Inside the Palace of Versailles: Every Room and Highlight

Two thousand three hundred rooms, and you will see about fifteen. This is what those fifteen are, in the order the route runs them, so you can decide in advance where to stop rather than working it out in a moving crowd.

Before you go in: the building in the courtyard

Stand in the Cour d'Honneur and look at the narrow red-brick block at the far end. That is the Marble Court, and its core is the hunting lodge Louis XIII built in 1624. Louis XIV was advised to demolish it and refused, so everything around you was built outwards from a building that was already there. It is the one thing at Versailles that most visitors walk past without knowing what it is.

The Royal Chapel

Finished in 1710, and the tallest space in the building. On a standard route you look into it from the tribune where the King sat rather than walking through the nave, which is why every photograph of it is taken from one of two positions. Give it five minutes and look up: the vault is the reason.

The Hercules Salon and the King's Grand Apartment

Seven rooms named for planets and gods — Hercules, Abundance, Venus, Diana, Mars, Mercury and Apollo. They were never bedrooms. They are a ceremonial route, designed to be walked in sequence by people waiting to be seen, and they get progressively grander as you go. Twenty minutes for all seven is about right, and the ceilings are where to spend it.

The War Salon

The hinge between the King's rooms and the Hall of Mirrors, and easy to walk straight through. Coysevox's oval relief of Louis XIV on horseback is on the wall. Three minutes.

The Hall of Mirrors

Seventy-three metres long, with 357 mirrors set into seventeen arches facing seventeen windows. Jules Hardouin-Mansart built it between 1678 and 1684 over what had been an open terrace. Charles Le Brun painted the thirty compositions on the vault, covering Louis XIV's reign from 1661 to the peace treaties of Nijmegen.

The mirrors are the point of it. Venice held the European monopoly on making them, and producing 357 in France was an industrial statement as much as a decorative one. Two treaties have been signed under that vault since — the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 and the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919. Give this room ten minutes and stand still in the middle of it for one of them.

The Peace Salon

The far end of the Hall, and the mirror of the War Salon. Marie-Antoinette later used it as a music room. Three minutes, and then you turn back along the south side.

The Queen's Grand Apartment

The more human half of the visit, and the one people remember. The Queen's Bedchamber is the room to slow down in: the gilded balustrade in front of the bed is where the court stood to watch a queen give birth in public. Nineteen royal children were born in that room. The flowered silk you see is the summer hanging, changed with the season as it was then.

The Gallery of Battles

Near the exit, and a complete change of register. It is 120 metres of enormous canvases covering fourteen centuries of French military history, installed by Louis-Philippe when he turned the palace into the Museum of the History of France in 1837. Most visitors are tired by the time they reach it, which is a shame, because it is the room that explains what the building is now for.

The Coach Gallery, if you have the afternoon

Across the Place d'Armes in the Great Stables, free to enter, and open only in the afternoon — weekends and public holidays in high season. It holds the royal carriages, sledges and sedan chairs. It takes half an hour and hardly anybody goes.

The route in one table

Ninety minutes covers the first nine at a guided pace.

Five things most people walk past

• The brick core in the Marble Court. Louis XIII's lodge, still standing in the middle of the courtyard.
• The mirrors themselves. Look at the edges of the arches, not the reflections.
• The balustrade in the Queen's Bedchamber. It is where the court stood. The room makes sense once you know that.
• The pediment above the courtyard. It carries the 1837 dedication to all the glories of France, in letters you can read from the ground.
• The Royal Opera. Wood painted to look like marble, for acoustics and for cost. It is not always open on a standard ticket.

The rooms nobody photographs

Three are worth slowing for and none of them is on a postcard. The Salon of Abundance, early in the King's sequence, was where drinks were served during the evening receptions, and the ceiling is about exactly that. The Guard Room at the head of the Queen's Apartment is the room the crowd came through in October 1789. And the Coronation Room, near the Gallery of Battles, holds a version of David's coronation of Napoleon that most visitors walk straight past because they have already seen it reproduced.

The thing they have in common is that they are quieter. In a building where the pressing problem is other people, a room nobody stops in is worth thirty seconds of your ninety minutes.

What a standard ticket does not open

Rather a lot. The private apartments of the King and Queen, several of the smaller cabinets and often the Opera are shown only on the estate's own guided tours, booked separately at €10 to €16 on top of admission. A guided departure booked here covers the State Apartments and the Hall of Mirrors, which is the visit almost everybody means. A Versailles palace skip-the-line guided tour adds the story to it.

What is genuinely worth adding, if you have the time, is not another room but the outside. The gardens are more than half of what you have come to see, and the axis running west from the terrace is the single best view on the estate.

If you would rather read the rooms first, the Palace page has them in detail. Every departure is on Palace of Versailles Tours.