LH Franz Visiting Versailles, I anticipated a grander version of my experience at the National Archives. The history of Versailles fascinates me, from its beginnings as a country escape for Louis XIII through its development into a physical symbol of the French monarchy, a monarchy on steroids. I’d read a couple of history books about the place and had watched the recent TV series (knowing full well that the TV story had been modified somewhat for dramatic effect). This was one trip I really looked forward to.
We took the Metro to the RER to Versailles. Although hungry, we skipped the KFC next to the train station and the Starbucks and MacDonald’s across the road, and instead strolled down a pleasantly shaded tree-lined walkway towards the chateau. There was a café along the way managed by a middle-aged guy carrying on a loud and agitated telephone conversation. It involved a lot of yelling, with “Jamais dans ma vie!” repeated several times, one hand holding his mobile to one ear, waving his free hand for emphasis, all the while managing to take orders and wait on tables without missing a beat. Quite a feat.
With our “skip the line” museum passes, we did not need to wait to buy tickets. The passes, however, did not allow us to skip the security line. It was late morning, a time we subsequently discovered was the busiest time of day. The line filled the courtyard, snaking back and forth, moving at a constant slow shuffle. We ended up shuffling for over two hours under an increasingly hot sun. An hour into this experience, I wondered aloud if we shouldn’t cut our losses and leave, avoiding the trap where you’ve invested so much in what you’re doing that you feel you’re losing something if you don’t see it through to the end. Somehow we convinced ourselves to soldier on.
There were roughly a thousand people lined up with us. Like everyone, we spent a lot of time observing the humanity around us. Visitors came from all over the world. Everyone, even small children, were amazingly patient as they made their way to…
ONE security gate! ONE X-ray belt with ONE metal detector. Thousands of people. One gate. I thought of the scene in the movie Blazing Saddles where an army of desperados is tricked into going through a toll gate one by one, purposefully set up to slow them down. It was funny in the movie (a Mel Brooks movie, after all). It was not funny here. I had just spent two hours torturing the soles of my feet on hard cobblestone, using my smartphone to look up the symptoms of heat exhaustion (confirming that neither I nor Daughter were in danger of succumbing) thinking of how else we could have been spending this time.
Once inside, those thousands of visitors filled every available space in every room, reducing all movement to another slow shuffle through the palace. After the experience of waiting just to get in, and especially after seeing the bottleneck at the security station that caused us to spend the morning so miserably, I found myself less good natured with my fellow tourist travelers. In a better mood, I would be patient and smile when encountering a fellow tourist exhibiting the behavior of “I’m lost and I’m going to stand in just the best spot possible to block everyone’s ability to move past me while I figure out that my map is upside-down.” In a more generous frame of mind, I would “ahem” loudly and make hand motions indicating I want a path around them. Today, I found myself pushing my way around them to create a path, an action, by the way, much appreciated by fellow tourists behind me. Daughter was in the same frame of mind. She admitted she almost knocked a kid down on her way to the bathroom.
Our water bottles had gone empty an hour ago. Our first stop was therefore a restaurant. There were two, each with its own line, one very long and one very short. The long line was for a small “delicatessen”, the short line was for a “tea room,” a full blown restaurant and more expensive. That’s where we went. Ever cost-conscious, Daughter scanned the menu and exclaimed “Twenty euros for a sandwich!?” “Yes!” I replied. “Twenty euros for a sandwich! Eat up!”
The food was the tasty-creamy-buttery French food I’d come to love, but it was the two carafes of water and glass of wine that brought me back to normal. We had learned to be leisurely about our meals in France, and, having wasted so much time today, knowing we would not be able to see half as much as I wanted, I had no sense of urgency to see the rest of the palace. Whatever we got to see was what we would get to see. Refreshed and rehydrated, we started our tour through the chateau.
Sort of.
There were just too damned many people. There was no wandering through the galleries, appreciating the elegance surrounding us. Rather, there was a continual slog to make your way through solid walls of people. We fell into a routine: In each room, push and shove to make your way to the front of the crowd to the cordon that roped off the display so you could see what was there, push and shove to make your way back through the crowd behind you, push and shove to make your way across the floor to the next room. Repeat. Before our trip, I anticipated at least some of the old grandeur had been preserved by caring curators. Would I be able to stand in the king’s ceremonial bedroom, imagining how it would feel to plead the king’s favor on some matter or other? No, I would not. Instead, I was jostled around with a couple of hundred other folks. (Today, post-pandemic, tickets are purchased for specific date and time slots to help control the number of people who enter at any given time.)
By the time we finally left the building and turned to the gardens, I was exhausted and my feet were killing me. Daughter was in much better shape. To make the best of the situation, I gave her my camera so she could go ahead and take pictures of the gardens, then sat myself down on a bench to rest, massage my feet, and sigh deeply, which actually helped moderate my disappointment. (I think it’s the deep breathing involved in that kind of sighing that helps calm the nerves. Just my opinion.) Daughter later told me we should definitely have gone to the gardens first, where there was no line and no sardine-can experience, touring there while giving the crowd in the palace a chance to thin out a bit before hitting the chateau. Of course, that made me feel even worse.
On the train back to Paris, we were too exhausted to even talk about the experience, each of us simply resting with her own thoughts all the way back.
To end the day, we went back to the cafe where we had eaten on Tuesday.
