Paris 6 - Versailles

The Palace of Versailles

This would be our last full day in Paris. We would be leaving the next morning. We had one last “big ticket” visit on our list. The Palace of Versailles.

I should say that of all the critical things to see in Paris, this is the most challenging to get to. In fact, it’s not really in Paris. Rather it’s more of a suburb about 19 km. southwest of the city. There are a number of ways to get there via public transportation, but it does take a chunk out of your day.

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The massive 30,000-acre tourist destination we see today began as a simple hunting lodge built by Louis XIII in 1623. With his passing came Louis XIV who expanded the relatively small château into the beginnings of a palace. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his government to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France until 1789 when the royal family and capital returned to Paris. At one point, over 5,000 people could be accommodated in Versailles’ large living space.

The gardens of Versailles are some of the largest and most spectacular in the world and contain 372 statues, 55 water features, 600 fountains and over 20 miles of water pipes. Hundreds of thousands of plants and trees have been continually planted over the years. While this makes the gardens look amazing, in the 17th century the fragrance from these blooms in Trianon was so overpowering it made guests feel ill and drove them away.

The palace was large, but a potential oversight from the architect was the distance between the kitchen and the dining rooms. With sometimes over 5,000 people to feed, hundreds of servants were needed to get all those mouths fed. Unfortunately for the king, the distance from his seat to the kitchen was so far away, his meals were often served cold. Eventually, in the 18th century, Louis XV had private kitchens built in his private apartments.

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For the rest of the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents, and the population of the surrounding city plummeted. In 1792, the National Convention, the new revolutionary government, ordered the transfer of all the paintings and sculptures from the palace to the Louvre. In 1793, the Convention declared the abolition of the monarchy and ordered all of the royal property in the palace to be sold at auction.

Napoleon I, following his coronation, used Versailles as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, but didn’t restore it due to the huge cost. Though the palace was used in different ways over the following years, there wasn’t a serious effort to restore it until the late 1800s. It returned to the world stage in June 1919, when, after six months of negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending World War I, was signed in the Hall of Mirrors. Restoration has continued to today, interrupted only by WWII. One of the more costly endeavors has been to repurchase as much of the original furnishings as possible, auctioned off during the Revolution.

self-portrait in the Hall of Mirrors

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The palace is large enough that when visiting with children, it’s important to maintain a certain pace as you move from room to room. With the large crowds and seemingly endless series of rooms, it’s a lot, even for me. The Hall of Mirrors, the Palace show piece, gives reason to linger a bit and imagine all of the history that has happened in that room. Eventually, we made our way out into the gardens and zigzagging around the paths. A couple of the fountains are set to music – a modern enhancement that the royalty of the past would definitely have appreciated.

We concluded our visit by venturing out into the town of Versailles to carry out a task that formerly was very common and easy: sending postcards. Today it is neither. But, thanks to my wife, it was important for us to explain to our daughters what postcards are and how to mail them. Given the bother, it’s unlikely that they will replicate the effort in future travels.

We also made an effort to purchase an affordable Kylian Mbappé jersey, the football/soccer star and newly named captain of the French national team. In the end, we opted on ordering it in the US and I picked one up a week later for half the price. The specific request from our daughter, Kinaya, was that it would not be the national team jersey but of his team, Paris Saint-Germain. Unfortunately, he’s shopping for a new team and the PSG jersey is in the process of becoming a relic.

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Thus ended our time in Paris. The next morning, we all headed to the airport. We said our good-byes as my wife and daughters went to one terminal (to return to Nairobi) and I went to another (to carry on to the US). The trip was amazing and well worth the effort to squeeze it into our (my) calendar. The busyness would now be cranked up a notch or two.