Versailles, near Paris, France
Château de Versailles · vair-SIGH
A hunting lodge in a marsh that one king turned into the seat of government of the most powerful country in Europe. For a hundred years France was ruled from these rooms, in public, by the clock. Then one October morning a crowd came for the king, and the court never returned.
Photo: ToucanWings, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are in a cobbled courtyard that narrows as you walk in, like a funnel. Gilded railings are behind you. Ahead, at the far end, is a small court paved in black and white marble, with walls of red brick. That brick house is where it began.
Louis XIV moved the court here for good in 1682. In Beijing the Kangxi emperor was twenty-eight and had been on the throne for twenty-one years. The two never met, but they exchanged gifts and scholars across the world.
One ticket, the Passport, covers the palace, the Trianon palaces and the gardens on any day. The park is free. The gardens are free too, except on days when the fountains play or music is on. The palace and Trianon are closed on Mondays.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The palace: state rooms, Hall of Mirrors, king's and queen's rooms, Gallery of Battles | Passport, with a timed entry |
| The chapel | Seen from the door on the palace route |
| The Royal Opera | Guided tours and performances only |
| The gardens | Free; about 12 to 15 euros on fountain and music days, included in the Passport |
| The park and the Grand Canal | Free, every day |
| The Grand Trianon | Passport, or the Trianon ticket at 15 euros; from 12:00 |
| The Petit Trianon | Same ticket |
| The Queen's Hamlet | Same ticket |
| The Gallery of Coaches | Included; afternoons |
In 1623 Louis XIII built a hunting lodge here, on poor marshy land that nobody else wanted. His son, Louis XIV, was four when he became king and lived through a civil war in which nobles drove him out of Paris. He never trusted Paris or the nobles again.
So he kept his father's little house and wrapped a palace round it, big enough to hold the whole nobility of France. A duke who lived here, waiting to hand the king his shirt, could not be at home raising an army.
Everything pointed at him. The palace faces the rising sun, and his bedroom is at its exact centre. His getting up and his going to bed were ceremonies with a hundred people watching.
Before you leave, walk to the back and look down the garden. The view runs straight for three kilometres and was laid out before most of the palace was built.
"Marie-Antoinette said: let them eat cake." The line was in print, put in the mouth of an unnamed princess, when she was a child in Vienna. Nobody who knew her recorded her saying it.
"Louis XIV said: I am the state." No witness reports it. On his deathbed he is recorded as saying something close to the opposite: "I am going, but the state will always remain."
"The palace had no lavatories." It had hundreds of close-stools and some fixed privies, and servants to empty them. With several thousand people living under one roof it still smelled, and visitors said so.
"The furniture is original." Nearly everything was auctioned off in 1793 and 1794. The palace has spent a century buying pieces back, one at a time, and much of what you see is a careful replacement.
"You can see Versailles in a morning." The estate covers eight square kilometres. The palace alone takes two hours; the Trianon palaces are a twenty-five-minute walk beyond the garden.
The stops follow the route every visitor is sent on: through the courts, up to the chapel and the state rooms, out into the garden, and on to Trianon.
The gilded gate is new. The original was torn down in the Revolution, and this copy, eighty metres long and covered in a hundred thousand leaves of gold, was put up in 2008. On top are the king's crown and his emblem, the sun.
Beyond it the courts step up and close in: the wide Court of Honour, the Royal Court, then the small Marble Court. The further in you were allowed, the higher your rank. Only a few people could drive a carriage past the second gate.
The brick and stone walls round the Marble Court are Louis XIII's house of the 1630s. The painting shows it in 1668 with the first gardens. Everything else you can see was added round it over the next forty years.
You look in from the door. The chapel was the last thing Louis XIV built, finished in 1710, five years before he died. It is white stone below and gold and paint above.
The king heard mass every morning from the upper gallery, level with his apartment. The courtiers stood below with their backs to the altar, facing him. A visitor wrote that they seemed to worship the king while the king worshipped God.
In 1770 a fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess was married here to the heir to the throne. She was Marie-Antoinette.
Seven rooms lead one into the next along the north side, each named after a planet and its Roman god: Venus, Diana, Mars, Mercury, Apollo. The sun stands at the centre of the planets, and the Apollo room was the throne room.
Three evenings a week these rooms were opened to the whole court for cards, billiards, music and food. The king walked among his nobles and nobody had to stand on ceremony. It was politics: people who are busy gambling are not conspiring.
The silver throne, the silver tables and the silver orange-tree tubs that once stood here were melted down in 1689 to pay for a war.
The hall is 73 metres long. Seventeen windows on the garden side face seventeen arches filled with 357 mirrors. When it opened in 1684, a mirror the size of a hand was a luxury, and Venice kept the secret of making them. Louis's minister lured Venetian glassmakers to France and had every mirror here made at home.
