The end of our visit to Versailles was drawing near - as indeed is the by now legendary photo of the scorch mark...
Passing through this archway we found ourselves once again in the courtyard, where we had shivered and gasped under the icy torrent of the thunderstorm of two or three articles ago. If you have no idea what I am talking about then shame on you and go back to recap it all!
Leafing through the guide book, it seems incredible what a very small fraction was seen of all that Versailles has to show. The clock in the Marble Courtyard had the hands symbolically stopped to show the time of the death of Louis XIV. (I use this excuse at home now whenever Miss Franny complains the battery has run out on the clock...)
The Sun King's symbol can be seen in the centre of the clock. As a child, whenever games of fancy dress were played, he would always choose the costume of the sun.
Looking up at the two wings of the house where we had been deluged both by storm and by drainage from the roofs. Actually the "wing" on the right is more like a chapel. It was hard to believe how totally we had been soaked. But a mere pat of the trouser legs brought it sharply back to mind! I apologised and reminded myself to pat my own trousers in future...
We said goodbye to Louis XIV, the Sun King, who had last been seen against a sky so dark that the floodlighting of the palace had switched on. Did the lightning really come as close as it had seemed?
It certainly did! This was not the only scorch mark in the area. And once we got back to the coach other passengers told us that all the fish were dead in one of the ponds, which made me think that lightning must have struck there also. We sat on a bench, eating baguettes whilst our coats were laid down in the sun to dry. As the coach pulled away a scream of laughter directed our attention to a German coach whose company name was an Anglo-Saxon word that I'm not going to repeat here!
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