Versailles, at last
Jun. 30th, 2003 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darcydodoOK, pretend like I posted this Wednesday evening. I didn't want to change the day references.
It came up on Saturday, and again last night, that some of the CEA group were also going to Versailles today. As I knew that if I left the Cité with them I'd also feel compelled to stay with them later, despite having commented that I intended to go around on my own, I waited to leave until after they were gone. (What this really means is that I woke up at 7:00 and then checked e-mail from 45 minutes.)
There were no problems with transportation, for once, but I would like to note at this juncture that I am still being amused by the fact that the RER C trains have names. Such as Sven, which cracks me up. From what I've seen, the other RER trains sometimes have real names, but it's not so consistent.
So I ended up getting to Versailles at around 10:45 and went hunting for some bread to complete my lunch. I had bought cheese and tomatoes and paté at Franprix the night before, when I was buying wine, but saw absolutely no point in getting bread in France a day early. Then I headed to the château and wandered around trying to find the correct entrance. Apparently, I'd mistaken the sign indicating the entrance for one of those boards they put up around a construction site (funny, how could I have made that mistake?), but asking a guard where I could buy a ticket resulted in my getting sent round the houses a bit. To be fair, I think he actually did know where I could get the ticket and tried to tell me, but he told me in English, and I think some idiom such as "behind the building" (as compared with the more correct "around the building") confused the matter. I ended up at the garden gate, and the guard there told me helpfully that I wanted entrance A. Well, I hadn't seen an A in the main courtyard. So I went back, and this is when I identified my error with the big green board.
I knew that I wanted to spend more of my time going around the grounds than staying inside the château, and I knew that I didn't want to spend the entire sum of 20 euros on my ticket either, so I just visited the grandes appartements. They were nice enough, and took something over an hour to actually get all the way through, and there were some paintings I really liked, but my favorite things far and away were the painted ceilings and the long room which quite conceivably has a picture of every major battle which France has ever fought. In one of the first rooms, which more often held things pertaining to the palace than things actually from the palace, there was a lovely map of France done in colored marble. There was also, in one of these rooms, a painting that I found quite disturbing. It was by Vignon, and it depicted two women who were identified as Françoise-Marie de Bourbon and Louise-Françoise de Bourbon. Accompanying them was a little black maid, and a little dog was held on one of their laps. Herein lay the disturbing nature of the image. The dog's eyes, as far as I could see, matched precisely the eyes of the black girl, and they had similar expressions of wide-eyed surprise (or something) on their faces, creating an odd reflection between degraded human on the one hand and the anthropomorphised (I may be taking a bit of a leap, but it's a French dog, for goodness' sake) animal on the other.
There were lots of tour groups taking up too much space, but I survived that aspect. It didn't seem quite so bad as I'd been warned it would be, in any case, probably because I was in fact there in the middle of the week. It was also fun playing spot-the-language when passing each group; from a distance, everything sounded like French, but in fact we had Italian, German, English, and several groups of Spanish. There may have been Russian or something, too, I can't remember any more.
In the room with the battle scenes was a painting depicting a battle in the American Revolution, and it had George Washington, and this made me feel stupidly patriotic enough that I took a picture of it. Yes, go ahead and laugh. On a less embarrassing note, I liked the different costumes in the battle scenes from different eras.
There was a long hall with busts of famous people (kings, writers, artists, etc.); it had busts of some very early kings, and it had a bust of Charlemagne, too, and I found myself wondering if the real people actually looked anything at all like these images.
When I'd made my way through the grand apartments, I went into the garden to eat lunch. The cheese, which was Cabécon du Périgord, was very nice. I'd managed to forget my knife so for the paté I improvised with the lid of the tin (it was one of the pull-off kinds). I was sitting on the grass eating, having checked to make sure there were no signs forbidding such an act, and I got through most of my lunch without being disturbed. But eventually a guard came over and told me not that there was no sitting on the grass, but that there was no eating on the grass. Eating was only allowed "over there" (which I'm assuming meant the marble bench on which I finished my meal. At least no one corrected this impression).
After lunch I wandered down toward the canal, heading through the bosky groves (yes, that is, in fact, tautologous, as I now know; bosky comes from, or at least from the same root as, bosquet, or "grove." I always assumed it meant "shady," not "with lots of bushes in"). Sadly, said groves were fenced off. I peered longingly through the wooden lattices, but I figured I'd get in major trouble if I unlatched the (easily unlatchable) gate from the inside and went in. Ahem. So I manfully resisted the temptation (there wasn't even a lock!) and went to rent a bike. See, this was my plan: I'd rent a bike and see the grounds that way, because I'd cover a lot more space and get a lot less tired, and I could manage to see all the things I wanted to.