Look up. The ceiling shows the first eighteen years of the king's reign in thirty scenes. Earlier kings had themselves painted as Hercules or Apollo. Louis is shown as himself, in a wig, among the gods.
On 18 January 1871, with Paris under siege, the German princes proclaimed their emperor in this room, to humiliate France. On 28 June 1919 the French chose the same room for Germany to sign the treaty that ended the First World War.
One delegation stayed away that day. The treaty gave Germany's holdings in Shandong to Japan and not back to China. Students in Beijing had been in the streets since 4 May, and the Chinese envoys refused to sign.
The room looks east over the Marble Court, on the axis of the whole palace. The bed stands behind a gilded rail that only a few could pass.
At 8:30 the first valet said: "Sire, it is time." Doctors, family and favoured nobles came in by turns, in six ranked groups, while the king was washed, shaved and dressed. To hold the candle or pass the right sleeve of the shirt was an honour that families fought over for years.
Louis XIV died in this room on 1 September 1715, of gangrene, after reigning for seventy-two years. No European monarch has reigned longer.
The queen's bedroom is the room where nineteen royal children were born, in public, as the rule required, so that nobody could doubt the heir. When Marie-Antoinette gave birth in 1778, the crowd was so thick that she fainted for lack of air.
On 5 October 1789 several thousand women marched from Paris in the rain to demand bread. At dawn on the 6th part of the crowd broke in and killed two guards at the queen's door. She escaped through the small door to the left of the bed, which you can still see, and ran to the king's rooms.
That afternoon the royal family was taken to Paris in a carriage, surrounded by the crowd. The shutters were closed behind them. No king lived here again.
Stand at the top of the steps behind the palace. Below you is a fountain of a goddess and her children, surrounded by frogs; then a strip of lawn; then a second fountain; then a canal that runs to the horizon. André Le Nôtre drew this line in the 1660s and thousands of soldiers dug it.
In the second fountain the sun god drives his horses up out of the water, facing the palace. At evening the real sun sets behind him, at the end of the canal.
The one thing Louis could not command was water. The site is high and dry. A machine of fourteen giant wheels on the Seine pumped water up a hill, and it was never enough for all the fountains at once. When the king walked in the garden, boys ran ahead and whistled, so that each fountain was turned on as he came and off when he had passed.
To the left, down two great staircases, is the Orangery. More than a thousand orange, lemon and palm trees in wooden boxes spend the winter in its vaulted gallery and are wheeled out in May.
Even the king needed to get away from Versailles. In 1670 he built a pavilion at the far side of the park, faced with blue and white tiles in imitation of Chinese porcelain. The tiles cracked in the frost. In 1687 he replaced it with the Grand Trianon, a low palace of pink marble, where he dined with people he chose.
The Petit Trianon, a perfect cube of pale stone, was built in the 1760s. Louis XVI gave it to Marie-Antoinette, and it became the one place where she gave the orders. Nobody came without her invitation, not even the king.
Beyond it, round a pond, she had a village built in 1783: a mill, a dairy, a dovecote, a farm with real cows. The cottages were painted with cracks to look old. Pamphlets in Paris made it a symbol of a queen playing shepherdess while people went hungry.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1623 | Louis XIII builds a hunting lodge | The last decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); the Mayflower landed three years ago |
| 1661 | Louis XIV, aged 22, begins to rule in person and starts the gardens | The Kangxi emperor comes to the throne in Beijing, aged six |
| 1682 | The court and government move in | Peter the Great becomes tsar; Newton is at work on gravity |
| 1685 | Louis sends six Jesuit mathematicians to the court of Kangxi | They reach Beijing in 1688 and teach the emperor geometry |
| 1715 | Louis XIV dies after 72 years on the throne | Kangxi has seven years to live; he will have reigned 61 |
| 1789 | The crowd takes the king to Paris | The Qianlong emperor is in his 54th year; Washington becomes president |
| 1837 | King Louis-Philippe reopens the palace as a museum of French history | Victoria becomes queen; two years before the Opium War |
| 1919 | The treaty ending the First World War is signed in the Hall of Mirrors | The May Fourth Movement in China; the Chinese envoys refuse to sign |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Venice sent agents after the glassmakers who had gone over to France. Two of the best died suddenly within weeks of each other, poisoned, and the rest took fright and went home.
Source: Told in histories of the French mirror works since the eighteenth century; the deaths are recorded, the poison is not proved
On 10 August 1901 two English schoolteachers walking near the Petit Trianon met people in old-fashioned dress and passed a fair-haired lady sketching on the grass. They decided afterwards that they had walked into the year 1789 and seen Marie-Antoinette.
Source: Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, An Adventure (1911)
Louis XIV ordered the windows of his rooms thrown open in every weather and never noticed the cold, while his family shivered in furs and the wine froze in the glasses at table.
Source: The letters of his sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine, who records the frozen wine in the winter of 1695
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The palace's own English site (en.chateauversailles.fr), ticket pages opened in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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