Today we are visiting the ultimate palace in Europe. As I mentioned yesterday we have visited many palaces that advertised themselves as the Versailles of . . ., so today was my first time to see the model for palaces thru out Europe.
Ton visited Versailles a long time ago when she was a student in England. She spent the bus ride over wondering if the second visit would wow her like the first visit did. She remembered thinking she had never seen so much gold before.
These days you are only guaranteed entry if you buy a ticket on line with a scheduled time of entry. In our case we choose noon. We arrived about 10:15, and headed to the gardens to start our visit.
The gardens are immense, the scale and variety of types of gardens is hard to take in. There are several large man made lakes and forest trails that make up parts of the grounds. The gardens made a huge impression on me.
We had just begun to explore a small portion of the gardens when it was time to head to the line to get into the palace itself. The only disappointment was that because it was late in the season a lot of the flower beds had been pruned back in preparation for winter.
We joined a line of a couple of hundred people for the noon entrance to the palace. It looks like they allow a few hundred people to enter the palace every half hour. It is a big place, but even a palace the size of Versailles has a capacity that it can handle daily.
The interior of the palace is immense, and the opulence is impressive, and also unsettling. Ton told me that if the palace was built today it would cost the equivalent of 30 billion dollars. The majority of the palace was built during the reign of three kings over about 100 years. The last king Louis XVI was executed during the French Revolution.
These days it makes an impressive museum and the French are rightly proud of it and how it reflects French culture. The art and statues inside are indeed superb.
The room I really wanted to see was the hall of mirrors. I had read that it was one of the most impressive rooms in the world. Several important treaties have been signed there. As we got closer to the hall the rooms just proceeding it were jammed with people. We have not felt this crowded since the Vatican so that was kind of a bummer.
The room was impressive and very large. The art work was extensive and of very high quality and the chandeliers were beautiful. But I was expecting a little more.
We wrapped up our tour of Versailles Palace in another large hall full of paintings of battles won by the French for 600 years. The last battle included was during Napoleons reign.
When Napoleon took over as emperor about 15 years after Louis lost his head, the palace had been ransacked. While he had himself crowned in the palace, the cost of restoring it was going to be very expensive, so he moved into one of the minor buildings on the grounds called the Trianon Palace.
We had a bit of a walk to the palace because we had entered the gardens earlier in the day we could not reenter the gardens thru the same gate. The young lady told us there was another gate quite close we could use to reenter and gave us directions. It turns out quite close was about half a mile away, and when we got to that gate the nice young lady discouraged us from entering there but told us to go directly to the palace along the street. She said the palace was also quite close, which apparently in France means half a mile because I checked my watch when we got to the palace and we had walked a mile since we left the palace.
We enjoyed the palace as the scale seemed more human after Versailles even if it is quite a large home. It was busy with visitors but not teeming like the main palace.
The gardens here have an annual theme and this year it was Provence. The flowers had not been pruned back so Ton really enjoyed walking thru and taking in the different types and colors.
It is an amazing place, but in the end our ambivalence remained about the cost of the place, as a palace it is a scandal, as a museum of French culture it is a treasure. Later in the evening we were talking over palaces we have visited in Europe. We have visited many at this point, and Versailles is the model of many of them, but the one we really thought was the most beautiful and interesting was the Alhambra in Spain. It is also immense, but while Versailles feels like it is built to overwhelm the senses, the Alhambra feels like it embraces the senses, and we think that is harder to pull off.