REPORTAGE
After 82 days of closing, one of the most beautiful shop windows in France is visible again. The Palace of Versailles, which welcomes 8 million visitors each year, reopened on Saturday. Before the confinement, the castle welcomed more than 4,000 visitors per hour, compared to only 500 now to comply with health precautionary measures against the Covid-19. Ultimately, management plans to increase to 1,000 visitors per hour.
>> LIVE - Coronavirus: follow the situation on Saturday
Versailles at its own pace
For heritage lovers, this must not be missed. Fewer people are also the freedom to wander around the salons and the park without hurrying. "The Hall of Mirrors was dusted during confinement, we really wanted to see it," says a visitor. Franck came specially from Epernay: "We never take the time, if we stop for 30 seconds, we feel that it is annoying behind. We rushed to come, saying that we would have time to take photos and follow the audioguide without skipping a step. "
Taking the time to study each detail of the paintings and sculptures, while following the corridor that has been set up to avoid crossing, allows another approach to the palace, recognizes Thierry Gosseron, the administrator of the Palace of Versailles. "We notice that visitors are more contemplative than usual. This corridor serves as a guide, and it is a small revolution that we are experiencing."
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Wartime teams
To allow the castle to reopen as soon as the authorities allowed, the teams worked hard during the confinement. "The gardeners came to work in small numbers because it was the full season of planting and watering the trees, we could not leave these gardens to themselves", says Catherine Pégard, the president of the establishment castle audience. "In the same way, the watchmaker has come to reassemble the clocks every week. If the mechanisms become entangled, they stop and Versailles could not be silenced!"
Time has left its mark on the park, still wild here and there, as the manager of the English Garden and the Queen's Hamlet testifies: "There are lots of things that we had to do at the last minute, when we learned that it was going to reopen. We are doing our best to make the garden as beautiful as possible. " The containment will have at least made it possible to do some renovation work in the fountains.
For its part, management hopes to quickly revive the machine, while the castle has already lost more than half of its revenue for the year.