in which we see architecture

Sunday was the first Sunday in March. This is important because:

(1) Many French museums and monuments are free on the first Sunday of the month, and

(2) Even more of them are free on the first Sundays of November, December, January, February, and March.

That means that we've been working very hard for the last few months to make sure that we get to all the winter freebies while their free. So we went to Sainte-Chapelle, the Conciergerie, and the Towers of Notre Dame in January. We went to the top of the Arc de Triomphe in February, along with the Louvre (first Sundays year round). And we went to the Pantheon as part of the French Patrimony celebration, so we didn't need to go there again. That meant that we'd been to all of the free winter museums in the city of Paris itself. Of course, we could have gone to some of the museums that are free all year, but that seemed a bit obvious. After all, there is a lot to see in the Paris region that isn't actually in Paris proper, and there were 5 sites in the Paris region that we could go to for free, if we so chose.

Two of them, Saint Denis (where the kings of France are, in some sense, buried) and the Château de Vincennes, we visited when we were here two years ago, so those were off the list of possibilities. A third site, the Château de Pierrefonds, looked really cool, but wasn't accessible by public transportation, and so had to be eliminated. (Renting a car to spend an hour looking around a castle just didn't seem to make much sense.) The other two sites were accessible by public transportation, and, better yet, were on the same RER branch on the other side of the line that runs through our station.

So Sunday morning we bought our Mobilises (daily transportation passes) and Cartes Jeunes (the same thing, but half price for under 26s) and hopped a train headed through Paris. We got off at Maisons Laffitte, and waited at the bus stop for the bus to appear. 15 minutes after its scheduled appearance, we decided that perhaps it wasn't going to show up at all, and that since it wasn't supposed to be that long a walk, we might be better off just walking. So we did, and it ended up taking about 10 minutes. (In other words, it would have been much quicker to just walk in the first place.)

We arrived at the Château de Maisons (built in the first half of the 17th century) from the front, and got a very nice view of the building. The windows were perfectly lined up, which made the whole thing look like a stage front, since we could see the light shining straight through the house. Once inside, we walked through a mostly unfinished downstairs, admiring the moldings and statuary on the ceilings, walls, and fireplaces.

Then up the grand staircase to the ballroom, which was also mostly unfurnished, but I suppose it was probably that way 300 years ago too, since furniture would get in the way of the dancers. Off the ballroom was the king's bedroom. Cherry and Ezio both decided that if the house were ours, that was the bedroom they would choose. (I'm not clear on whether or not a reigning monarch ever actually slept in that room. I do know that Louis XIV went to the inaugural feast with his mother, and that it was owned at one point by the brother of Louis XVI, who would later become King Charles X.)

We had to walk back through the stairs area to get to the other side of the upstairs, right past some very, erm, elegant 17th century ball costumes. The dresses weren't half bad, and I suppose I could see wearing them. We all got a giggle out of picturing Blaise in satin breeches with pictures of birds on them though. The other side of the upstairs was mostly taken up by the bedroom of one of Napoleon's field marshals. It was quite a lovely room, in lots of lavender and pale yellow. Somehow, the decor didn't exactly seem to fit the room of a decorated war hero, and Sapphire decided that she would like it as her bedroom.

Our final stop was down in the basement, which was set up as a sort of shrine to horse racing, which owes its existence in France largely to the efforts of the mid-nineteenth century owners of the château. Blaise wasn't particularly interested, and the museum was about to close for lunch, so we checked out the kitchen (also downstairs) and headed for the door.

After a quick (and very cold) lunch eaten outside looking at the château, we headed back for the train station. I put a pull up on Cherry (who announced that she desperately needed to poop with no bathrooms in sight) standing out on the train platform. It was a good think she was wearing a dress, and we could do so with minimal exposure.

Our next destination was the Villa Savoye in Poissy, which was designed by the architect Le Corbusier during the period between the World Wars. This one, however, required that we catch a bus, since it was quite a bit further from the RER station. Unfortunately, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 bus lines that go to the Poissy RER station, split into two different bus station groupings. After spending 10 minutes wandering through the northern grouping, and panicking because the bus we were supposed to catch didn't seem to have a stop there, we noticed a sign indicating that there were more buses on the other side of the RER station. We successfully found the other bus station after walking all the way around the block, and walked through the whole thing looking for the correct shelter. Then we waited 20 minutes for the bus to show up. Fortunately, it did. And we rode it right past our bus stop. (A good reminder of why it is that I like riding the metro better than the bus. I've yet to miss a subway stop, because the train stops at all of them. The bus only stops if either there is someone waiting for a pick up or someone buzzes the driver.

The Villa Savoye was about as different from the Château de Maisons as possible (though they both had servants' quarters--the attic in the Château de Maisons and the ground floor in the Villa Savoye). It was very minimalist, although I assume that there was furniture in in when it was actually being used as a home. There was a daybed made of tile and concrete in the master bathroom, which didn't strike me as a particular comfortable piece of furniture. The kids all tried it out though, and claimed that it was really comfy. (We went to a rest stop with giant concrete recliners a couple of years ago. They were surprisingly comfortable also.) The house is built around a rooftop garden, which we got to walk through (or run through in Cherry's case). Then Ezio needed to go to the bathroom, so Blaise took Sapphire and Cherry out to run through the grounds while I guarded the bathroom door so no one would walk in on him. (And figured out how to flush the rather bizarre toilet. Evidently the modern movement had strange ideas on bathroom fixtures as well.)

We headed out to the bus stop when we saw a big group heading over, thinking that perhaps they knew something about the bus schedule. (We had tried to see what it looked like, but couldn't find any time tables on the return shelters.) Unfortunately, they didn't, so we ended up waiting 30 minutes for the bus along with 20 other people instead of by ourselves. It did show up, eventually, and we all piled on to begin the trip home.