The palace seemed a mirage of itself.
The canal water shimmered in the sun, drawing my gaze to it.
The opulent building dominated the landscape, and the landscape seemed made for it.
I got on my bike. Strobe light beams cut through the narrow cracks between the trees and my tires crushed the gravel.
As I cycled down a hidden path, the crimson leaves of the trees covered my head and open fields stretched out in the distance.
There was no one in sight. But a short distance away, inside the opulent ballrooms of the Palace of Versailles, thousands of people swarmed.
I was in the Versailles Parkthe 2,000-acre playground for the kings, queens and political leaders who made up France’s ruling class until the late 18th century.
Versailles was the center of power and the material embodiment of the absolute monarchy that reigned in France until the Revolution of 1788-1799.
The palace witnessed strategic marriages and state visits.
But the entire property was actually built for other reasons: leisurewith the large park and the smaller manicured gardens used for pleasure and debauchery.
In the centuries since it was built, Versailles has become one of the most famous and most visited palaces in the world, a site that welcomes 27,000 visitors daily.
But outside the palace there is another storyone that stretches for miles and is almost impossible to cover on foot in a day.
It is there that, amid the fresh air and solitude, another facet of the great vision of the magnificent place can be seen.
“When you go to the gardens, you learn more about the history of Louis XIV, XV and XVI,” tour guide Mara Alfaro Prias told me.
“Versailles is more than paintings or chandeliers.”
different ideas
It all started in 1623 when Louis XIII built a hunting lodge in the countryside around the small town of Versailles, some 20km southwest of central Paris.
But his son, Louis XIV, had bigger plans for the grounds.
“Louis XIV was a bit of an architect,” explained Mathieu da Vinha, scientific director of the Versailles Palace Research Center.
“In Paris he couldn’t really enlarge the palaces because the urban fabric was too dense…in Versailles it was the opposite.”
The king didn’t just want more space.
“Louis XIV needed what today we would call a ‘bachelor apartment’, that is, a little house of pleasures… for fun parties with some friends,” said Michel Vergé-Franceschi, co-author of the book A Histoire Erotique de Versailles.
“So, he created Versailles partly for his pleasure, for his sexuality, with amazing gardens.”
Near the top of the park’s Grand Canal, hidden among cafes and restaurants, is a stand where visitors can rent bikes.
On my way to it, last fall, I passed the Latona fountainI collected fallen orange leaves from the sculptured trees and wanted to know more about the flower-filled gardens and romantic groves.
They were the work of André Le Nôtre, the king’s gardener.
“It’s a garden where nothing is left to chance,” Hélène Dalifard, the palace’s communications director, told me.
“The gaze is always directed towards a particular effect… the idea is to imagine the garden as a museum in which the visitor thinks he is taking a walk aimlesslywhile in reality it is completely guided by the effects of perspective“.
painstaking calculation
The dimensions of Versailles and its park were carefully calculated to reflect the Louvre; the Etoile Royale (the viewpoint at the other end of the canal) and the Apollo fountain they are exactly the same distance away as the Place de l’Êtoile and the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
And the distance between the Fountain of Apollo and the Palace of Versailles is the same as the distance between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.
There are optical illusions, hidden groves and subtle messages alluding to Sol all over the parkthe personal symbol chosen by Louis XIV who is known as the Sun King.
To reinforce that connection, the image of Apollo, the Greek god of the Sun, appears in fountains, groves and statues of the place. Symbolically, Versailles would revolve around him and the gardens would be his setting.
“Versailles was the king’s theater,” Vergé-Franceschi said, adding that Louis XIV even wrote a book on the proper way to visit the gardens.
The route, which begins at the top steps of the garden, reads almost like an instruction manual, with precise directions on where to walk, stop, and what to admire along the way.
In 1661, when Louis XIV was married to Maria Theresa of Austria, he met Louise de La Vallière, the woman who would become his first official mistress.
“She would ride a horse through the park…she could stand on a horse holding the animal’s reins with silk ropes, and kill a wild boar in the forest of Versailles with stakes,” Vergé-Franceschi said.
They were meeting in private, in Louis XIII’s hunting lodge in the park.
“Since the castle was too small before Louis XIV enlarged it, most of the parties took place in the gardens,” da Vinha said.
The first great festivity offered at Versailles was the legendary Festival of Delights of the Enchanted Island.
There were six days of spectacular celebrations, with carousels, fireworks and works by the renowned French playwright Molière, offered officially in honor of the mother and wife of Louis XIV, but unofficially dedicated to the Duchess of La Vallière.
an open place
The park has an air of excess and exclusivity, but surprisingly, the grounds were never closed to the public.
The entire complex remained open, from the king’s bedroom (as long as he was not there) to the gardens and park.
Today, Versailles is always open to the public, and access to the gardens and the park is free, except during certain days.
“The tradition of the French monarchy is that the king must be accessible to his subjects, so one could enter the castle very freely on the condition of being well dressed,” da Vinha explained.
The lack of privacy could have been a contributing factor to the expansion of the grounds.
At Versailles, a palace was not enough.
Wanting to have a place to escape to, Louis XIV commissioned the Grand Trianon at the northern end of the Grand Canal in 1670.
This was where he spent time with Madame de Montespan, the mistress who replaced Louise de La Vallière.
It’s a 30-minute walk from the palace to the site, but it’s a 5-minute bike ride from the rental stand.
The Grand Trianon sits on high ground, its salmon-pink marble walls bending in arches open to the landscape. It is breezy and pretty, like a little jewelry box born out of nowhere.
A short distance from the Grand Trianon is the Little Trianona palace Louis XV commissioned for the Comtesse de Barry in 1758, his mistress at the time (it was supposed to be for Madame de Pompadour, but she died before completion).
It would eventually be offered to Marie Antoinette as a gift from Louis XVI in 1774. She spent most of her time there.
The isolation of the monarchy at Versailles played a role in the Revolution; there they lived in opulence while the French population starved, and hundreds of citizens finally stormed the place in 1789.
“Versailles contributed to [Luis XVI y María Antonieta] disconnected from reality“Verge-Franceschi said.
A few years after the Revolution, the palace and its gardens were absorbed by the Republic, to be kept for the public.
*this artArticle is part of the BBC Travel series slow motion, which celebrates slow, self-propelled travel and invites readers to get out and reconnect with the world in a safe and sustainable way. If you want to read the original, Click here.
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