The guy at the bike rental let me pick my own bike, so I found one that actually had gears and was, happily, adjusted to a sensible height. Then I trawled off into lime-lined lanes and pot-holed paths. Actually, the lanes were pot-holed and the paths more root-filled, but I thought I'd go with the bad alliteration, having strayed in that direction. (For that matter, I wouldn't swear to the trees being limes, either.) I went all the way along one side of the canal, then went around and tooled along some of the other paths on that side. There were people rowing rowboats on the canal, and some people had abandoned ship and were swimming instead. Eventually, I came back around, headed across to the other side of the canal, and discovered the Petit Trianon and the Grand Trianon. Annoyingly, it turned out I couldn't go in with my bike, but I rode through the surrounding parks a tiny bit. And then I ran into Lindsay and Robyn and Anna! I walked with them briefly, until they got to the Trianon, and then I departed, as I couldn't actually join them in there. I headed up to the Queen's Hamlet, which is theoretically like the one I saw at Chantilly, but it turned out I couldn't take my bike in there either. This made me vaguely peeved. I had rented the bike specifically so that it would take me less time to cover the ground to the various places I wanted to see. On the other hand, I couldn't really be cross, as I'd been having a brilliant time riding around anyway. So I skirted along the edge of the gulch that surrounds the hameau and then went riding off in a random direction and sat in a bit of meadow and ate one of my tomatoes. At some point, possibly then, I discovered that a bolt just under the bike-seat had torn my capris, which I was wearing. Sucks to that. I like them, and they're my only "elegant" pants that aren't full-length.
It was nearing two hours that I'd had the bike out, and I was definitely not going to have it out for more than that: five dollars an hour. I thought I might read for five minutes or so and then head back, but just then, Lindsay, Robyn and Anna showed up again. So I walked back with them. They told me they'd found a hedge maze in the Trianon. I asked if they were interested in renting a boat and rowing around the canal, but it turned out that Jess and Jody were currently doing exactly that, and they were to all meet up and go around the museum and more of the château because they had gotten the 20 euro see-everything pass. Me? I prefer freedom. Anyway, they sat at the edge of the canal near the boat dock and waited, and I returned the bike, looked for a restroom and somewhere to fill my water bottle, and bought some cassis sorbet. (Still not as good as Berthillon, but fairly nice.) When I got back to the canal, planning to head along it toward the Trianons and the hamlet, they were still there. So I waited with them and got to laugh at Jess and Jody and their rowing attempts when they eventually showed up. We then finally parted company for good.
I managed to wind up where I wanted after a few false starts in wrong directions — walking wasn't actually so bad once I stopped missing the ease and speed of biking. I didn't see all of the two Trianons, because what I really wanted to see was the hamlet, and the gardens are vast. I may have found the hedge maze, but it wasn't very mazy. It also took me a while to get to the hamlet, because the English gardens are currently closed off for restoration. (I'd like to see them; I'll go back to Versailles some day, I think.) The hamlet was very sweet, though. There were donkeys (or maybe mules?) and goats and chickens and dogs and sheep, and there were lots of little half-timbered houses. As had been the case all over Versailles, someone was selling fresh-squeezed orange juice for three euros. Very extravagant. But I commented on how silly the price was, and he said I could have a cup for two. Which I thought was more reasonable, especially as he ended up filling the cup all the way to the brim. Anyway, the houses were much more elegant and twee than the ones at Chantilly, but I'd known that would be the case. It was really like being in a little village; the region taken up by the hamlet was quite large, and each of the houses had vegetable gardens and/or flower gardens. There were also flowers everywhere else. Staircases that spiraled up the sides of little towers or simply led up to balconies were hung with wisteria, and burgeoning pots of flowers marched directly up their middles. There was a stream with a few bridges (how could there not be a stream? who ever heard of a locus amoenus without water?), and the stream had ducks and swans and was chock full of catfish. (They might have been carp with little whiskers, but if no carp have whiskers, they were catfish.) A few people were throwing breadcrumbs to the fish, which caused a literal feeding frenzy; every so often you could hear a popping sound as a fish closed its mouth on empty air, and you could see more fish arrowing in from far away, their fins cutting little rills through the water. I saw a dragonfly, or several, though only one at a time, that was dark with a bright light blue patch on its back. Rather like this userpic of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pameladean's, really.
