On Saturday, I finally made it to Versailles, with a week to spare!
Well, it sounds like I was cutting it close, but I've honestly been 'saving up' Versailles if you like, mainly because I thought that it would be better to go and see it in the summer when its beautiful gardens should be at their best, but also because I realised, upon doing some idle googling one day, that the light show happens on Saturdays, starting from yesterday, and yesterday being my very last Saturday in Paris, (I know! *sob*), it was the only day that I could do it.
Me and my friend Anne-Marie headed over to the RER station at Musée d'Orsay earlyish on Saturday morning - but if you're going there, note that you can get there on the same ticket and a lot lot quicker if you get the train from Montparnasse to Versailles-Chantier, which we realised on the way back. The walk from the station to the château is a bit longer but it's worth it.
The Versailles website suggests that on the busiest days you start off on the Gardens and make your way into the Château itself later in the day to avoid the worst of the people traffic, and so that's what we did.
The gardens themselves are very beautiful, and I think that holding off on a visit until summer paid off very nicely. The flowers were in bloom, the fountains were running, and people were out boating on the Grand Canal, and it gave me a very nice holiday feeling, thankyou very much, as opposed to feeling like I was on 'just' a day trip.
It was also sweltering hot - there was not a cloud in the sky until well after 19:00 and all in all I really think the gardens were at their best.
A (rather pricey) chocolate ice cream later, and we walked leisurely up the Grand Canal towards the Grand and Petit Trianons, and Marie-Antoinette's hamlet.
This is where you start to understand why the citizens of France started to get a bit disgruntled with their esteemed Royal Family and start a wee revolt. The Grand Trianon was apparently built so that the King could have a little privacy with which to conduct a love affair.
An excellent use of the peoples taxes, no?
An excellent use of the peoples taxes, no?
Anyway, the gardens of the Grand Trianon, again, were what struck me the most, and me and Anne-Marie spent ages taking pictures of them.
Marie-Antoinette's hamlet was something else that made me laugh. Of course the woman who supposedly declared, "let them eat cake!" would play pretend and be 'normal' by ordering an entire mini village to be built in her back garden!
It was very lovely though. I could have spent a couple of hours there alone, meandering around and enjoying the sunshine.
After this, we were getting quite hungry, so we stopped off at a restaurant, whose name currently escapes me, for something to eat. Considering we were sitting in the middle of one of the biggest tourist-traps in the whole of Île de France and beyond, the prices were fairly reasonable - €11 or so for a pizza, €8 for a ham omelette with a salad and bread. The ony thing that was noticeably extortionate was the coke. A medium sized one cost Anne-Marie something on the region of €5.60!
Anyway, hunger satisfied we made our way into the château itself. Truly, you can see why Versailles earned the reputation it did. It is dripping in splendor, nearly everything covered in marble and gold leaf and so on.
Most famous of all, and for good reason, is the Hall of Mirrors, a long gallery adorned with several mirrors (duh), chandeliers and large windows which make the room bright as anything and very very beautiful.
If I had one complaint to make about the château, it would be this.
Overcrowding.
The amount of people filtering through the Grands Appartements was, at times, slightly alarming. There were people every which way, the temperature in the room was climbing steadily, there wasn't much in the way of seating for those - I'm thinking here of the elderly and not the lazy - who needed it, and at times it was hard to see any of the room in which we were standing for the throng of bodies. It made it quite hard to appreciate what we were seeing. And this was late in the day when there was supposedly 'less' people traffic.
They need to, in my opinion, introduce a system rather like that which they have running at Buckingham Palace in London, where you pay for a ticket which can only be used within a certain timeframe, thus staggering out the number of visitors. I understand the need to make money from opening the palace up to the public, I do, but Versailles obviously makes so money in a year that I really wouldn't be all that concerned if I limited the number of people who could go through at once. The gardens are more than big enough and nice enough to keep people entertained in the meantime.
Anyway, my whinging over and done with, I can carry on to the Royal Serenade, which we also paid to see (largely, I admit, to fill the gap in between the closure of the château and it's gardens and the light show in the evening).
Basically, it consisted of a company of actors in period dress, putting on three mini performances throughout the grand apartments.
First, an opera singer and period instrumentalist - I'm completely ignorant about these things, but if I had to guess, I would say it was a lute or something similar.
Second - and my favourite segment, was a display, set to music, of the rituel d'habillage, or the ritual in which courtiers of the day would dress their King and Queen.
And last, a man playing some kind of instrument that reminded me a lot of bagpipes, but which was actually something else.
Anyway, after this an hour wait in the sunshine saw the gardens being reopened for the evening show. Wandering around the gardens, all of the fountains had been turned on. Some were playing to music, some had strobe lights and dry ice, and some put on seven minute 'displays' which were pretty awesome to watch.
The sunset was spectacular, and right before the sun dipped totally below the horizon, the sky was a bright crimson, which reflected in the Grand Canal made a real sight to behold.
And then, the pinnacle of the night - the fireworks. This was what we'd all been waiting for, really, and it didn't disappoint. I would add pictures, but my phone had died by this point and they're all on my camera (and I currently have no laptop to transfer them to, as I sent it back to the UK with my dad for some much needed repairs).
All told, it was a very nice, if very exhausting day, and I'm glad I managed to cross it off my bucket list. It wasn't the only château I went to this weekend - I visited Fontainebleau on Sunday, but I'll post about that separately.
Speaking of, today is Monday and I leave this week (!!!!!) so I only have 4 more full days to explore.
Time flies -
Vicky xx
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