I left my razor in Versailles. Do you think it's having a better life than me? It's in a pretty hot room with a cramped little shower and not even a view of the palace. Probably the maid took it home and put it in her Ariel little mermaid collection of dumb shit people leave in international bathrooms. Piles of weird phone plugs, the occasional special hair conditioner. Maybe if you're really lucky, a couple American dollars.
I have to say some of the best memories of this trip was getting to take a shower. It certainly wasn't the Looking for Bruce game we played the first 9 days. Being in the line for the Mona Lisa and craning my neck to see who I was going to see first, the front of the line in the Mona Lisa room, or Bruce running in the back door. He never made it to the Mona Lisa. He was on the phone to Indonesia out in front of the Louvre where Louis the 14th parked his carriages. Under the arch, 400 years earlier, I bet Louis was never sitting there in front of his Paris palace, smoking an expensive kingly gold cigarette with five manservants waiting silently desperate to be the one to take his discarded butt, I bet Louis was never looking at the sky and thinking man. In 400 years some San Francisco surfer dude with sexuality issues is going to be standing right in this exact spot sweating and obsessively calling the girlfriend from a doomed relationship in Indonesia. He'd look up at his 650,000 square foot horseshoe shaped mansion all massively laid out and looming around him and say damn I collected all this art for nothing
and then throw the butt and watch the young, no doubt good looking butler staff swarm for it
We went to Louis' summer home, his trifling hunter's lodge, Versailles, in well, Versailles. All of everything we did in Europe was a train, a bus and then a looooooong walk to. We long walked from the bus to the hotel which had exactly three cubes of ice available at any one time (and this was a PLETHORA, in European ice terms). Emma kept saying when I'd be filling up my hydroflask, don't use all the ice worriedly and I was like
all the ICE. There is only ONE CUBE HERE. One postage stamp of ice. Ice singular not plural, ever, here.
Anyway, the next morning we were eating breakfast in a serious of bland yet expensive and not free hotel breakfasts where I secretly every time pocketed baguettes and brie and apples for lunch later, and we were about to see Versailles the palace and reading about Marie Antoinette and then Barry said isn't the tour at 9 and I said no 930 and he said well check in is at 9. So I look at my phone and it's 8:45 and two people in the fam just sat down to eat with blurry sleep eyes and we have one person in the family who can't walk the length of a block without needing to sit down and the palace is many lengths of blocks on cobblestone with no way to get in except walking through gold and black gates, and up a vast cobblestone hill. Okay! I stand up. Time to go then.
I get to the tour check in room first, to the side of the palace where Louis must have housed his riding mowers by the look of the lawn behind the place. Can't wait to see the grounds, we can rent bikes, I kept telling the kids. I can't wait to ride all around in there and imagine wearing a long wig and pounds of wool dresses in all temperatures.
There is a thin and up on her feet active French chick who says oh yes you have to wait in the second room, your guide will be here. I say immediately that we need a wheelchair and she says oh I will arrange one and whisks off with the swiftness of a palace at-your-whim staff. The kids and a dragging Barry finally arrive into the assigned wait room and we wait. A couple from Frankfurt. Some other weirdos. We're supposed to see the private rooms of Louis the 14th. It's past 930. It's 945 now. I go to try and find the french lady and she asks again if I need a wheelchair. I thought she was already getting that. She says perhaps just a folding chair. He can carry around. I look at her like um. The LEGS. Not working are the issue. The wheels, are what we were hoping for. To help the legs. Also, uh. It is getting late. We have a train to catch. And then a plane to catch. We need to see Louis' shit now, man. It's shit or get off the king.
They are finally arranging for another tour guide to take over and then suddenly our french dude tour guide breezes in with his shirt unbuttoned just one too many, just one, and he doesn't apologize, he makes it seem like maybe we were too impatient, and he has the folding chair for himself that the lady was telling me would be good for Barry, and we follow him while someone else takes Barry and Nathan to go get the wheelchair that they said they were already getting an hour ago. I say to the guide as we are hustling toward the palace, will they meet us there then? He looks at me like he doesn't really care one bit, opening an 8 dwarf thick massive gold door. Perhaps, he says. Shrugging like no big deal.
