Werdness and irony at Versailles

4/18 Friday
(5/20)
That Thursday we made the requisite trip to Versailles. Caspar from The Improfessionals joined us and the three of us had a lovely, tourist-crowded time.
All of the Louis XIV grandeur was, of course, grand, and ostentatious. One can look back at my open letter to the Hapsburg Dynasty and re-address that to the Bourbons as well.

My favorite bit of irony in the palace includes the Hall of Mirrors, where the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
As one passes through the galleries leading into the Hall of Mirrors, it’s necessary to pass a portrait of Alexander pardoning his defeated Persian foe Darius. While the scene in the “historical” portrait never actually took place, the story it portrays is clear: The victorious Alexander strengthens his victory and therefore his empire by showing mercy on his defeated enemy.
The diplomats and statesmen who signed the Treaty of Versailles must have walked past this painting, on their way to humiliating and emasculating Germany and setting the stage for World War II.

The weirdest part of the complex is the Marie Antoinette estate. Slightly weird is the small baroque opera house she had built for herself, in which she performed French comedies as a clever method of learning the language after her move from Austria. Clearly she’d never heard the phrase that all one needs for theater is “two planks and a passion.”
Very weird is the miniature peasant village. As a faux-intellectual, the queen fundementalized some theories of Rousseau which declared the nobility of the peasantry. In an attempt to return to these noble peasant roots, the Hapsburg queen spnt a fortune to have her own little Disneyland peasant village built. She and her court would dress in country garb and go slumming in this weird, scaled down rural village. There are several small farmhouses, a scaled down mill with a scaled down water-wheel, and presumably “real” peasants to work the town when she felt like attending her own personal amusement park. If I was an 18th century peasant and I knew she was passing her time in an expensive movie-set peasant village, I’d be screaming for her head as well!

Don’t forget there’s an actual town of Versailles in addition to the palaces. For lunch we took our customary diversion from the tourist track and found ourselves a wonderful, not so expensive restaurant just 15 minutes or so from the palace complex. It’s well worth it to avoid the museum café for lunch.