Le Château de Chantilly

This weekend, Middlebury organized a trip to the Château de Chantilly in the town of Chantilly, just a short 30-minute train ride north of Paris. The château's huge forest was a favorite hunting site for kings and other royalty for years, and is still used for this purpose today. (Host mom was there a couple of weeks ago for a riding-hunting party!)

 The most picturesque way to get from the train station to the château is through the forest.

 The first thing one comes upon when coming out of the woods is the giant race track (with a big, annual, bourgeois, big-hat-wearing derby every summer) and the stables, which look like a château themselves and can house some improbable number of horses, packs of hunting dogs and staff.

 Le Château de Chantilly

 The chapel

 Four huge dogs guard the entrance, reminding everyone of the hunting tradition

 Inside the château, which is mostly a modern reconstruction of the old structures, the rooms are filled with gilded decorations, chandeliers, eastern-inspired furniture and objects

 One room, a rare survivor among other singeries in France, is entirely painted with scenes of monkeys

 The Musée de Condé, now housed in the château, has an incredible collection of illuminated manuscripts

 The library, left in its original state, is organized not alphabetically, not chronologically, not even by subject, but by the size of the books!

 When the museum was left to the state by the Duc de Condé, his only stipulation was that none of the pieces ever be sold or removed from the collection, and that all the works have to remain exactly where they were at the time of the donation.... in the 19th century! That's why the galleries look so crowded and unlike a display we'd find in a museum today.

We also made a point to take a walk to the hamlet gardens not far from the château. In a little restaurant we sampled the famous crème chantilly, the French name for whipped cream, which was supposedly invented in Chantilly. Of course this isn't your spray-can whipped cream - it's the real deal, hand-whipped from some very rich cream with a pinch of sugar and vanilla. Yum!