Castles · Tour

Semi-Private Versailles: Guiding Starts on the Train From Saint-Michel

The commentary here does not wait for the palace gates. It starts at Place Saint-Michel and runs through the ride out, so the building already has a story attached by the time it comes into view. The tour keeps three strands going at once: how the palace was built, what the works hanging inside it actually are, and the domestic detail of court life across several reigns. By the end the names have faces. The Sun King, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Pompadour, the sequence of events that brought the Revolution to these rooms, and what happened to the building afterwards, since it is still in use today for sittings of the French Parliament and for receptions given to foreign Heads of State. Running under all of it is one man's idea. Louis XIV conceived the project at twenty. He died at seventy-eight and it was still unfinished. That gap between one lifetime and one building is the thread the guide follows, and it explains the scale better than any figure does: a plan nobody has matched anywhere since.