14 Facts About the Palace of Versailles That Will Surprise You

Fourteen things about Versailles that are true, sourced, and not what most people arrive expecting. None of them is padding: if a fact did not make you stop, it is not here.

1. There is a hunting lodge inside the courtyard

Louis XIII built a small lodge here in 1624 and rebuilt it in brick and stone between 1631 and 1634. Louis XIV was advised to demolish it when he started building in 1661 and refused. The narrow red-brick block at the far end of the Marble Court is it, still standing, with the largest palace in Europe built around it.

2. The mirrors were an act of industrial competition

Venice held the European monopoly on making large mirrors when the Hall of Mirrors was built between 1678 and 1684. Producing 357 of them in France was a statement about French manufacturing as much as about decoration. The room is a trade policy you can walk through.

3. Nineteen royal children were born in public in one room

The gilded balustrade in front of the bed in the Queen's Bedchamber is not decoration. It is where the court stood to watch. Royal births were witnessed to prove the succession, and that room saw nineteen of them.

4. It has been a museum longer than it was a court

The court moved in during 1682 and left on 6 October 1789 — 107 years. Louis-Philippe opened the Museum of the History of France here in 1837, and it has been open as a museum ever since. The museum has now had the building for nearly twice as long as the monarchy did.

5. The dedication is carved on the front, and it is not royal

À toutes les gloires de la France — to all the glories of France — is cut across the pediment above the courtyard. A king did not put it there. A constitutional monarch did, in 1837, to reframe a palace of absolute monarchy as a national museum. It worked.

6. The gardens took forty years

Louis XIV handed them to André Le Nôtre in 1661, and the estate's own account puts the work at roughly forty years. That is longer than most of the buildings took. The gardens page walks the axis he laid out.

7. The Grand Canal is 1,670 metres long

The Grand Canal was dug between 1668 and 1679, and it takes about twenty-five minutes to walk from the Apollo Basin to the far end. Rowing boats are hired on it in summer. Most day visitors never reach it, which is why it is the quietest part of the estate.

8. Two treaties were signed in the same room

The German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871. Forty-eight years later the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War was signed there on 28 June 1919, and the choice of room was not accidental. It is the only space at Versailles whose fame is mostly about the twentieth century.

9. The Queen's Hamlet was a working farm

Not a playhouse. The Queen's Hamlet was built between 1783 and 1786 under Richard Mique, and it has a windmill and a dairy alongside the salon and the boudoir, and the farm produced food for the household. It still keeps animals. The Hamlet page has the rest.

10. The cracks in the Hamlet were painted on

The timber framing is real and the thatch is real. The weathering was not: cracks were painted onto the render to make the buildings look older than they were. It is a stage set built to working standards.

11. The Grand Trianon was called the Marble Trianon

Construction began in 1687 under Jules Hardouin-Mansart, and the name came from the pink marble panels on its facade. Louis XIV built it to get away from the court he had spent thirty years assembling in the building next door.

12. Napoleon refurnished it

Much of what stands in the Grand Trianon today is Empire furniture rather than Louis XIV, because Napoleon had it done up and used it. Visitors who arrive expecting the seventeenth century throughout are often surprised by the first room.

13. Half the estate is free for half the year

From November to late March the gardens are free to everyone, every day, and the whole estate is free on the first Sunday of the month. The park — about 800 hectares of it — is free all year round, every day, including the Mondays when the Palace is shut.

14. The Palace has 2,300 rooms and you will see fifteen

63,154 square metres of floor. A standard visit, guided or not, is the State Apartments, the Hall of Mirrors and the Queen's rooms. Everything else is either closed, on a separate estate tour, or in a wing you will never find. That is not a complaint — it is why people come back.

15. The fountains do not run all the time

They never did. There was never enough water pressure at Versailles to run every basin at once, so in Louis XIV's day fountaineers turned valves ahead of the King as he walked and shut them behind him. What you see today on a show day is a timetable for the same reason, and one traveller notes that the fountains are held back in hot weather to save water. The gardens are the only part of the estate where the seventeenth-century solution is still the twenty-first-century one.

16. Almost nothing in the rooms is original

The court left in October 1789 and the contents were sold off during the Revolution. Most of the furniture you walk past is a reconstruction, a period substitute or a piece bought back over two centuries of patient acquisition. That is not a failure of the museum — it is the museum's whole job, and it is why an empty-looking room in one wing can be more interesting than a full one in another.

17. The park is bigger than the 1st arrondissement

About 800 hectares of it, with a rivulet running 22 kilometres through it and a lake for the Swiss Guards covering twelve hectares on its own. You can walk in it all day without buying anything, on a Monday when the Palace is shut, in February when nothing is running. Very few people do, and that is the estate's best-kept practical secret.

The numbers in one table

Every figure here is published by the estate. The facts page has the full set.

If any of this made you want to stand in the room it happened in, a Palace of Versailles guided tour is the straightforward way to do that, and the history page puts the dates in order.

The dates behind all of it are on the history page. Every departure is on Palace of Versailles Tours.