Just pass through the Queen’s Gate, north of the Palace of Versailles, to enjoy a trip to the countryside. The plain of the Toad Fountain, a vast expanse of flat land, yellowed under the July sky, smells of cut hay. “Usually there are even sheep here. They’ve probably been brought in for the summer.”notes Grégory Quenet, environmental historian at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and author of Versailles, a natural history (The Discovery, 2015).
There are only a few hundred meters between the first acres of the bucolic park, whose entrance is free, and the gilded palace wanted by Louis XIV, one of the most visited monuments in the world, with nearly seven million tourists per year. Here, however, under the silvery lime trees of the Queen’s Alley rustling in the morning wind, we count ourselves. A few parents carrying strollers and tricycles, two riders whose mounts graze and a handful of visitors struggling to get their broken-down electric cart out of the way in the Saint-Antoine Alley.
“This is the park of the people of Versailles, not that of tourists”, says Gregory Quenet, in shorts and sneakers, who chose to explore it by bike, a “compromise” between walking and horseback, once the Court’s mode of transport. Because it was then necessary to walk miles to reach the limits of the estate! All that remains is what constituted the Petit Parc, or 450 hectares, which today runs along the departmental road to the west, linking the communes of Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole and Bailly.
But let’s go back to the end of the 17th centurye century, when the castle was inhabited, and let us imagine the Grand Parc, which extends over 11,000 hectares, more than the current surface area of Paris within the walls, surrounded by a wall 40 kilometers long, enclosing within its perimeter eight villages and thousands of peasants. “In this painting, nature is everywhere!”the historian specifies. Fields and woods for the most part, pastures then and finally some forests, all populated with animals, domestic and wild.
Screaming and yelling life
While Versailles shines throughout the world through the symbolic ordering of nature, notably through its famous gardens, imagining the screaming and yelping life of this territory is a challenge. “To visit it is to take a step back. The castle becomes a detail and that changes the perspective: the separation between nature and culture is nonsense!”argues Gregory Quenet.
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