The Palace of Versailles: fancy stuff and a little bit of racism

Last Sunday we visited Versailles.  Graham and I visited Versailles the day after we got engaged in 2007 but we only went into the gardens that day because the queue to enter the palace was craaazzy.  We loved our visit to the gardens, in fact here's a picture of us loving it that day:

Fast forward four years and a new wardrobe for Graham (although sadly not for me...) and we are older, wiser and have time to check whether there might be a way to avoid the queue.   

I looked online at the group tour options and lo and behold there was an "education tour" for student groups.  I quickly realised that if all of the people going to Paris from Graham's college committed to come on the tour we would not only skip the line but also save quite a bit of cash!  A few e-mails later we had a tour booked for 12 of us, I had asked what the tour included but got no response prior to our arrival on Saturday.  

We arrived, checked in at a separate entrance, got our headsets and then entered the palace by a side door bypassing all the queues, hurray!  

Next we followed our guide into a very quiet part of the building and she began to give us a tour of Louis XV's private apartments.  We quickly realised that these rooms are not open to the public and as the tour progressed we were more and more amazed at the wonderful rooms that she took us into and the very interesting stories that she told us about how the palace worked, why it was so big (it had 10 000 inhabitants + thousands of daily visitors!) and the people that lived in it over a period of one hundred years before the revolution started in 1789.

Here's a shot of one of the rooms that we went into, amazing gold leaf everywhere.

Louis IV was very interested in science and had the meridian traced on the floor of this room.  See the line on the wood flooring?

This clock is the centrepiece of the room (named creatively, the clock room).  It was crafted by the King's engineer and tells the day of the week, moon phase, time, year, etc all the way up to 9999.  Amazing!

This, we were told, is the Mona Lisa of furniture.  It took 10 years to build and was the first rolltop desk ever made. 

The inlay on this desk was unbelievable, plus there were secret drawers and all sorts, all so the king didn't have to clean up his desk at the end of the day!

We fully realised what a special tour we were getting when, at the end of the tour, our guide led us directly into the centre of the royal chapel while all the rest of the tourists had to stand behind a velvet rope.  Crazy!  


At one point another tourist tried to join us and our guide pushed her back behind the rope and then told us that she hates Russians: "an Italian maybe I would let in but never a Russian!".  Hilarious, and also good that she didn't look too closely at the last name of the person who booked the tour she was giving!

The Royal Chapel

After our tour we were able to visit the public apartments of Versailles where we realised just how lucky we had been to have our guided tour.  The public rooms were absolutely packed with people and we could really only see the rooms from above six feet since the crowd blocked everything below that.  


Nevertheless the rooms were beautiful and the famous hall of mirrors was spectacular.

 Us with my Moster Hanne who was visiting us over the weekend.

 Almost as fancy as my bed at home.

We also found a bust of the playwright (Quinault) our street is named after in one of the halls. Nice hair.

After three and half hours in the palace (and having seen less than 10% of the rooms) it was time to enter the gardens.  They are absolutely wonderful and deserve a whole post of their own which you can read here.