In earlier posts from Vincennes, we told you about the Keep, which you see rising to the right above. We also promised to tell you more about the later buildings which you could see in a few shots taken from inside the Keep. Herewith those last explanations and indeed pretty much last photos from Vincennes. Louis XIV, often referred to as the Sun King, built The King’s Pavilion above in the 1650s. (Along with the Queen’s Pavilion, behind me when I took this photo but visible behind construction scaffolding in a few other shots below. Sheesh: royal spouses apparently aren’t satisfied with different bedrooms, they want whole different buildings, in this case on French tax budgets. No wonder those French peasants started their revolution – and no doubt the Bourbon descendants rue the fact that they hadn’t yet drawn enough attention to immigrants as the cause of all problems, in order to direct the guillotines away from royalty and towards far more defenseless individuals. Of course, for our North American first nations, we immigrants sure as heck were the root of some pretty major new problems.)
But back to old Sunny, the King: his was the last royal court to live at Vincennes. Unsatisfied with Vincennes’ proximity to the actual city of Paris, he built and moved to Versailles, deeper into the suburbs, about thirty years later.
Above, Queen Matilda of Flanders, who is of an older generation and different from the Empress Maud of the Anarchy so well chronicled in the Cadfael series. Interesting, the succession challenges that even a royal system can bring. Human ego, I guess, eh? Last shots from my stroll around the Jardins du Luxembourg, final morning in Paris before heading off to Zermatt last October.
Above, the footbridge / steps up and over the highway wedged between the lake and the mountains in Bissone. Below, left to right: foot and bike paths next to a big bridge across the Ij during my bike ride out to Muidersloot last May; bridge in Parc de Bercy last October; and a foot bridge at Ålesund in January.
Ah, even when the stories they tell aren’t always the kindest, the stained glass windows in the cathedral at Vincennes were lovely, colorful, and lit the place up nicely even on a fairly overcast day. Last of these particular windows on the blog, unless there’s another future visit :-).
With my 400-day goal (of daily posts) set to be reached in slightly more than a week, I’ve decided it’s time to splurge all my remaining Seine-bridge images from last October’s short stay in Paris.
In this entry, royal dungeons from the oldest portion of the keep at the Chateau de Vincennes — since, as the tour notes below indicate, when one has a hereditary absolute ruler who is thus also the final arbiter of justice, that hereditary absolute ruler must have a dungeon in which to lock up those whom he deems out of line with the laws that he created. This particular dungeon saw some famous prisoners such as the Marquis de Sade during that highly unstable first French revolution, when France went in the course of about 15 years from absolute monarchy to various phases of pretty vindictive and murderous republic, back to empire once Napoleon decided he like the absolute-monarchy idea after all, then finally after Waterloo (nope, not just an Abba song) back to the house of Bourbon with the “Bourbon Restoration,” for its own last hereditary-royalty hurrah prior to the various other revolutions, empires and republics that tried to govern France over the course of the 1800’s. France is a repository of so many lessons on how to do or not do governance, should once choose to study it or even, crazy notion, learn from it and apply lessons :-).
Last views from Paris’s (I’m pronouncing Paris as the French do, Maria – with a silent s) lovely Domaine Nationale du Palais Royale…til my next visit, at least :-). It feels odd that most of my royalty photos are coming still from France, whose last period of being formally constituted as an empire / kingdom ended in 1870. Particularly when you consider I spent nearly a full week in the formally-constituted Kingdom of Norway more recently than my last visit to France during this, its Fifth Republic…and that I spend most of my days and nights here in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. But somehow royalty is much less visible, more discrete, here – unless one goes looking for it. Which I must remember to do!
(so much world, so little time....) 