The vegetable gardens had squashes and things, and one patch had artichokes that were as of yet just the leaves, and one of the flower beds was bright with nasturtiums, and you couldn't, sadly, walk through any of them. And then, round behind one of the houses (I feel like I'm saying, "But round the end of a cucumber frame..."), I discovered a very familiar plant, not even remotely behind a fence. Rather, a lot of plants, of three varieties. They were as follows. White currant, red currant, raspberry. And each of the types had at least some berries.... So I happily stuffed my face with the last currants and raspberries of the season (it seems rather early for it to be the end of the season, but that's what it looked like) and felt monstrously pleased. Since I'm me, this was, perhaps, the highlight of my day.
After a while I headed back to the chateau, intending to look through the gardens proper for a bit before I left. But by the time I got there, I was exhausted. Nonetheless, I started heading over toward the Orangerie, since I'm still not entirely clear on what an Orangerie is. Before I reached it, though, I got distracted by an open gate to one of the groves, the one with the Bath of Apollo, designed by Hubert Robert, whose paintings I'd been looking at in the Louvre not so many days before that. I headed inside and came out on a clearing with grass and a pool and a towering craggy rock. The pool only had a very thin layer of glassy-looking water in it, but the rock was marked here and there with statues. I was too tired to really notice what the statues were of, but they were impressive nonetheless, and it was fun to see them outside in such a "natural" setting. Instead, I lay down on the grass in the shade, planning to possibly read or write something, and fell asleep for about a half hour. When I woke up, I was just at the edge of the shade and the sun, and I thought I'd be sensible and head home. Which I did, without any mishaps that I can recall.
That evening, I was planning to do very little of anything, but instead Eric (whom I'd met a couple weeks before) phoned me and asked if I wanted to have dinner or a drink. I thought I'd be polite and say yes, because he was perfectly nice and it's always good to practice French. I'd eaten already, so I had orange juice and he ate the French equivalent of a kebab and we talked a bit, and then I went home and tried to write this entry and eventually decided that sleep was the better part of valor. But now I've finally done it.
It came up on Saturday, and again last night, that some of the CEA group were also going to Versailles today. As I knew that if I left the Cité with them I'd also feel compelled to stay with them later, despite having commented that I intended to go around on my own, I waited to leave until after they were gone. (What this really means is that I woke up at 7:00 and then checked e-mail from 45 minutes.)
There were no problems with transportation, for once, but I would like to note at this juncture that I am still being amused by the fact that the RER C trains have names. Such as Sven, which cracks me up. From what I've seen, the other RER trains sometimes have real names, but it's not so consistent.
So I ended up getting to Versailles at around 10:45 and went hunting for some bread to complete my lunch. I had bought cheese and tomatoes and paté at Franprix the night before, when I was buying wine, but saw absolutely no point in getting bread in France a day early. Then I headed to the château and wandered around trying to find the correct entrance. Apparently, I'd mistaken the sign indicating the entrance for one of those boards they put up around a construction site (funny, how could I have made that mistake?), but asking a guard where I could buy a ticket resulted in my getting sent round the houses a bit. To be fair, I think he actually did know where I could get the ticket and tried to tell me, but he told me in English, and I think some idiom such as "behind the building" (as compared with the more correct "around the building") confused the matter. I ended up at the garden gate, and the guard there told me helpfully that I wanted entrance A. Well, I hadn't seen an A in the main courtyard. So I went back, and this is when I identified my error with the big green board.
I knew that I wanted to spend more of my time going around the grounds than staying inside the château, and I knew that I didn't want to spend the entire sum of 20 euros on my ticket either, so I just visited the grandes appartements. They were nice enough, and took something over an hour to actually get all the way through, and there were some paintings I really liked, but my favorite things far and away were the painted ceilings and the long room which quite conceivably has a picture of every major battle which France has ever fought. In one of the first rooms, which more often held things pertaining to the palace than things actually from the palace, there was a lovely map of France done in colored marble. There was also, in one of these rooms, a painting that I found quite disturbing. It was by Vignon, and it depicted two women who were identified as Françoise-Marie de Bourbon and Louise-Françoise de Bourbon. Accompanying them was a little black maid, and a little dog was held on one of their laps. Herein lay the disturbing nature of the image. The dog's eyes, as far as I could see, matched precisely the eyes of the black girl, and they had similar expressions of wide-eyed surprise (or something) on their faces, creating an odd reflection between degraded human on the one hand and the anthropomorphised (I may be taking a bit of a leap, but it's a French dog, for goodness' sake) animal on the other.
