Seven rooms, seven planets

Built out of an arrest

The design team was not assembled. It was seized.

In 1661 Louis XIV had his superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, arrested. Fouquet's offence, in effect, was building a château at Vaux-le-Vicomte more beautiful than anything the king had. Louis took the men who built it — the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun, the garden designer André Le Nôtre — and put them to work on Versailles.

The other motive was the Fronde, the noble revolt of 1648 to 1653. Moving the seat of power out of Paris and requiring the nobility to attend him in the country was a way of neutralising them. The State Apartments are the room where that policy was performed.

The Envelope

Construction of the Château Neuf — the "Envelope" — began in 1668. Le Vau wrapped a new stone casing around three sides of Louis XIII's old brick-and-stone hunting lodge, creating a piano nobile facing the north, west and south gardens.

The north wing became the king's state suite; the south wing was the symmetrical suite for Queen Maria Theresa. Le Vau died in 1670 and François d'Orbay saw the work through, mostly complete by 1679.

The rooms, and what each one claims

• Salon de Vénus — love and beauty: courtly elegance, and peace after war.
• Salon de Diane — the hunt and the moon: vigilance, navigation, sport. The billiard room.
• Salon de Mars — war: French victories, in gilded stucco trophies of armour.
• Salon de Mercure — commerce, science and the arts. The formal state bedchamber.
• Salon d'Apollon — the sun. The throne room.

Each ceiling carries its planetary scene, and the sequence builds towards Apollo the way an argument builds towards its conclusion.

He did not sleep here

The state bedchamber in the Salon de Mercure is a ceremonial object, not a bedroom.

Louis XIV slept in his private bedchamber overlooking the inner Marble Court. The parade suite was for state ceremony, court reception and diplomacy. If you are looking for where the king actually lived, you are in the wrong rooms — which is the most common misreading of this part of the palace.

The silver throne, melted

The Salon d'Apollon held a throne 2.6 metres tall, in solid silver, draped in crimson velvet. The gallery and the state rooms held over twenty tons of solid cast silver furniture besides — tables, balustrades, torchères, mirror frames.

In December 1689 Louis XIV sent all of it to the Paris Mint to be melted into coin, to pay troops in the Nine Years' War.

It was destroyed a full century before the Revolution, by the king who commissioned it. The throne you see now is gilded wood on a dais. No French royal silver furniture survives from Versailles, because the monarchy spent it.

The staircase that is not there

The Ambassadors' Staircase was the grand entry to the State Apartments, and one of the most admired interiors in Europe. It had a top-lit glass skylight — rare engineering for seventeenth-century France — illuminating painted spectators from Asia, Africa, America and Europe leaning over a painted balcony to watch you climb.

Louis XV demolished it in 1752 to make private apartments for his daughters. Thirty-seven years before the Revolution, and nothing to do with it.

Two things that happened in these rooms

On 1 September 1686, ambassadors from Siam entered the Salon d'Apollon and crossed the floor on their elbows and knees without looking directly at the king, following Siamese court custom. The French court had never seen anything like it and wrote about it for years.

In the Salon de Mercure stands a mechanical clock made by the royal watchmaker Antoine Morand in 1706. On the hour, an automaton figure of Louis XIV descends from a cloud and is crowned by Glory.

Four things almost everyone believes that aren't true

What survived, and what was sold

Through the Revolution the shell and the ceiling paintings stayed. Everything loose — furniture, wall hangings, bronzes — went to auction in 1793.

Refilling the rooms has taken over a century, beginning with Pierre de Nolhac in the late nineteenth century and continuing since: the Salon de l'Abondance's green velvet hangings recreated from inventories in 1955, the vaults restored alongside the Hall of Mirrors from 2004 to 2007, and the Salon d'Apollon's ceiling, stuccos and paintings redone in 2014–15.