#accountoftheday

[ridiculous-to-the-core]

Versailles

Sorry about writing all my accounts of the day a day late, but I'm just so exhausted that I pass out early (at 7 last night!) and don't even begin to think about how I want to record everything. Anyways, Versailles. Where to start? Something that Paris has shown me recently, and that Versailles further emphasized, is that you need to see beauty in a city during all seasons, including winter, in order to truly love the place. That's why I love Florence I think, because even in the scorching hot summer days, when your sweat sizzles on the cobblestones after it crawls down the path of your face, and the winter days, when the sun never makes it past the clouds and rain fills up the holes in the street so that walking and not standing in puddles is almost impossible, I still want to be there; I still want to call it my home.

Paris is very monochromatic in the winter, especially without snow. If there was snow I think I would love it more--white has a way of making everything beautiful and barren to me--but there is only rain and uniform lines and similar buildings. I do not love Paris. I like Paris, especially the Latin Quarter,  but I do not love it.

Versailles was similar, and yet very different. It was rainy and gray and misty. The statues were all covered up to protect them from the harsh winter elements, construction was in the works, and ice still floated on some of the fountains even though the temperatures had not dipped below freezing in almost a week. But this way, with the trees empty of their leaves and hardly any tourist wandering around, I got the image of just how BIG the gardens really are (I didn't make it inside this trip, but I just have this feeling that I will return to Versailles one day when everything is in bloom and the fountains are turned on and then I will go inside). Once you make it around the enormous stone castle the grounds went on for miles in all directions and you could hear the wind. Everywhere. Walking around, I got this feeling that it would be so easy to get lost or hide away in these gardens and in that moment, standing on those immense acres, I really, really wanted to. And so I believe there is beauty at Versailles in the winter. And so I think I love Versailles, or I at least appreciate it and its history: how Louis the 14th saw his creation as a reflection of himself and all the glory that France called her own, how Marie Antoinette was able to lead an existence there, even with a husband who never made love to her and too many prying eyes around for her to find someone else to, and how the angry mobs of revolutionary peasants just couldn't bring themselves to destroy the fabulous chateau during the late 1700s after getting rid of the Monarchs who resided there. In the end, the motto of Versailles rings true "A Toutes Les Gloires De La France"--to all the glories of France.