The first room he shows us has a drape all across it so we can actually see nothing. They are refurbishing this one. The king's bedchamber, he says. We stand for 10 minutes in basically a hallway in front of a large sheet like we're outdoors waiting for projector family movie night and see nothing except he does unfold his chair and sit down while we are standing awkwardly not wanting to lean on anything goldly adorned which is everything while he tells us about the things we are missing in this room.
He hustles us into the next room and we are looking at big oval table and I keep looking at the group behind us where a lady has twin two year old boys on leashes and they are like monkeys going in different directions and wanting to climb on everything. I look at Bess who looks like at 15 that she wants to be executed for having to stand here and look at art while someone who keeps unfolding and folding his chair keeps talking about stuff she has zero interest in. Speaking of, in the next room is Louis the 14th's rolltop desk and this piece of furniture is good enough to unfold the chair and talk forever about and I start to join Bess in the desire for immediate execution. It's a cool desk and all. It has a clock with two faces. It's worth a bunch of gold. This guy in the unbuttoned shirt has been doing this tour and talking about this desk for 30 years. I'm sure when he was not hurrying to come give our tour, when he was untangling himself from his slim french boyfriend and throwing on just any silk shirt he had lying around and grabbing a baguette piece on his way out to his tiny french car, he was thinking somewhere about the desk, he loves this desk, he can't tell enough people about this desk.
It's an adorned, double hippopotamus of a desk and I could see the staff of 400 years ago, the tired overworked ten of them it would take to move this desk saying really Loius? I think it looks good here. The rest of the tour moves on including Bruce who godbepraised is ahead of me for the only time in this trip and for two seconds it is me alone and the desk. Just like it was Louis and the desk. And probly his mistress under the desk. I had to squint. What did Louis write here. An order for more playing cards for the gambling room? A quick note to get out of his in-laws birthday party? In the end it was still a piece of wood manmade into spectacular with a bunch of lacquer and gold. I can see through you, desk, I said to no one ever. But you are lucky to still be here, kicking it in the manse with no one ever writing on you again. The flimsy whore pens of today will have no scrawl aboard this royalty.
The best part of the tour actually is the opera, which is basically a home movie theater in 1682. A 14 yr Marie Antoinette married a 15 year old Louis the 16th here. Imagine that moment in time, right in the same place where we sat and actually trapped Bruce because they corralled us in by shutting doors between opera groups and good tip, we should have adopted this way earlier in the trip. This is the last day of the trip with all of us.
The rest of Versailles is just huge rooms, amazing ceiling art, and crowds and crowds of sweating allofus, windows full of the grounds we won't have time to see, no bicycles, no outdoor time. A hall of mirrors, always looking for the bathroom, for water, the elevator for the wheelchair, the way out.
Luckily, just the night before, when we got into Versailles and it was a billion degrees and we were waiting to eat with bees everywhere outside at the table-- after, when it got to be less hot we walked to the side of the palace which was closed and we found a side lake built for a king on the grounds. It was immense and there were swans and ducks and we thought aw we don't have the frisbee and we flopped down and Bess actually talked and smiled, traveling humans need time to look at water and talk to ducks. We had no bread but they still swam up to us and the trees surrounded us from afar and patted our weary heads and Bruce asked how you tell male ducks from female and Nathan said it's easy all ducks are male.
We liked it so much we hiked alllll the way back to the hotel a different way and found a cute hidden winding street where there were a bunch of cafes spilling out into the car-less cobblestone street and people eating and laughing and gelato was happening and we grabbed Emma at the hotel who had had to stay behind to watch a video for school about safety and pickpockets (remember this for my later installment Why Rome Sucks). We grabbed her and the skateboard and the frisbee and we all the kids walked back the two miles to the lake and even though it was getting dark we played frisbee right where Louis played frisbee between beheadings, and we showed Emma the discovered winding road and the ice cream and the impossibly perfect fake movie set looking town street that was still hopping at 1030 at night on a weeknight in the dark. Even though we walked 11 miles that day, this is where we found Versailles, in between the history and art and learning, wandering with no purpose being immersed in the dark in present day France all together, on the one night we had there probably in our lives, in summer. The 14 and 15 year old married Louis and Marie walked along with us. Even palace folk like ice cream and an ambling walk with their people.
And that was the last time I saw my razor.
