Having already been to Versailles and the apartments of Napoleon III in the Louvre earlier that week, palace fatigue for my week in Paris was starting to set in as I departed from Gare du Lyon on the train to Fontainebleau-Avon station. There were regular buses but I opted for the slow route, walking ~3 km through some unremarkable French suburbs alongside the railway viaduct to the entrance to the park to the east of the palace. This is part of the core zone already but there is a tentative extension to cover more parkland and the surround forests, appropriate given Fontainebleau started life as a royal hunting lodge, although the large game animals are long gone. I did not venture further out into the woods so cannot comment on the validity of that extension. Between two seemingly endless perfectly straight rows of trees, I eventually emerged onto the road and crossed over to enter the formal gardens, which were nice enough but nothing out of the ordinary for this sort of site.

After resting at the café in the Courtyard of Fountains, in which the fountain is remarkably not very prominent despite the name, I passed through into the main front courtyard, which I have seen variously called the Courtyard of Honour, Courtyard of the White Horse, and Courtyard of Goodbyes. Inside there is a bag search then free lockers to stash said bags before some automated scanners to check tickets. All of this infrastructure makes Fontainebleau seem like it would be another Parisian tourist hotspot expecting hordes of visitors but, thankfully, it was not. The first section is a museum devoted to the life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte who by all accounts enjoyed this place a great deal. The rest of the indoors are a similar fare to Versailles and, although perhaps less ornate and grand in scale, they make up for it with a complete absence of crushing crowds. The wooden Gallery of Francis I, where the Mona Lisa once hung before being moved to the Louvre, reminded me a great deal of the Hall of Mirrors, trading great size and shininess for a more understanded and almost rustic-feeling space. The later rooms continue the Napoleon theme with his throne room and the study in which he signed his abdication before his first exile on Elba (pictured). I do get easily suckered in by connections to historic events like this, regardless of authenticity, but the chairs that are still there do strongly resemble those in Delaroche’s famous portrait of the dejected Emperor awaiting the end.

Exit is through the gift shop then back across the Courtyard of Honour to collect bags from the lockers. Bear this in mind because I had entered in sunshine only to exit into heavy rain and so sheltered by the gift shop door with a large Playmobil model of Napoleon for the worst of the showers to pass before rushing back across to collect my waterproofs. Perhaps it is because I am a relative novice in WHS travelling and have not had chance got bored of European palaces yet but I rather enjoyed Fontainebleau. Despite Versailles being objectively the ‘better’ site artistically and historically, it does suffer from being rammed with people even in mid-September when I visited and is more than twice the price (27€ for palace and gardens versus just 13€ for Fontainebleau as of late 2022). In fact, you could visit the core zone of Fontainebleau without paying a penny as the park and gardens are free to access although really you should see the inside to properly appreciate the site.