Thursday, October 9, 2008

I'd hate to clean all the bathrooms...if there were any


...this quiet country lane belied what we found just ahead....




Andre and Susan live just 40 minutes from here. Thanks to them, we had a fabulous day exploring this amazing chateau: Vaux le Vicomte, built by the equally amazing Nicolas Fouquet, a shrewd businessman, lover of fine art, and loyal to King Louis XIV. Unfortunately, Fouquet's lovely chateau was the object of extreme jealousy for the king, who plotted and succeeded in imprisoning Fouquet so that he, the king, could claim this beauty as his own. Versailles was patterned after this chateau!




No wonder Louis was drooling and plotting to get his hands on Fouquet's piece of real estate....




I felt very small as we approached the entrance to the chateau...amazing.




Here you see the stables, blacksmith shop, a greenhouse-type building ... they had it all and did it up big.




I always thought a moat was for defense purposes, however this chateau was purely Nicolas Fouquet's brilliant creation....but he had a moat nonethless.










Without a doubt my favorite room in the chateau. The light, the floor, the varied shapes . . . gorgeous.




Most likely a top-of-the-line kitchen in the 1600's.





Nice room for Thanksgiving dinner, if they'd only had Thanksgiving in the 17th century. In France.



Wow. The entire place is simply breath-taking.




How about this roof job? It's a multi-million-euro repair, only partially done. Old roof on the right; new roof on the left.







For you garden-lovers .... they were spectacular!




...I'm smiling because there really weren't any bathrooms for me to clean. I did see a sort of adult-sized potty chair. Does that count?










It was a good idea to tour the grounds on a golf cart, since we didn't see any horses in the stables....and it would have taken til dark to cover the territory on foot.





It was quite a day. We headed back to Emerainville to eat dinner, pack and say our farewells to Andre and Susan. The day ahead would be exciting: seeing Katie and Ireland!

2 comments:

Jenny Haller said...

The garden! The copper pots! The checkered floor! GORGEOUS and ENCHANTING!

klrodman said...

WOW!! What a place of beauty. To see all that georgeous handiwork and realize that our home in heaven will be that on steroids!!!