Bike About Versailles

Thursday, 7 June 2012

Louis XIV and his curls

When you’re the King of France at age 5, the line between God ordained monarch and regular guy isn’t blurry at all – you’re ordained by God.  Effectively you were born a King. There was never a doubt. You have known nothing else.

So when the Noble with the grandest estate in France, Nicolas Fouquet, throws a party for 6,000 people in your honor to celebrate your coming of age and assuming your born right as King, isn’t it a perfectly natural reaction to accuse your host of embezzlement, lock him in prison, and hire his painters, gardeners, architects, and anything else you need to build your own 700 room “Chateau”?

While you’re at it, install a Grand Canal in the shape of a cross large enough to reenact battles upon or have Venetians conduct you in a Gondolier. You will need to reroute the Siene, but that's a detail. Since government offices are inconveniently located 20 minutes away, at your current residence, Le Louvre in Central Paris, you will want to build new government buildings, a chapel, and basically a whole new town while you're at it.

Backroads of Versailles

And so he did. Over a 50 year period that saw him employ 40,000 people, Louis XIV guided the creation of an Estate so grand you’re best to rent a bicycle for the day to tour the grounds.

Looking down the "small" canal to the
intersection with the Grand Canal

And so we did. On four bicycles from Bike About Tours, with Amber, our Dutch/French/Anglo always animated guide, we pedal our way around the Estate.  The back gate doesn’t see the traffic of the front so few see the working dairy farms or portions of the grounds that remain closer to their hunting origins. It is bizarre to come through a section of woods and into a clearing with rows of perfectly coiffured trees along a man-made Canal intersecting another Grand Canal.

The grounds are natural enough that when the clouds open up there is nowhere to go and you get soaked. Ducking under umbrellas near Petit Trianon, a smaller palace built away from the Chateau to which the King could retreat from the stresses of court life. Louis XVI gave it to Marie Antoinette when they married. She added an Hameau, a “tiny” country village and farms to make you feel truly away from it all. Don’t worry; the staff will milk the cows for you. 

Part of Marie Antoinette's Hameau

From the perspective of common folk whose taxes funded the extravagance at Versailles, it isn’t hard to see how the French monarchy effectively came to an end when Louis XVI met the guillotine at Concorde adjacent Le Louvre. Louis XIV moved the government there in 1682 and Louis XVI moved it back to Paris in 1789 after the French Revolution began. A poster child for absolute monarchy, it certainly wasn’t an era of government “by the people and for the people.” Nevertheless, what Louis XIV created and Louis XV and XVI furthered is truly remarkable. The focus and spending on the arts fueled the Renaissance era and in so many ways came to define a culture and a nation.

Front of the Chateau with Louie's Bed Chamber in the Center

Watching the kids navigate the rutted out back roads of Versailles on bikes is a blast. It was like going back stage before the show. As we cross the cobbles through the main gate, we get the jaw dropping wow Louis XIV was after. The gates, roof lines, and ornate trim of the Chateau, Chapel, and adjoining administrative wings burst forth in fresh gold paint, bring the renaissance architecture alive with the grandeur you would expect.

Hall of Mirrors

Our first tour stop is the Chapel Louis XIV visited every day for Mass, especially later in his life. Passing through room after massive room covered in spectacular paintings, sculptor, painted ceilings, dramatic windows and fire places, they all begin to look the same. That’s when it hits you – there is no furniture anywhere. It’s like walking through a house on the market for too long. There is nothing to make the throne room look like the throne room. You can’t picture how anyone lived here.

Grand Canal View from the Hall of Mirrors

The French were so mad at Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that in destroying the people they hated their rage took much of their precious cultural history and valuables as casualties. Today the French are still trying to find and buy back the furniture and other property that wasn’t burned or otherwise destroyed. The elaborate wardrobe of the young Austrian Princess, Marie Antoinette, who came to France at age 14 to be Louis XVI’s Queen, was scattered or burned. Much of the furniture is in England having been eagerly acquired at auction for a pittance.

You know instantly when you enter the most famous room in the Chateau. Seventeen mirrors, one opposite each second floor window looking down the Grand Canal, mark your entry to the Hall of Mirrors. It doesn’t need furniture to be mesmerizing.  Louis XIV sitting on the opposite end awaiting foreign dignitaries, Louis XVI receiving Benjamin Franklin, world leaders arriving to sign the Treaty of Versailles and end World War I, you can picture it all. Allegedly it was here Louis XIV, while dressed as one of five trees at a masquerade party, met his longtime mistress Louise de La Vallière.

The King's Bedroom and center of the Chateau

Off the Hall of Mirrors, overlooking the courtyard on the front side is a waiting room to the King’s bedroom containing one of two pieces of furniture in the whole place - the King’s bed. The bed is placed at the exact center of the Chateau (he was the Sun King after all). A meeting room and dining room are beyond the bedroom before you are looped back to the Hall of Mirrors. Exiting the Hall takes you through the Queen’s chambers and the Queen’s bed, the only other piece of furniture in the place. Wide open in the corner of her bedroom is the secret door through which Marie Antoinette temporarily escaped the night Versailles was stormed by Revolutionaries.

Five things jumped out at me while touring Versailles:

Queen's Bedroom

First is the sheer size and scale of the grounds. I expected opulence and I knew it was big, but until you ride your bike around the massive grounds that surround the Chateau it isn’t possible to truly understand.

Second, Versailles is also a town complete with hotels, markets, homes, citizens, and a train station, none of which was here when Louis XIV decided to move Court from Le Louvre to Versailles.

Third, as much as Louis XIV lived his life in public and designed his Chateau – the bedroom, dining room, etc. – to be seen, he truly enjoyed getting away from the public eye. He was a hunter and an outdoors man. Moving from Central Paris was not just to build a grand estate, but also his way of getting out of the City to a place he was more comfortable and wanted to live.
Fourth, there are no kitchens anywhere in palaces. Cooking with fires had a nasty way of burning down your palace when something went wrong so kitchens are separated. “Warming Huts” are constructed nearby to warm the food back up before it is served in order to avoid the risk - no venison steaks served hot off the grille at Versailles.

Fifth, the transition from rule by Monarch to rule to a Republic didn’t go very well. Unlike England, the Monarchy was done away with entirely. The gap between Louis XVI and Napoleon, saw the reign of Terror when 30,000 people were executed in one year alone at the hands of revolutionaries who knew how to hate the Monarchy but not how to lead a country. Ultimately it was the military and Napoleon who returned France to prominence.

Our favorite thing about the day was the bike ride. Blasting through the palace grounds and the streets of Versailles was a cool twist when you aren't big museum goers in the first place. Laura’s Achilles liked the bike a lot more than walking. Hopefully we can weave more biking into our transit plan.

Bike About Versailles