and, if some of you love old cars and old carriages, you'll be thrilled: there are dozens of each!

Oh, and the thing that repeat-visitors to France will also love, it's the (almost) total absence of tour groups and the very few number of individual visitors.

I guess that this palace can be done in a long half-day (if you insist) but I highly recommend that you fit it in with another half-day to make it a full-day tour.

And my last-but-not-least argument to convince you to go there will be the slideshow here below:

To be honest with you (ain't I always?) I wouldn't put Compiegne at the top of your list. For several reasons:

1) it's not as beautiful and impressive as Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fontainebleau or Chantilly.

2) like some palaces quoted just above (except Versailles), it's a bit far (50 miles) so we need 1h30 to get there.

3) it's a massive building with huge rooms (except for the Hall of Mirrors, the rooms are bigger than in Versailles) so a lot of the rooms lack charm and the palace doesn't really have a soul of its own...

Some rooms have remarkable furniture from the First Empire.

I mean, look at the pictures below of Napoleon and Josephine's individual bedrooms !

This is HIS :

And this is HERS :

I mean, isn't that the best invitation to go to bed you could ever get ?

Compiegne also hosts an interesting museum dedicated to the Second-Empire (1852-1870) so it gives me the opportunity to tell you all about Napoleon III's astonishing life from birth to death and, if you're interested, I can tell you about his numerous feminine conquests (the man was such a womanizer that it won't be possible to mention them all!).