I don't know how everybody else feels, but I think I've had enough of Paris for a while. It is a beautiful city. However, it can quickly overwhelm the senses. I am definitely ready to head off to London tomorrow.
This morning we had a bit of a late start heading over to visit the catacombs. After standing in line for an hour I decided to salvage my morning by heading over to the Cimitiére du Montparnasse to pay a visit to the graves of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Bouvoir, and Samuel Beckett. I also wanted to do a little exploring. The rest of the group decided to try there luck with the dead in the catacombs. It's a macabre facsination that history guys have with cemeteries. Every grave and crypt has a story to tell. Monparnasse's crypts tell some of the best. For example, I noticed that the most common year on many of the graves was 1918. Many casual observers would think that this could be easily explained by the First World War. However, this isn't quite right. The years between 1915 and 1917 were the most deadly of the war, and most of these graves had birth dates in the 1850s and 1860s. These were not war dead. They were victims of the worst flu pandemic to ever hit the world. I got a really good idea how bad this epidemic was just by counting all of the 1918 graves in this one cemetery.
After grabbing a quick bite to eat the group headed off to the Palace of Versailles. Louis XIV's palace is the most copied palace in the world. He had every aspect of this monstrous building designed to symbolically remind his subjects of the greatness of France and the glory of the King. For example, the windows of the king's bedchamber face to the east. As Louis, the Sun King, rose in the morning he cast his light all over France, just like the sun rising in his windows. In his big party room, the Hurcules Drawing Room, he had a big painting of Hurcules being elevated to the level of the gods splashed across the ceiling. In the painting Hurcules is being delivered to Olympus in the chariot of Apollo, the sun god. This was supposed to be a subtle reminder that only Louis, the Sun King, had the power to elevate men to greatness in France.
Tomorrow we jump on the Eurostar and head out for London. I'm looking forward to high tea. Pub crawl?
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