Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Fontaine blue blue bleu bleau (ah!)

The gang did an outing to Fontainebleau yesterday.  It was a first for me--actually, for the whole crowd.   It's a natural for a day trip: just 35 miles southeast of Paris from the Gare de Lyon, which bears an eerie similarity to the trip into southeast England from Waterloo.  We had a hard rain in the morning but around noon the skies cleared and the gardens exploded  in spring green.   The 19-year-old begged for a few minutes just to romp around in the forest; I half expected him to rip off all his clothes.

As to the chateau itself--I'm delighted I went and half sorry I never went  before, but it's a mess: a stew of styles and eras, made more confusing by the habit of previous owners to move stuff around and reassemble.  There's a great deal of techne on offer; lots to admire, some even to inspire a gasp.  Still--correct me if I'm forgetting but I don't remember a single thing that you'd actually call beautiful. Pretty, maybe, but "pretty" in this context is a bit of a slur. Maybe an exception for the outside, stately and restrained, but the inside--my God, no wonder the peasants sharpened their pitchforks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have never been to Fontainebleu, but I owe my existance to that town, and to the fortuitous encounter between the daughter of a wealthy New Haven family studying music at the Orf acadamy, and a poor kid from Southern Ohio serving as an E5 radio repairman at an army microwave relay station in the area (he joined when he was 18, because in Pomeroy, Ohio, what else did you do. . .).

One faked a British accent, the other an irish, shins were kicked, and the rest was history. . .