There were lots of tour groups taking up too much space, but I survived that aspect. It didn't seem quite so bad as I'd been warned it would be, in any case, probably because I was in fact there in the middle of the week. It was also fun playing spot-the-language when passing each group; from a distance, everything sounded like French, but in fact we had Italian, German, English, and several groups of Spanish. There may have been Russian or something, too, I can't remember any more.
In the room with the battle scenes was a painting depicting a battle in the American Revolution, and it had George Washington, and this made me feel stupidly patriotic enough that I took a picture of it. Yes, go ahead and laugh. On a less embarrassing note, I liked the different costumes in the battle scenes from different eras.
There was a long hall with busts of famous people (kings, writers, artists, etc.); it had busts of some very early kings, and it had a bust of Charlemagne, too, and I found myself wondering if the real people actually looked anything at all like these images.
When I'd made my way through the grand apartments, I went into the garden to eat lunch. The cheese, which was Cabécon du Périgord, was very nice. I'd managed to forget my knife so for the paté I improvised with the lid of the tin (it was one of the pull-off kinds). I was sitting on the grass eating, having checked to make sure there were no signs forbidding such an act, and I got through most of my lunch without being disturbed. But eventually a guard came over and told me not that there was no sitting on the grass, but that there was no eating on the grass. Eating was only allowed "over there" (which I'm assuming meant the marble bench on which I finished my meal. At least no one corrected this impression).
After lunch I wandered down toward the canal, heading through the bosky groves (yes, that is, in fact, tautologous, as I now know; bosky comes from, or at least from the same root as, bosquet, or "grove." I always assumed it meant "shady," not "with lots of bushes in"). Sadly, said groves were fenced off. I peered longingly through the wooden lattices, but I figured I'd get in major trouble if I unlatched the (easily unlatchable) gate from the inside and went in. Ahem. So I manfully resisted the temptation (there wasn't even a lock!) and went to rent a bike. See, this was my plan: I'd rent a bike and see the grounds that way, because I'd cover a lot more space and get a lot less tired, and I could manage to see all the things I wanted to.
The guy at the bike rental let me pick my own bike, so I found one that actually had gears and was, happily, adjusted to a sensible height. Then I trawled off into lime-lined lanes and pot-holed paths. Actually, the lanes were pot-holed and the paths more root-filled, but I thought I'd go with the bad alliteration, having strayed in that direction. (For that matter, I wouldn't swear to the trees being limes, either.) I went all the way along one side of the canal, then went around and tooled along some of the other paths on that side. There were people rowing rowboats on the canal, and some people had abandoned ship and were swimming instead. Eventually, I came back around, headed across to the other side of the canal, and discovered the Petit Trianon and the Grand Trianon. Annoyingly, it turned out I couldn't go in with my bike, but I rode through the surrounding parks a tiny bit. And then I ran into Lindsay and Robyn and Anna! I walked with them briefly, until they got to the Trianon, and then I departed, as I couldn't actually join them in there. I headed up to the Queen's Hamlet, which is theoretically like the one I saw at Chantilly, but it turned out I couldn't take my bike in there either. This made me vaguely peeved. I had rented the bike specifically so that it would take me less time to cover the ground to the various places I wanted to see. On the other hand, I couldn't really be cross, as I'd been having a brilliant time riding around anyway. So I skirted along the edge of the gulch that surrounds the hameau and then went riding off in a random direction and sat in a bit of meadow and ate one of my tomatoes. At some point, possibly then, I discovered that a bolt just under the bike-seat had torn my capris, which I was wearing. Sucks to that. I like them, and they're my only "elegant" pants that aren't full-length.
