Paris: The Gardens of Versailles

"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden, I do not doubt but that he concludes it was something approaching that of Versailles..." Horace Walpole

{Versailles, France}

I didn’t love Versailles. It’s a little too much for me: too crowded, too gold, too big, too ostentatious. Only a small portion of the rooms are open to the public, but considering there are over 2300 rooms in total, you still get an opportunity to see quite a few rooms. The chateau is a whopping 680,000 square feet, and the surrounding grounds cover around 37,000 acres. The numbers are overwhelming. The chateau itself is so large that it is difficult to get a picture of it. This is how far you have to back up to get the entire facade in one photo:

So it was a relief to get out into the gardens, to be able to breathe again. The gardens at Versailles are massive: the formal gardens contain 75 fountains and countless hundreds of sculptures. Beyond that is a wooded great park, and a grand canal.

But the best part is off to the side, not part of the formal gardens at all. This is Marie-Antoinette’s estate - the bit she had built for when she had to get away from the king and his court. Which, rumor has it, was pretty often.

At the front of the estate is a lovely small chateau - The Petit Trianon - which the preceding king, Louis XV actually had made for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Louis XVI gifted it to his new wife, Marie-Antoinette, upon their marriage. The chateau is surrounded by bucolic English-style gardens.

And beyond that is the charming Queen’s Hamlet, a series of cottages that form a small village (hamlet) around a pond on the edge of the estate. The conventional wisdom is that Marie-Antoinette had her hamlet built to remind her of her childhood in Austria, though the truth is she was a Habsburg and was born in the Hofburg Palace in the heart of Vienna. She more likely was influenced by a trend for all things pastoral, and had her hamlet built in a generic “country” style.

The hamlet includes a watermill, and even a working farm. The queen used her hamlet as a means of escape from court life for herself and for her children. After visiting Versailles, I can’t say that I blame her.