Bonjour! I’ve had an incredible time exploring Paris over the past week, embracing the delicious food, rich culture, and stunning architecture. There is truly nothing better than flâneuring around the city, following your nose to a boulangerie, and successfully ordering a croissant in broken French. The French are really onto something with these pastries!
Aside from eating mouth-watering food, we’ve spent our morning seminars discussing the causes and events of the French Revolution, and after exploring Versailles yesterday, I fully sympathize with the revolutionaries.
Although the characters did not visit Versailles in A Tale of Two Cities, it represents a key cause of the revolution: class divides. The incredible opulence of the palace and surrounding gardens is enough to make anyone realize how unfair life must have been for everyone who was not at the very top of French society.
Walking through the town on the way to the château, there was nothing in particular that jumped out at me. It seemed like an ordinary and quiet country town. However, turning the corner onto Ave. de Paris, I found myself awestruck at the pure size of the Château de Versailles. It loomed over the town on its hill, and the golden gates glistened in the mid-morning sunlight.
We began our tour in the main château. Intricately carved statues lined long halls, and thick tapestries hung on the walls. Looking up, I marveled at the stunning frescoes that covered the ceilings in many of the rooms, most notably in the royal chapel.
To think that this residence was home to so few kings amazes me. While the nobility walked these gilded halls, the lower classes struggled to afford a stale piece of black bread. Dickens explored the ignorance of the aristocrats through the Marquis. The Marquis ran over a child without a second thought, throwing down a coin as an offering for the life he had just taken. Just as Versailles sits above the town on its little hill, the upper class thought themselves to be on a whole other level.
In order to immerse ourselves in the full opulence of Versailles, we stopped for some hot chocolate at Angelina. This was by far the richest and thickest hot chocolate I had ever had, and it paired perfectly with a dollop of Chantilly cream (which I learned was one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite toppings).
After our break, we continued our tour by exploring the sprawling gardens. Looking at a map of Versailles, the main château barely takes up any space. It is mainly dominated by the vast classical gardens. I struggled to wrap my head around the fact that this palace was actually someone’s home rather than an incredible tourist site. With around 2,300 rooms and 800 hectares of gardens, someone could probably spend months exploring Versailles.
Our first glimpse of France in A Tale of Two Cities is of the people desperately drinking spilled wine in front of Defarge’s wine shop. As I strolled through the gardens, I kept this image in mind. The desperation and poverty that Dickens conveyed through this sequence were starkly contrasted by the opulence of the gardens alone.
After walking for about two miles in the gardens, I finally came across the estate of Trianon. It consists of three main areas—the Grand Trianon, Petit Trianon, and Queen’s Hamlet. When someone stopped me to ask which one of the many surrounding châteaux belonged to Marie Antoinette, I paused before answering uncertainly: “I think all of them.”
Of course, pointing the finger at Marie Antoinette is similar to hating Madame Defarge. They were both products of their upbringing, with Marie Antoinette being brought into this society and Madame Defarge being shaped by her family’s tragic past. Marie Antoinette is often seen as a prime example of the opulence of the upper class, but she is just one of the many nobles who prospered at the expense of the lower classes. It truly is no wonder the tension between the upper and lower classes boiled up to the point of revolution.
Jumping to the modern day, it is mind-boggling that monarchies still exist today. While I understand that the class divide in these countries is not nearly as wide as the class divide in revolutionary France, it is still odd to consider that a person can hold so much power over a country simply based on their ancestry. Versailles is not unique in its opulence—plenty of other palaces around the world are still occupied by the nobility. This leads me to question whether all monarchies are headed towards their end as our world continues to modernize.
As we have learned through Les Misérables, the abolishment of the monarchy in France did not necessarily put an end to all the issues the country was facing. A new order still had to be established. We will be diving into Les Misérables this week, and it will be interesting to explore the outcomes of the revolution, what came next, and how successful it was in breaking down class divides. À bientôt!