It’s true.  I dined in a duchess’s boudoir at the Chateau de Versailles.  Full confession: the duchess’s boudoir is nowadays known as Angelina’s, the Versailles outpost of the celebrated Parisian tea room.

Generally speaking, I don’t care to eat or drink at establishments that are inside tourist attractions, on the grounds that they are usually crowded and over-priced.  However, sometimes options are in short supply.  Such was the case on a very rainy day in late March (2016) during my visit to the Chateau.  Having just toured the Private Apartments (see the 2 previous posts) and the State Rooms, I was footsore, hungry, and slightly dehydrated.  My preference would have been to leave the Chateau and find a restaurant in the town, but one look out the window at people struggling to control their umbrellas in the gusting winds sent me in search of a restaurant inside the Chateau.  As far as I could make out, there was only one.  I followed the signs until I arrived here:

Sign at the entrance of Angelina’s tea room and restaurant in the Chateau de Versailles.

Naturally, I was not alone in having this notion and I was confronted by a long line of fellow visitors waiting for a table.  Angelina’s is known primarily known as a tea room, but it does offer a limited menu of light meals.  The line for the self-serve snackbar was shorter, but I wanted to have a hot meal.  So I waited.  And waited.  For 40 minutes.  The wait turned out to be worth it, though.

Versailles: A Visit to the King’s Private Apartments, Part 2

In the late afternoon of the first day of my visit to Versailles, I went along to the ticket office of the Chateau to buy my ticket for the next day, including a guided tour of the Private Apartments.  There were various tours in several languages, but the young woman behind the counter flatteringly recommended that I take the French language tour at 10:30, on the grounds that it was the most thorough one.  I duly purchased a ticket and wandered off in the rain — the weather was relentlessly wet throughout my visit — to find my dinner.

Semi-restored room in the ticket wing. My inner interior decorator sees some sleek Italian sofas and striking contemporary art in here.

All but skipping with excitement, I turned up the following morning at the designated entrance for the Private Apartments tour.  This entrance is on the north side of the Cour Royale (the Royal Court), the great courtyard that precedes the Cour de Marbre (the Marble Court) at the heart of the palace.  A uniformed man checked my ticket and waved me inside.  A young woman in a smart black pantsuit and a headset then asked me which tour I was there for, and directed me into an adjoining salon.  This turned out to be the holding tank for imminent tours.  It retained its 18th century boiserie, but was furnished with sleek contemporary furniture, which I’m tempted to say was by Philippe Starck, but I’m not sure.  Another pant-suited young lady appeared and gave me a pair of earphones.  I nearly protested that I hadn’t asked for an audio guide, but held my peace.  All became clear when the actual guide appeared, a brisk, middle-aged Frenchwoman.  She instructed us to put in our earbuds and see if we could hear her on the audio system that was connecting us.  A very sensible system, this.  Nothing is more annoying on a guided tour than straining, and failing, to hear what the guide is saying.  We were a group of about 15 or 20.  As far as I could tell, I was the only non-francophone apart from a young woman from Brazil who was studying art history in Paris, which I know because we had a chat after the tour.  In fact, it turned out that she was taking a course on museology and asked me if I would oblige her by taking a short survey about my Versailles experience.  I obliged, of course.