Versailles

July 1, 2020

On our epic six-week drive across Europe the summer of my high school graduation, one of our stops was Versailles. We began our tour eager to take it all in—Daddy and I were big history fans— but after a dozen or so rooms (there are 2,300), of endless vaulted ceilings, parquet floors, chandeliers, gold and bronze leaf doors, massive drapes, marble statues, historic paintings, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, vase after vase, extremely uncomfortable looking furniture, gilded statues, in fact everything gilded, everything that said Look-What-I-Have-and-You-Don’t, we had had it.

Daddy looked at me and said quietly, so as not to disturb the tour, that he’d seen enough. I said me too. So we slipped out and left Mama and Walker inside to trudge through the rest of Louis XIV’s ego trip. We escaped back out into the natural world and found our way back to Walker’s yellow VW bug, leaned up against it, and looked back at the phantasmagoria that is Versailles.

Daddy had his thinking face on. He studied the scene, silent, for a bit. I waited.

Finally, he said. “I think I understand now why the peasants wanted to cut off their heads.”

I nodded.

And that’s all you need to know about Versailles.

Nan’s Hand

The Moon Told Me So