The profane

This afternoon, we spent a few hours at Versailles, the profane end of the trip (profane as in "not sacred" or "secular"). The main thing we were interested in was the gardens, although I really wanted to see the Hall of Mirrors in the palace. To see anything in the palace, you must travel the whole tourist route through the building, with people packed shank to flank and stopping over and over again to take photographs. I took very few in the Louvre and none inside the palace at Versailles, figuring that most of what was there had been photographed a million times, often by professionals who could do a far better job of it than I could. I get distracted by the act of photography sometimes and forget to enjoy what is right in front of me. After a while I got fairly irritated at having to make my way through people who were stopping not to look at what they were seeing or admire it or think quietly about it but to take photos of the same obvious things that everyone else was photographing and that I'm sure are featured in the books you can buy in the gift shop. (The worst is the people stepping back to try and capture family and friends against whatever fabulous backdrop we were all supposed to be enjoying, thus causing more congestion--and for what? to prove that they had been there? in every single room?).

Yeah, I know, what do you expect if you want to see anything inside the palace? Griping aside, the palace is a marvel. The chapel was even more impressive than the Hall of Mirrors in terms of beauty, harmony, and scale, but I still felt a bit of a thrill in the Hall of Mirrors, largely because of the historic events that have occurred there (most notably, the Treaty of Versailles was signed there in 1919, ending World War I). Al Stewart has an excellent song called "League of Notions" about the establishment of the League of Nations after the war; it begins "I'm here sitting in the wreck of Europe with a map of Europe spread out in a hall in Versailles...".

The gardens were delightful. The scale of Versailles is truly astonishing, and the highly groomed flower beds and trees exemplify the French style of formal gardens in which nature is controlled and rendered harmonious. I tend to prefer a more natural style, but still, this was quite an impressive example of the formal approach.

This view is from the Apollo fountain, partway down the long, long lawn from the palace:

Rick Steves, whose 2011 guidebook to Paris has been invaluable, describes this view thus:

Looking back at the palace from here, realize that the distance you just walked is only a fraction of this vast complex of buildings, gardens, and waterways. Be glad you don't have to mow the lawn.

The grounds include a Grand Canal (not the Grand Canal, obviously) and some faux ancient ruins (built because the grounds did not boast any real ancient ruins). These things reminded me a bit of Las Vegas, which happily plunders images of landmarks from around the world to create its own little world. Life must have been pretty good for the privileged few who lived in the Sun King's special world, although I wonder what he would think of all the lesser folk like me going through his palace today. I also wonder if he would have done anything differently if he had known what was coming down the road for his descendants at the end of the 18th century. It was impossible for me to view all this opulence without remembering a quote from Will Durant: "We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution."