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“Let the brothels of Paris be opened,
Said the beautiful queen of France.”
William Blake, if I recall correctly.
And it certainly sounds like a jolly thought.
“And old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and coughed and belched.”
Good, raunchy poetry. Nothing restrained.
“Because I love hanging, drawing and quartering
Every bit as much as war and slaughtering.”

Oh my God. I now realise it was in a different time.
Things were different then.
They had a different world view then.
It was violent and cruel.
People were poor.
Life was nasty brutish and short.
And yet they produced Versailles.
They drained swamps, they flattened villages.
They pumped water for miles.
And it is beautiful.
Spectacular. Great.
And yet I keep thinking,
“What is this built on?
Did the peasants of Trianon approve
As their village was razed
Because a proud and vain king did not want to be outdone?”
I doubt it.
But what they produced is non pareil.

I think of my little garden
And how I sweat to produce such minor changes.
And Versailles takes on a magnificent aspect again
Built on the back of peasants, no doubt,
But there were the geniuses too.
Engineers, architects, builders, masons,
Plasterers, painters, gardeners.
And the king?
Perhaps. I do not know.
Did he have vision? I am ignorant.
But his legacy is fantastic.
Even the Republican French are proud of what he did.

But my little garden is nice.

Versailles is truly fantastic.
I often think of it when I sit and sip wine in my little garden.

© Richard Strong, August 2007