Adventures in France 2002: Versailles
Ah, Versailles…I have seen you before. But never with a super VIP pass. If only I had known everything would be free, free, free - I would have stayed longer! The last time I came here I passed sleepily (with many Italians who had left some of their important hygiene items at home) through your corridors and ended up asleep on the mall. Oh my misspent youth!
This time around I skipped the ultimately dull palace and headed straight for the fantabulous “Hamlet.” Marie Antoinette, who apparently had tired of her many public duties and of the brutal court, commissioned a “peasant village” so to play out her fantasies of a simple country life. She would invite a small group of friends to the resulting Hamlet during holidays and even played the role of shepherdess, in full costume of course. Around 1774, Antoinette destroyed parts of Louis XV’s botanical gardens, which scientists used for research, in order to plant lovely sprawling English-style garden. Today, the Hamlet has been completely restored (by the Rockefeller Foundation after the war under the “Gift to France” program) and includes a functioning water wheel, several abodes, a small pond with corresponding wooden bridges, a garden with cabbage and legumes, and there is even a fenced yard full of sheep, birds, goats, cows, a couple of sad looking horses, and a gigantic Great Pyrenees. The Hamlet is indeed charming and one cannot (or at least I couldn’t) help but feel a tinge of sympathy for the Hapsburg princess who became a Queen in a land and time hostile to her. Antoinette’s last words were an apology to her executioner when she stepped on his foot on her way to the swift justice of the guillotine.
