Versailles worked by being watched. The whole apparatus — the levée, the public dining, the thousands of courtiers and petitioners — depended on the king being permanently on display. The Grand Trianon is what he built to get away from the thing he had built. One storey, pink Languedoc marble, an open peristyle in the middle, and no state ceremony at all.
First there was a porcelain house
The building here from 1670 to 1687 was the Trianon de Porcelaine, by Louis Le Vau — a small pavilion put up for Louis XIV and his maîtresse-en-titre, Athénaïs de Montespan.
Europe was fascinated by Chinese porcelain, and the pavilion was clad in blue-and-white glazed tiles to imitate it. They were not porcelain. They were French faience earthenware from manufactories at Rouen, Nevers, Lisieux and Saint-Cloud, made to look like the real thing.
Faience does not survive French winters. The tiles cracked and fell, the structure decayed within about fifteen years, and in 1687 the whole thing came down.
The king redrew the plans
Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the replacement in 1687, and his first scheme had rooms across the middle of the building.
Louis XIV took the drawings and struck the central rooms out, forcing an open space through the centre. That is the Peristyle: a double row of pink marble columns, open to the air, running straight through the building so that the entrance court and the flower gardens become one view.
The single most admired feature of the Grand Trianon exists because the client edited the architect.
What it smelled like
The gardens were planted for scent as much as sight, in quantities that are difficult to credit: flowers in constant rotation, with figures of over 1,900,000 bulbs and plants at a time.
Court ladies reported feeling faint from the perfume of the tuberoses. The research rates this high confidence, and it is a useful corrective to how we experience these gardens now — politely, at a distance, in a way the people who used them did not.
A tsar with a measuring rod
Peter the Great stayed here in 1717, and he did not rest.
He walked the Trianon gardens with measuring rods, sketching the peristyle and the fountains and taking down dimensions. Those measurements went back to Russia and fed directly into the Grand Cascade and the palaces at Peterhof.
Separately, the single-storey plan was so admired by Louise-Françoise de Bourbon — legitimised daughter of Louis XIV and Montespan, who lived at Trianon in the 1720s — that she used it as the model for her Paris residence, the Palais Bourbon, which today houses the French National Assembly.
Napoleon's house, and his bedtime
The Revolution abandoned the building. It was not demolished, but the furniture, clocks, bronzes and art were systematically auctioned off.
Napoleon took it on between 1805 and 1810, repaired the masonry, reglazed it and refurnished the interior throughout in Empire style. Much of what you walk through now is his taste rather than Louis XIV's, which surprises people.
Louis-Philippe altered it again in the 1830s, destroying original partitions and service stairs to put in modern heating, plumbing and staff quarters below.
The other treaty
Everyone knows the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in 1919.
The Treaty of Trianon, on 4 June 1920 — the settlement with Hungary, which redrew that country's borders and is still politically live there — was signed here, in the Galerie des Cotelle. Not in the Hall of Mirrors, and not in the main palace.
Four things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| The Trianon de Porcelaine was Chinese porcelain | False | French blue-and-white faience from Rouen, Nevers and Saint-Cloud, imitating it. It weathered badly and was demolished |
| Marie Antoinette built the Grand Trianon | False | Louis XIV and Mansart, 1687. Her retreat was the nearby Petit Trianon, built for Louis XV |
| The Treaty of Trianon was signed in the Hall of Mirrors | False | It was signed here in 1920, in the Galerie des Cotelle. The 1919 Versailles treaty was the Hall of Mirrors |
| The Revolution demolished it | False | The building survived; the contents were sold at auction |
It is worth walking here from the palace rather than being delivered. The Grand and Petit Trianon sit at the far end of the estate, and the distance is the point of them: far enough that the court could not casually follow, close enough to return the same evening. A retreat you can see from your own throne room is not a retreat.
Hear this one standing in front of it
Wanderlight's Versailles guide covers 9 landmarks and runs 1 hr 30 min in total. It plays offline, keeps going with the screen off, and doesn't ask you to make an account.
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for Grand Trianon — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.