Visit to the Chateau de Versailles

Yesterday I went with my friend Nancy to the Musee D'Orsay, which is one of my favorite museums in the whole world.  Today we went from the sublime to the well, not ridiculous, but perhaps overdone is the right word:  the famous palace of Louis XIV, the Chateau de Versailles.  Louis took a hunting lodge and turned it into what many people consider a sumptuous and enormous palace.  I personally consider it the enormous, gaudy estate of someone with meglamania and too much of other people's money.  Here's a photo of just the gate to the estate:

Room after room of more gilt than anyone ought to have (and paintings every where, mostly of Louis or of gods he saw himself as representing).  One should scrape off the gilt and give it to the starving kids of the world!   But see below for what I did like--the gardens.

Below is the hall of mirrors.  I have to admit that it has astonishing beauty.

 

And it wouldn't be as impressive with white instead of gilt, but still....  Here's a closeup of one of the candle holders (electric now).

I also took photos of the floors--see the above photo--the inlay floor is nicer than in almost everyone's home, and we thousands of tourists just walked all over it.  Below is one of one of the many pieces of beautiful fabric that is all over the chateau.  This one happens to drape the king's bed.

The gardens of Versailles are quite remarkable.  They have 300 pools of water, all artificially constructed (there were 1500 originally).  Lovely flowers and lots of trees.  I favor the gardens because they give people a place to enjoy nature (and in the case of Versailles, lots of sculpture).
These two photos were taken from the second floor of the chateau, the first is the view onto the Royal Allee, which continues as far as the eye can see.  The second shows a garden section with the morning mist in the forest at the edge of the garden.

This is the fountain of Apollo, the sun god, after whom Louis XIV fashioned himself.  It was my favorite spot in Versailles.  Water and sculpture always works for me.

When King Louis XVI (descendant of Louis XIV) was beheaded, Versailles was overrun by people who pilfered many items.  It was restored at great cost by the kings of the 19th century and then was neglected again.  Later much of the furniture was sold off, and Versailles itself was almost sold (it was in a bad way).  It took a lot of money and many years to restore it.  In the photo below, you can see a piece of Versailles that is still being worked on.  In the 1900s, one of the people who contributed to its repair was John Rockefeller, who also paid a lion's share of the restoration of the cathedral at Reims, which was destroyed in WW1.