We were up early to go on our day-long tour of Versailles and were at the tour office at 8 am. Unfortunately, the day-long tour was overbooked, and they moved us to the half-day tour instead, which started at 2 pm. Eric was really annoyed. To distract him, we went to Saint-Chapelle, the palatine chapel in the courtyard of the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. This chapel has some of the most famous stained glass windows in the world, many of which were unfortunately being restored while we were there. The chapel also houses a large collection of saints' relics and papal treasure (we have seen a lot of the Roman Catholic Church’s collections by going through the museum of St. Peters and the Vatican Museum in Rome, the museum in Notre Dame, and then the museum in Saint-Chapelle). Unfortunately, it was overcast that morning, and the windows were not as luminous as they are in direct sunlight, but it was definitely worth the visit.
From Saint Chappelle we took the metro across town to go to the Catacombs. The Catacombs of Paris are a famous underground ossuary in Paris, France. (An ossuary is a site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains, frequently used where burial space is scarce.) The ossuary fills a rennovated section of caverns and tunnels that are the remains of Paris’s stone quarries that were used to build the city. The Catacombs collected the bones of all the cemeteries of Paris from 1786 to 1814. They hold the remains of approximately 6 million Parisians. (There are catacombs in Rome as well, but we didn’t have time to see them while we were there, so Eric was really looking forward to seeing the Paris version.)
To get to the catacombs, you walk down an incredibly narrow, windy staircase until you get to the quarries. You walk quite a long way through underground tunnels and caverns until you get to the Catacombs (and the bones themselves). The bones are artistically arranged but very hard to photograph due to the dim light. (For better photos, google “Paris Catacombs”.)
The tour took longer than we had expected (two hours), so we had to hop back on the metro and make it back to the heart of Paris to catch our bus to Versailles. After touring several Versailles replicas in Germany, it was interesting to see the real thing, which is on an enormous scale. Still, the sheer number of people everywhere took the pleasure out of it a bit, much like it had in Venice. Versailles should be seen once, but I don’t have any desire to go back.
At the palace, there was an exhibit of the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who specializes in manga and pop culture. While we applauded the idea of bringing together the modern with the historical, we found the exhibit to be pretty jarring. (Although we thought the gold statue in the garden was kind of funny. It reminded us of Napoleon.)
As our bus made its way back to Paris, we got caught up in a strike for something or other. (Paris was always on strike during the month of September. We weren’t sure if we would be able to fly into Paris because the air traffic controllers were on strike. The train conductors were threatening to go on strike the day after we left, which was the start of fashion week in Paris. One of our fellow shuttle passengers to the Milan airport made the immortal remark: “A strike in Paris – what else is new?”) We snapped a picture of crowd control from the bus. Our bus driver did a masterful job of getting us back to the tour agency.
