Versailles: A peasant girl in a palace

Let them eat cake!

Melancholy and megalomania in Versailles

Anyone who visits Paris and has more than three days to spend really must go and visit Versailles. It's an easy commute with RER-train C, which drops you off around 15 minutes walking from the palace.

What can be said about Versailles, that doesn't drown in superlatives and adjectives? Especially the letter M turns out to be very useuful. It's truly magnificent, magnanimous, megalomaniac, monumental, majestic... but also monstruously large, mercilessly exhausting and massively overrun.


In peak season, the queues to get into the palace are enormous and even though the rooms, hallways and stairwells are colossal, it does get crowded inside. It is a much, much better idea to stick to the enormous gardens, where there is ample room for everyone. Visit during the weekend, and chances are that the fountains are running. A truly incredible spectacle, well worth the admission fee.

Worth shelling out for even more are the golf buggies you can rent. The gardens are absolutely vast, and even reaching the start of the 'Tapis Vert' will take you half an hour. A brisk stroll to the Trianons will take almost an hour. And it's really there that you should go. Not only because the main palace is overcrowded with groups who rarely have enough time to make it to the back of the gardens, but also because the Trianons are built to a more human scale, and therefore are much more enchanting.

The golf buggies themselves are quite marvellous and chic, as you would expect. During the drive, beautiful baroque music sounds from the in-built speaker, and when you approach some interesting sight, the appopriate commentary sounds. Best of all is that you cannot get lost: turn off the allowed paths and the engine shuts down. Brilliant.

Behind the Grand and Petit Trianon is the quirkiest place in all of Versailles: the Hameau de la Reine. The Queen's Village, a postcard-pretty farm village with cute cottages and farms dotted around a scenic lake. Here, Marie-Antoinette escaped to with her ladies in waiting, to indulge herself in the ultimate fantasy for a super-rich queen living in a colossal palace. To be a farm girl!

Unrestrained by the stifling court protocol (and the even more stifling corsets!), queen Marie-Antoinette dressed up in a simple peasant dress (made of silk, undoubtedly) and milked carefully selected cows using a special bucket from the porcelain manufacture of Sèvres. How many farm girls dream of being a princess living in a palace? Marie-Antoinette did the exact opposite and that's probably why I think she's as silly as she is endearing.

So, when on a fateful day in july 1789, a messenger warned her that the mobs outside the palace were angry and hungry, she giggled and said 'Let them eat cake!'. I really think she meant well, she was probably just baking a cake herself in the bakery of her village. Sadly, she was grossly misunderstood, and she ended up losing everything.


Sometimes I wonder what her last thoughts were in october 1793, as she was driven through the jeering crowds in revolutionary Paris, on her way to the guillotine that had already claimed her husband's life two years earlier. I'm certain it wasn't the Hall of Mirrors or the grandeur of Versailles she thought of, as she laid down her young, sad head onto the block. But the simple, carefree life of a peasant girl, happily filling her Sèvres milk bucket and baking cakes in an eternal summer.