor of been vines start to seem a little too sappy--almost like an "Old Europe" theme park at Disneyland.

You start to realize why there was a Revolution in France!  It wasn't just that Versailles had been draining the country's resources for generations.  It wasn't just that the kings were oblivious, out of touch with the people, and sometimes tyrannical.  The problems with the royal family were summed up fairly nicely when the queen's solution to the lack of bread in the country was to suggest that the peasants eat cake while she pretended to be a farmer in a make-believe village with cracks painted on the wall!  When I visited the royal burial church of  Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris, though, I felt sadness and pity at the grave of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.  They inherited generations of problems from ancestors like the Sun-King, and a good deal of the oppression and cruelty that brought them to the guillotine was not of their own making.

Back in Paris, Rachel and I went to the Montmartre area of the city to visit the white Basilica of Sacré-Coeur.  Sitting majestically on a hill at the top of a long flight of steps, this Neo-Byzantine sanctuary was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  Montmartre is also the area where St. Denis, the missionary who is said to have first brought Christianity to Paris, was martyred.  According to legend, after the saint was beheaded, he stood up, picked up his head, and walked until he reached the site where the Abbey of Saint-Denis stands today.  There he lay down and died, and the the royal burial church was built over his grave.

There are a lot of stairs up the steep hill to Sacré-Coeur, and there were a lot of people.  The view from the porch of the basilica is spectacular.  When I came to Paris before I climbed to Sacré-Coeur early in the day and heard the nuns sing the morning office of prayer.  The sun was shining on the city and reflecting off the gilded dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried.

Unfortunately, the basilica does not allow pictures inside, but it is a beautiful church with an impressive mosaic of the Sacred Heart of Jesus worshiped by a company of saints above the high altar.  Also above the altar is a monstrance displaying the consecrated Host (the bread of the Catholic sacrament).  The mission of the Benedictine nuns who live in the convent adjoining Sacré-Coeur is to adore the Host.  Amazingly, the Host has been perpetually adored in this basilica since it was constructed.  That means that all day, all night, for nearly 150 years, there has always been at least one nun or member of the local community kneeling in prayer before the bread of the sacrament.

As usual, Rachel and I also made a pastry run.  This time it was to one of the nicest pâtisseries in Paris--Gaston le Nôtre.  My parents went to Gaston le Nôtre with me when I was baby.  They bought a pear tart, which was a pastry revelation!  It has become a kind of legend in our family--"the pear tart of Gaston le Nôtre."  So Rachel and I found an outlet of the pâtisserie and ... there was no pear tart, although I was told that they still make it at certain seasons in the year.  We did get a millefeuille with paper-thin pasty between layers of cream with flecks of vanilla bean, a chocolate macaroon, and an fabulous strawberry éclaire.

We ate in a park across the street from Sacré-Coeur.  The éclaire had strawberry sugar on the outside, and it was filled with strawberry cream.  When Rachel was eating the last of it, half of the remaining cream fell without warning onto her clothes and leg.  She screamed in shock at the mess and then gave a cry of heartfelt grief at having lost all the cream!  It was hilariously funny--especially since none of the cream got on me!

 We finished up the day with dinner at a bistro.  I got quiche.

And Rachel got salade niçoise.  Traditionally there are anchovies in salade niçoise, and Rachel's dish included them as a very strong, very fishy paste.  We ate everything except the anchovy paste!