Fontainebleau, at last!

While Chateau de Vincennes is associated with earlier kings, Charles V, (14th century), Fontainebleau is later...18th & 19th centuries.  Much more elegant, more famous occupants...Napoleon being the most.

It ranks up there with Versailles & while it takes a bit more to get there, the crowds are far, far less than Versailles.  For the official website, click HERE.

Our trip started with a 35 minute train ride to the town of Fontainebleau.  It is so cool how the tourist side of things are integrated.  Our tickets cost 14 euros each (about $20) but were good not only for the rail trip both ways but also for the bus to/from the Chateau & good on the Paris Metro for the rest of  the day.

I love the vastness and the energy of a Parisian rail station. And Gare de Lyon is not the biggest.

The waiting crowd.  Susanne in the center.















Double decker train.  But not many sights along  the way.  Just pleasant French villages & countryside.

Cheerful, colorful rail cars.  Five seats across is 2nd class.  But the car was uncrowded, so we had a set of four seats, two across facing each other all to ourselves.

 

I did a video sweep of the main portion of the chateau.  It's hard to believe there are other wings & pavilions.  Some 1500 rooms in all.

Only one portion of one leg of the "U" is open to the public.  But it's enough to get a sense of the place.  And after awhile you tend to have sensory overload.  The rooms are so lushly & lavishly furnished.  The opulence is amazing.

A shot of one leg of the U.

At the start of the tour, homage to the main dude and...

his wife, the empress.  

The Nikon has trouble maintaining focus in a very low light situation where the shutter speed is very slow & I don't have a tripod.

One of the small halls.

A royal receiving room where guests are greeted. 

A large hall.  It certainly compares with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Note the wooden carvings on the door.

After awhile the purpose of these rooms becomes a blur, so I'll just call this the Chandelier Room.

The ceiling of the Chandelier Room.  The French love their ceilings.  Every room has a ceiling as ornate as any part of the rest of the room.

The ballroom.  You know, just a little place to throw the odd milonga now and then.

An inner courtyard.

The French royalty back then loved fussiness & detail.

The three muses...

Good King Henry IV (who also lived here), done up using the latest 17th century 3D technology. 

Can't remember what this room was  for.  Note the ornate ceiling.

Hey, what's a royal residence without a throne room?  And this one was designed by & built for the big N.

The ceiling is worked into the design.

The Queen's Bed, designed by & for Marie Antoinette, but the poor lady lost her head before she could ever occupy it.  She & Louis XVI were in residence at Versailles on that fateful day, July 14, 1789.

The bedroom itself is quite large but I didn't photograph it.

This is the room where Napoleon met with his councilors.

Of course, the Emperor (Napoleon would not settle for the title of a mere "King") has to sleep, too.

Married royalty always slept in separate (and sometimes widely separated) bedrooms.  Gives the king/emperor more opportunity to....well, you know the history.

Remember Chuck5 and his little chapel?  The bad news with his chapel is that he had to go out into that nasty weather to pray.  So later kings just built the chapel into their residence.  After all, when you've got 1500 rooms, what's another one more or less?

Chapel ceiling detail.

A statue in one of the hallways.  I like the way the sculptor included her Live Strong bracelet on her upraised arm.

That's it for the chateau photos.  I did not shoot every room I saw nor did I include every photo I took.  After awhile, the mind boggles.

Some thoughts.

1. After seeing all this opulence, for whom?  Maybe a dozen people in the royal household itself...somehow Larry Ellison's $100+ million, 250 foot yacht doesn't seem like such an extravagance.  After all, 150 years from now people will still be touring this place while Larry's little puddle-jumper will have been on the scrap heap for a long time.

2. Life in this chateau may have been opulent but it was never comfortable.  No indoor plumbing, no electricity, no central heating.

3.  Think of  the logistics of keeping this place running.  A fireplace in every room that had to be started, stoked & shifted as the royal family move through their day.  All rooms had an outside exposure so day lighting was not a problem.  But at night.  Think of keeping candles burning in all the right places at all the right times.  And firing up those chandeliers for state occasions.  Then there's feeding not only the royal family but all the staff.  They didn't show us the staff mess hall.

Last two pics...of the Fontainebleau town centre.