Petite Trianon

So Louis XV decided that a palace and the Grand Trianon weren't big enough to house all of his various mistresses, so he built the Petite Trianon, but then he died, and Marie Antoinette moved in and turned it into EuroDisney, the end.

My history degree was worth EVERY PENNY.



I don't really know what she's guilty of besides being wildly insensitive, so I'm going to say that based on our ramble around the Petite Trianon that she and I would have got along famously and I so, so wish we could have braided each other's powdered wigs while listening to music in her mini-concert hall.

You know, the pavilion next to the faux burned-out church:



The one flanked by likenesses of her highness as a sphinx, shaved-off nose and all:



Maybe the French beheaded her for being tacky.

The grounds were awesomely arranged and full of hidden little fun things-- ponds, streams, bridges, swings, dovecotes, topiary, but left to grow sort of wild and tangly. We were the only people in the gardens all afternoon. Nothing has been changed from when Marie designed it herself as a playground for her children.



The underground grotto (a little bench inside. And spiders.):



And then you come upon the Temple of Love, where Cupid is turning a club-like weapon into his bow, which is a weapon of love, or something. I don't think the metaphor is very well thought-out but hey, it's Rococo:



A view of the Petite Trianon from the temple and a very obliging swan:

Just a quaint little hunting lodge

So when Louis XIV wanted to get away from it all he would retreat to the Grand Trianon, which is a giant pink marble building originally designed as a hunting lodge. But because the French do it right, this 'hunting lodge' has a ballroom and gardens which (at the time anyway) were changed out and re-landscaped weekly or to match his mistresses outfits or whatever.

Gilded curlicued 'barbed wire' at the gate, very rustic:


Lots of gaming and hunting-themed rooms in the Trianon. It's like the ultimate parents' basement. The gaming hall:


And the billiards room (I actually really, really want this room):

Versailles Interiors

The Grand Palace at Versailles is basically the biggest physical monument to overcompensation in existence.

Case in point: this is me standing under the largest canvas oil painting in the world in the Grand Ballroom. It's literally hundreds of pieces of canvas pieced together to form the ceiling. The room is bigger than a football field, and I am shorter than the fireplace.



The Queen's bedroom (top picture, overexposed) features pink feathers and peacocks and fringe-y gilded everything. Those are Marie Antoinette's linens of her own design. In her defense, if I had to give birth in front of 30-odd people, I'd want the decor to provide some distraction.

By contrast the King's bedroom, with it's pink and white ostrich feathers and minty green brocade, is demure and understated:



Recently restored ceiling frescoes in the Hall of Mirrors:

Marie's great-great-grandfather-in-law (I think??) Louis XIV had either an excess of self-esteem or a serious lack of it. The entire length of the Hall of Mirrors and the ceilings in almost every room are devoted to his various victories and General Awesomeness. He also liked to have his likeness depicted as various especially powerful Greek gods. That's him in the bas-relief below, trampling his enemies underfoot and once again Being Awesome. It's easy to spot him in paintings and frescoes throughout the palace and Trianons, as he's the only dude with waist-length Weird Al hair.

Versailles - Grand Palace

Versailles is my favorite place in the world and one of the only non-fictional places I go in my head when I need to escape reality.

Just go. See all the different buildings and gardens, then pick a bedroom and hide and hope nobody finds you and you can live there forever with the headless ghost of Marie Antoinette.

Last time we were in Versailles we only paid for the Grand Palace, and it was the highlight of our entire European backpacking tour. This time we paid to get into the Petite and Grand Trianons, including Marie Antoinette's gardens and fake village, which gets a whole separate post because she built a fake village. It was so worth every penny. We spent over 9 hours in the buildings and gardens and lingered so long in the main palace that they had to shoo us out as the sun was setting. We even considered going back for a second day, just to tour the main gardens again for free.

We got to the palace super early, and skipped all the (already crowded) buildings and went directly to the gardens, which were all misty and completely deserted. By the time we made it back to the Grand Palace at the end of the day, it was also deserted while the gardens were crowded. We were the only people in the Trianons all day. It was fantastic.

The gardens of the main palace are an Alice in Wonderland-esque tangled mess of trees and fountains. Every so often a Greek god looms out of the green.

Over the past 5 years Versailles has been undergoing a massive renovation. They'd already restored the paintings and fixtures in the the Hall of Mirrors (2nd picture) and were working out the gold leaf on the exteriors when we got there (see the roof on the far right of the picture below, to see what it looked like before the gilding):

Obligatory Diana statue

Musée d'Orsay

The Orsay is an 1890's train station made over into a museum containing late 18th/early 20th century art and every fantasy I've ever had of being a Victorian-era fancy lady. I mean seriously, look at this clock. Just look at it. It's about 3 stories tall. Each of the horizontal struts in this picture is a separate floor of the museum. When the sun shines through the fogged glass you can see figures drifting all ghost-like behind it.



So you can be a Victorian Fancy Lady, or, um, Catwoman:

She was walking around the museum with her equally decked-out leather daddy, like a pair of comic book super-villains on holiday.








Paintings on top of (apparently less important) paintings.

And we went into sugar shock in the pink-frosted cupcake faux-Rococo-fresco'd glitterpony sparklekittens Grand Ballroom:

This was the pinkest room I have ever seen in my life. I thought I'd love it, but the overall effect was kind of disturbing.

The view from the roof:

From Musee d' Orsay

Learning to pronounce 'Tuileries' and 'Orangerie'

One year ago we were in Paris. So now it's time to quit procrastinating and pair the pictures with words before I forget everything.

The Tuileries are located outside the Louvre and are lovely. One especially awesome feature of the Tuileries is the abundance of heavy green chairs, which unlike in Seattle (where the meth addicts will steal anything metal that isn't bolted down) were unchained and free to drag about the park. People had grouped them around the fountains and in circles for conversation. It was super relaxing in the busiest tourist area of Paris.





O hai Diana.


The hedge maze outside the Louvre.


Note the Eiffel Tower in the background.

The Musée de l'Orangerie is located within the park. It's actually the old storage space for the palace's orange trees and was converted into an art gallery in the 1800s specifically for a series of huge Monet paintings titled Nymphéas. Unlike the Louvre next door, the rooms in the Orangerie were specifically constructed around the paintings according to Monet's direction.





We've been fortunate to see Monets all over the world, from Chicago to Hong Kong, but seeing the paintings as the artist intended was an incredible experience. The Orangerie is tiny-- only two small floors, more like an art gallery with a basement full of Picassos-- but we spent over an hour just in the two large fishbowl-shaped rooms that held the Nymphéas, which are pure white and lit only by gauzy skylights. It's a fairly disorienting experience because the exits are hidden (the one between the two panels in the picture above was an emergency exit only) so the room is full of tourists walking in circles searching for a way out.

And then the basement is full of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and pre-Cubist Picassos (below). I actually like these a lot more than the stuff we saw in Chicago, they seem softer and more emotional.