Post Tour 3: When You've Seen One Napoleon...
Foods of the Day
Bertillon ice cream
Apple candy
The Sweep of History
The more places I visit in Europe the more I appreciate the connections and how the history of one place impacts the history of another.
I’ve already mentioned seeing Ancient Rome in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum, Athens, London, Bath, Paris, Arles, the Pont du Gard, and now Lyon. (And let me put in a plug for Mike Duncan’s excellent podcast The History of Rome here; if you have any interest in Roman history and have not listened to it, go get it now)
But we also enjoy other kinds of connections – such as maritime (we’ve seen Captain Cook all over the place) and Celtic –it’s amazing who they were trading with.
But today it’s Napoleon. We’ve seen Napoleonic history at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (Marie Louise of Austria was Napoleon’s second wife) and the Borghese Gallery in Rome (which houses a famous statue of Napoleon’s sister Pauline). Naturally the Austrians and Italians have a somewhat different perspective on Napoleon than the French, but that’s what made it so fascinating to see the Napoleon rooms at Fontainebleau.
Practicalities
City: Paris
Weather: Sunny
Hotel: Ibis Bastille
Sights: Vaux le Vicomte
Fontainebleau
Today is our 17th wedding anniversary! I extended our trip by a couple of days deliberately so that we could spend our anniversary in Paris because how many opportunities do you have to do that in your lifetime?
We have a Paris City Vision bus tour booked today for a day trip to Vaux le Vicomte and Fontainebleau, so we metro and walk over to their office to check in and then we pick up some pain au chocolat for breakfast and walk over to the Tuileries to eat it.
Breakfast in the Tuileries with the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
We return to the tour office and board the bus. It's a 90 minute drive to Vaux le Vicomte, and as we drive I review the packet of information the tour company gave us. There is a schedule, audio tour vouchers, and tickets for each palace.
Tickets
I've always wanted to see Vaux le Vicomte, the palace that inspired Versailles. Nicolas Fouquet, the original owner, was one of Louis XIV's ministers. Louis got chateau envy, and poor Fouquet ended up chateau-less and in jail. Never cross an absolute monarch. We enter the tree lined alley leading to the chateau and arrive.
The audio tour tells about Fouquet's life and times. We are soon squirrel spotting, as the squirrel was his emblem, and it's everywhere.
Fouquet
Squirrel
The back doors to the garden are open, and Bill gets a nice shot (see top of page). After the audio tour we walk around the grounds and buy paninis for lunch at a little stand.
At 1:30 the bus leaves for Fontainebleau. The trip takes about an hour. We don't have quite as much time here, just enough for a quick taste. Fontainebleau is huge, and you could really spend all day here if you wanted to do it thoroughly, but I'm happy with a short visit. I most want to see the Napoleon artifacts.
Here's a sampling of Napoleon at Fontainebleau:
The iconic outfit
The camp tent
Throne Room
In the gardens we stop for some delicious Bertillon ice cream, which I have never managed to have before as we have always come to Paris when the flagship store has been closed. And in the gift shop we find some intriguing apple candy that turns out to be quite good.
At 5 we are back on the bus for the return trip to Paris. The tour office happens to be near a Maison du Chocolat shop, so we stop in for some anniverary chocolates. Then it's off for an anniversary dinner at La Place Royale on Place des Vosges. We had a wonderful outdoor meal here when we visited Paris in 2014, and we wanted to come back, so I saved it for our special anniversary dinner. It's as good as we remembered.
And then it's back to our hotel room to pack and get ready for our morning flight back to the U.S. It seems anti-climactic, but all good things must come to an end.
Gardens of Vaux le Vicomte