Versailles, narrated properly

What's inside

• 01Royal Chapel of VersaillesThe court stood with its back to the altar, facing the king's gallery instead8 min
• 02Royal Opera of VersaillesEverything in it that looks like marble is painted wood, and the floor of the stalls rises to stage level to turn the theatre into a ballroom13 min
• 03King's State ApartmentsThe solid silver throne, 2.6 metres of it, went to the mint in 1689 to help pay for a war12 min
• 04Hall of MirrorsLighting it for a ball took up to 20,000 candles, thrown back by 357 mirrors9 min
• 05The Queen's ApartmentsMost of the decoration was made for Marie Leszczyńska in the 1730s, not for Marie-Antoinette14 min
• 06Gardens and Great Perspective of VersaillesThe fountains were turned on by hand from tunnels underneath, on a whistle signal, just before the king arrived12 min
• 07Grand TrianonLouis XIV drew on his architect's plans, struck out the middle of the building, and got the open peristyle7 min
• 08Petit TrianonLouis XV caught the smallpox that killed him here, in April 17748 min
• 09Queen's HamletPainters were paid to add fake cracks, rot and moss to walls that were brand new6 min

Every one of those runs in full offline. Tap a stop above to read the research behind it, where a page has been written.

Why a stop runs this long

Each stop starts as a written dossier — earliest history, construction, architecture, archaeology, the people, the myths, and what is actually known — researched and written out before a word of it is narrated. Each claim carries how confident the research is, and the sources are listed.

Versailles needs that more than most places. It is a palace that has been curated, restored and re-narrated for two hundred years, and a great deal of what gets told on the floor is Third Republic myth-making. Where something is only a story — and at Versailles a lot of it is — the guide says so rather than repeating it as fact.

The half of Versailles most visitors miss

The state apartments and the Hall of Mirrors are what the queue is for. The estate does not stop there, and the far end of it is a long way from the palace door.

• The Queen's Hamlet — six minutes on a working farm village built new in the 1780s and then painted, by hired decorators, to look old.
• The Grand and Petit Trianon — fifteen minutes between them, at the other end of the park, where the whole point was to be somewhere the court was not.
• The gardens — twelve minutes on the hydraulics, the sightlines and the arithmetic behind what looks like scenery.

Allow for the walk — the Trianons and the Hamlet are at the far end of the estate, well beyond the gardens.

How it works on the day

Download Versailles over wi-fi before you leave Paris. After that the whole guide plays on aeroplane mode, which matters here more than most places: the estate is large, and it is most of a day outdoors and on the move.

Start a stop, lock the phone and put it in your pocket — it keeps playing, and you can pause or skip from your headphones or the lock screen. The app can also show you an optional list of stops within about a kilometre. Decline that permission and everything else still works.

Play them in any order. Nothing in the guide assumes you have heard another stop first.