Saint Germain en Laye

 

The Chateaux gardens are now a public park for all to enjoy.
The plane trees are pruned so they grow and make a shaded allee for those hot summer days.
The Chateaux is the Musee d'Archaelogie Nationale.

 
When you are the king, you may build many places to live.  It you don't like the place you were born, you are allowed to build a new house.  Saint Germain en Laye has a chateaux built by Louis VI le Gros.  It was added on and remodeled by several kings, but  Francios I,  or Frankie the First as I loving refer to him, really left his mark.  Now, Frankie had a thing for salamanders, so everything he owned has carvings of salamanders.  This chateaux was the birthplace of Louis XIV.  He didn't much care for the salamanders, so he built a new place, which most of you will know; Versailles. 

One of the many salamanders in the Chateaux.  This one is decorating a fireplace.

Looking through one of the beautiful windows out into the courtyard.

The chateaux at Saint Germain en Laye is the Musee d'Archeologie Nationale.  Several of the former kings palaces are now museums, the one that comes to my mind instantly is the Louvre.  So when you visit a museum in France, sometimes the building is as beautiful and important as the collections is houses.

Horses carved from antlers, more than 10,000 years old.

Horses carved on bone, about 10,000 years ago.

The collection at the museum is world renowned.  It helps that France has some of the best preserved places where early man lived.  People always wanted to live in France.

All of these arrowheads and not a single one made from Alabates Flint! (For all you Texans.)

If you are going to make something useful, you might as well make it beautiful, too!  A spear point.

Do you think the ancient French had a problem with the javelinas ancestors eating their landscaping?

Women have always liked their pretties.