How do you manage a site – and a sight – as vast as Versailles? The palace alone has 2,300 rooms. And there are two more châteaux – the Petit and Grand Trianon – in the grounds. Add to that two opera houses, Marie Antoinette’s model village, acre after acre of parks and formal gardens and, on summer weekends, spectacular firework and fountain displays, and you begin to realise the extent of the sightseeing challenge.
You need time, but you also need access. And a new hotel which has opened in the grounds of the palace gives you exactly that – a 24-hour pass to the park and after-hours tours of the interiors. So you can see everything from Marie Antoinette’s bathroom to the famous long gallery – the Hall of Mirrors – devoid of the crowds, and many additional rooms that are rarely open to the public.
I spent three days there a few weeks ago, quietly getting under the skin of the place. And I came away not so much dazzled by the architecture or appalled by the folie de grandeur, but curious about the bizarre cast of characters that created and inhabited this extraordinary place and used it to fulfil their even more extraordinary fantasies – from the Sun King, Louis XIV, who was the prime motivator behind both the palace and the partying, to Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, and the tragically naive Marie Antoinette.
For me Versailles felt like a theatre after a performance. The silent fountains, empty bedrooms, echoing halls, chapel and opera house were full of ghosts: the partygoers of the great festivities of the past. Six events in particular stand out. Moments when the great stage set of Versailles lived up to its billing.
The Party of the Delights of the Enchanted Island (1664)
When Louis XIV came to the throne, Versailles was a simple royal hunting lodge. It took 50 years, from the 1660s to the 1710s, to transform it into the vast palace set in the landscape we see now. But the 21-year-old king saw its potential from the start. Work started on the gardens in 1662, and he threw his first great party in 1664.
