Just pass through the Porte de la Reine, north of the Palace of Versailles, to enjoy a trip to the countryside. The plain of the Fountain of the Toad, A large, flat expanse, yellowish under the July sky, smells of cut hay. “Usually there are even sheep here. They probably came back for the summer.”says Grégory Quenet, an 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 metres between the first few hectares of the bucolic park, with free entry, and the gilded palace designed by Louis XIV, one of the most visited monuments in the world, with almost seven million tourists a year. Here, however, under the silvery lime trees of the Allée de la Reine rustling in the morning wind, we can count ourselves. A few parents with prams and tricycles, two riders whose horses are grazing and a handful of visitors struggling to get their broken-down electric cart out of the way on Allée Saint-Antoine.
“This is the park of Versailles, not the tourist park”, “Explains Grégory Quenet, in shorts and trainers, who has chosen to observe it by bicycle, a “compromise” between walking and horseback riding, the former means of transport at Court. Because at that time, it was necessary to travel miles to reach the limits of the estate! All that remains is what was once the Petit Parc, that is to say 450 hectares, which today border, to the west, the departmental road linking the municipalities of Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole and Bailly.
But let’s go back to the end of the 17th century.my century, when the castle was inhabited, and imagine the Grand Parc, which extends over 11,000 hectares, more than the current area within the walls of Paris, surrounded by a wall 40 kilometres long, enclosing within its perimeter eight villages and thousands of farmers. “In this painting, nature is everywhere!”The historian explains: Mainly fields and forests, then pastures and finally some woods, all populated by animals, domestic and wild.
Screaming and howling life
While Versailles shines throughout the world through the symbolic ordering of nature, particularly through its famous gardens, imagining the noisy life of this territory is a challenge. “Visiting it is like taking a step back. The castle becomes a detail and that changes the perspective: the separation between nature and culture is absurd!”says Grégory Quenet.
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