It was nearing two hours that I'd had the bike out, and I was definitely not going to have it out for more than that: five dollars an hour. I thought I might read for five minutes or so and then head back, but just then, Lindsay, Robyn and Anna showed up again. So I walked back with them. They told me they'd found a hedge maze in the Trianon. I asked if they were interested in renting a boat and rowing around the canal, but it turned out that Jess and Jody were currently doing exactly that, and they were to all meet up and go around the museum and more of the château because they had gotten the 20 euro see-everything pass. Me? I prefer freedom. Anyway, they sat at the edge of the canal near the boat dock and waited, and I returned the bike, looked for a restroom and somewhere to fill my water bottle, and bought some cassis sorbet. (Still not as good as Berthillon, but fairly nice.) When I got back to the canal, planning to head along it toward the Trianons and the hamlet, they were still there. So I waited with them and got to laugh at Jess and Jody and their rowing attempts when they eventually showed up. We then finally parted company for good.
I managed to wind up where I wanted after a few false starts in wrong directions — walking wasn't actually so bad once I stopped missing the ease and speed of biking. I didn't see all of the two Trianons, because what I really wanted to see was the hamlet, and the gardens are vast. I may have found the hedge maze, but it wasn't very mazy. It also took me a while to get to the hamlet, because the English gardens are currently closed off for restoration. (I'd like to see them; I'll go back to Versailles some day, I think.) The hamlet was very sweet, though. There were donkeys (or maybe mules?) and goats and chickens and dogs and sheep, and there were lots of little half-timbered houses. As had been the case all over Versailles, someone was selling fresh-squeezed orange juice for three euros. Very extravagant. But I commented on how silly the price was, and he said I could have a cup for two. Which I thought was more reasonable, especially as he ended up filling the cup all the way to the brim. Anyway, the houses were much more elegant and twee than the ones at Chantilly, but I'd known that would be the case. It was really like being in a little village; the region taken up by the hamlet was quite large, and each of the houses had vegetable gardens and/or flower gardens. There were also flowers everywhere else. Staircases that spiraled up the sides of little towers or simply led up to balconies were hung with wisteria, and burgeoning pots of flowers marched directly up their middles. There was a stream with a few bridges (how could there not be a stream? who ever heard of a locus amoenus without water?), and the stream had ducks and swans and was chock full of catfish. (They might have been carp with little whiskers, but if no carp have whiskers, they were catfish.) A few people were throwing breadcrumbs to the fish, which caused a literal feeding frenzy; every so often you could hear a popping sound as a fish closed its mouth on empty air, and you could see more fish arrowing in from far away, their fins cutting little rills through the water. I saw a dragonfly, or several, though only one at a time, that was dark with a bright light blue patch on its back. Rather like this userpic of
pameladean's, really.The vegetable gardens had squashes and things, and one patch had artichokes that were as of yet just the leaves, and one of the flower beds was bright with nasturtiums, and you couldn't, sadly, walk through any of them. And then, round behind one of the houses (I feel like I'm saying, "But round the end of a cucumber frame..."), I discovered a very familiar plant, not even remotely behind a fence. Rather, a lot of plants, of three varieties. They were as follows. White currant, red currant, raspberry. And each of the types had at least some berries.... So I happily stuffed my face with the last currants and raspberries of the season (it seems rather early for it to be the end of the season, but that's what it looked like) and felt monstrously pleased. Since I'm me, this was, perhaps, the highlight of my day.
After a while I headed back to the chateau, intending to look through the gardens proper for a bit before I left. But by the time I got there, I was exhausted. Nonetheless, I started heading over toward the Orangerie, since I'm still not entirely clear on what an Orangerie is. Before I reached it, though, I got distracted by an open gate to one of the groves, the one with the Bath of Apollo, designed by Hubert Robert, whose paintings I'd been looking at in the Louvre not so many days before that. I headed inside and came out on a clearing with grass and a pool and a towering craggy rock. The pool only had a very thin layer of glassy-looking water in it, but the rock was marked here and there with statues. I was too tired to really notice what the statues were of, but they were impressive nonetheless, and it was fun to see them outside in such a "natural" setting. Instead, I lay down on the grass in the shade, planning to possibly read or write something, and fell asleep for about a half hour. When I woke up, I was just at the edge of the shade and the sun, and I thought I'd be sensible and head home. Which I did, without any mishaps that I can recall.
That evening, I was planning to do very little of anything, but instead Eric (whom I'd met a couple weeks before) phoned me and asked if I wanted to have dinner or a drink. I thought I'd be polite and say yes, because he was perfectly nice and it's always good to practice French. I'd eaten already, so I had orange juice and he ate the French equivalent of a kebab and we talked a bit, and then I went home and tried to write this entry and eventually decided that sleep was the better part of valor. But now I've finally done it.
