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 :-).
