daytripping

I had an outing. Over the weekend I drove down to Fontainebleau with a friend who needed to recharge her car battery after a month’s vacation. S. agreed to manage the small person for the afternoon, so there were no extra diapers or car seats involved. The little town of Fontainebleau is about an hour’s drive from Paris, but it seemed like we were there even before we’d caught up on the summer’s activities. One exit off the autoroute, a roundabout, and a few blocks of narrow streets and there she blows (blew?) – several generations of French kings’ elaborate fantasia of a hunting lodge. My uncle Charlie would have taken one look and said, “What were those boys thinking?” And not a deer in sight.

After all the additions, Fontainebleau isn’t actually that much smaller than Versailles, but it seems like it’s on a much more intimate scale. It might just be that the tourist traffic is so much lighter, even in August, that you can walk along at your own pace instead of being borne aloft by the crowd surge. You can even pause halfway along Francis I’s grand gallery (built mainly so he could go from his bedroom to church without going outside) and look in both directions without getting knocked down. There’s the bedroom where Anne of Austria held court, and the completely fabulous ballroom conceived by Francis but not built until after his death (the ballroom, in turn, has almost completely walled in the beautiful late medieval chapel with hundreds of naughty – not medieval -- cherubs painted on its coffered ceiling). The horseshoe staircase where Napoleon made his departure for Elba (Adieu, mes enfants!), and the redecorated bedroom suite where he kept the Pope imprisoned until he signed the Concordat.

With that many bits of overlaid history, there are bound to be some ghosts. I saw mine everywhere. He was small and blond and had the exact facial expression of one of the putti on the chapel ceiling. When he wasn’t flirting with the museum guards (why else would they be smiling?), I heard his footsteps on the King’s Staircase, which I felt distinctly that he must have needed to climb up and down exactly twelve times all by himself. We came into the palace guardroom just after he left it, the velvet rope still gently swaying and the giant Sévres urn on the center table shifted several inches closer to the edge. And when we stumbled onto a concert demonstration of baroque French opera, it was certainly he who caused the young singer to miss a beat, by scrambling down the aisle and straight up onto the stage…Clearly, I have a problem.

The last time I came to Fontainebleau was during my first and last real trip to Paris before we moved here. I was still in college, on a trip that started in Spain and ended up in the Netherlands, and I stopped in Paris for a week to visit my friend who had just started her graduate school research. She was living with some unfriendly nuns on the Left Bank, and my visit coincided with that of some other friends of hers who were driving a car back from Luxembourg to London. We decided to drive down to Fontainebleau for the day, and after visiting the chateau and walking in the forest, we made our way slowly back to Paris. We stopped along the Seine and went swimming (well, some of us did) in our underwear, and when we had dried out we had dinner at a little riverside restaurant, on the lawn, as the sun was setting. I had snails for the first time.

This time, my friend and I drove straight back to Paris. As we entered the parking garage, I bought some ice cream and noticed the carousel that would surely be the main attraction if we bring G. back here sometime. Across the street, a wedding party was gathering in front of the park gates to have their photos taken in the garden. The bride and groom were in cream silks, and most of the rest of the party were in similar shades of summer, except for one very, very fat woman in heavy black crepe with a bright fuchsia shawl and a matching ostrich feather in her hair. I thought about her all the way home.