Chateau de Versailles

Now I’ve seen some fancy houses; Hearst Castle in northern California with its indoor/outdoor swimming pool and North Carolina’s Biltmore House built by the Vanderbilts with its bowling alley in the basement. And I’ve seen some castles in the British Isles. But never have I seen anything to even come close to the opulence of Versailles in France, or more correctly, Chateau de Versailles.


We had bought the Paris Museum Pass online which included admission to Versailles as well as other attractions. An early train out of Paris had us in the village of Versailles within an hour. The palace is about a half mile walk from the train station. There is no problem finding it; you just follow the crowds. Much to my dismay, in the parking lot were dozens of tour busses. After all it was Sunday morning. It was the “wrong day” to visit. It’s just impossible to schedule to see each attraction on the “right day”. However, since we had bought our tickets, we did not have to wait in the long line to buy a ticket and could enter immediately. After entering through the gate you enter the chateau on the right.

The first thing you notice is the vastness of the place. Its humble beginning was a hunting lodge in 1623 and it was expanded by various kings into what it is today. Louis the XIV was most responsible for the creation of the chateau as we know it today. Louis considered himself the “Sun King” and moved the seat of the French government to Versailles. He obviously had no small ego as represented by the hundreds of sculptures and paintings of him. The Chateau de Versailles castle has over 2,000 windows, 700 rooms, over 1,200 fireplaces, and 67 staircases. In 1837 King Louis-Phillipe made the palace a national museum and commissioned 3,000 works of art to adorn its walls.

As you move through the vast halls and rooms of the chateau you get a glimpse of life at the very top of the French social structure in the 18th century. One of the great halls is given to giant paintings of great moments in French history. As with all the art work the paintings are impressive. There is one thing I found quite distasteful: among the beautiful old artworks were modern Japanese sculptures. I thought they would have been more at home in Tate Modern in London or the MOMA in NY. We visited the royal apartments of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the chapel, and Napoleon’s coronation room, but the most spectacular room was the Hall of Mirrors. The Galerie des Glaces is 250 feet long and has 17 arched mirrors facing the arched windows and the gardens beyond. It was also the room in which the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 ending hostilities with Germany in WWI. Some say this treaty was the beginning of WWII.

We exited the chateau for an overview of the gardens. The Versailles gardens include around 1,300 fountains, which use water pumped from the River Seine. You can view a fountain show at a weekend from April until September. A Dutch couple took our picture and we did the same for them. (We do a lot of this while traveling.) We didn’t tour the gardens. That was a separate ticket, and we did not have the time. At such attractions as this you can spend hours, maybe days, looking at everything. The walk back to the train station was not crowded, a reprieve. We grabbed a café while waiting for the train.

I believe I’ve seen the house of houses, the mansion of mansions, the castle of castles, the palace of palaces and the chateau of chateaus. Chateau de Versailles!