Mardi 17 Mai 2011, Let them eat cake

This is the view from our garret window

Up early with the sans-culottes & off to Chateau of Versailles, by some miracle got on the right train & had the right ticket & arrived with the other 500,000 tourists & school kids who had elected to visit Versailles today (& I thought the Japanese economy was going bad)

Versailles for the masses

Versailles Hall of mirrors

Do you know how long I had to wait for scene to clear? Hall of mirrors

Silver service made for George 3rd of England relica of one used by Louis XIV at this very table, original disappeared in revolution, hopefully now gracing the table of descendent of one of the sans-culottes

They had some special deal going & you had to pay another 7 euro to go through the garden to access the
Grand Trianon & Petit Trianon even if you had the tickets to the trianons, well, we baulked at that, gardens better from a distance anyway, as mostly parterre, so we walked the long way around, got to work off the pain aux raisin anyway, I can't remember the garden being extra last time. Not missing much with garden,  the greater estate around Grand Trianon & Petit Trianon more interesting.

Spent a bit of time trying to work out which was the extravagance which caused the the people to start calling Marie Antoinette "Madame la Deficit" but came to conclusion that it must have been her queens hamlet & estate as other parts of the estate were there before she came on the scene

Folly in the Versailles estate.

We think this was the Queen's little hamlet which was her undoing

Petit Trianon

Impressions of Versailles the second time around, ...  well if size does matter then it's very important because it is HUGE, took us 3 hours to go through the rooms which are open to the great unwashed, - hazard a guess 5%.

Lots of gilt & art work & no passages, one room just leads onto the next, not a lot of privacy, but not much privacy in a one room hovel either! Took a heap of photos, none very good.
 Grand Trianon same deal one room led to the next,

Terrace of Grand Trianon, columns pink marble

I was there