From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Louis XVI was fond of a good lock. So much so that, when seven years had passed without his marriage to Marie Antoinette being consummated, it was her brother, Joseph II of Austria, who had the bright idea of explaining the business of the bedchamber to the young king in terms of lock and key. (Something seems to have clicked: the couple’s first child was born the following year.) So the story goes, anyway. And it’s certainly true that if anywhere is going to inspire a passion for door hardware, Versailles – with its multitude of portals and exquisitely elaborate gilt-bronze lock cases – is the place.
One could see it as a neat bit of symbolism that it was the last king of the Ancien Régime who had this particular penchant. It was the climate of his court, after all, that inspired works of intrigue such as Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro and De Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, just a few years before the Revolution. While Louis XIV had conducted almost every aspect of his daily life in front of a crowd, Louis XVI’s courtiers complained that they saw little of him. What went on behind his wife Marie Antoinette’s closed doors – whether in her private apartments at the main palace or at the Petit Trianon – had been the stuff of spurious gossip almost as soon as she had arrived at Versailles in 1770 as a 14-year-old.
While, in theory, almost anyone could turn up at Versailles to gawp at the king – for those who didn’t have the requisite attire, a sword and hat could be rented from the concierge at the entrance – only a very select few were admitted to the royals’ private apartments. One of the challenges for the palace today is how to bridge that gap. ‘Versailles was built to welcome a crowd,’ says its president, Christophe Leribault (in 2023 that crowd numbered 8 million visitors). ‘But of course we also want to show the more intimate apartments that were made only for very small numbers of people. So we have to organise better and better, but it’s a big job.’
Leribault arrived at Versailles exactly a year ago, having been director of the Musée d’Orsay for two and a half years, and before that head of the Petit Palais for nine years. A specialist in the 18th and 19th centuries, Leribault is the first art historian the palace has had at its helm for many years. In wranglings that have a whiff of the 1780s about them, the French senate blocked Emmanuel Macron’s fait du prince attempt to keep Leribault’s predecessor Catherine Pégard in post well beyond her term. When I mention how well-received his appointment seems to be in the museum world, he says simply: ‘For an art historian it’s a dream to be here.’ Initially he was commuting to Versailles from Bastille – which felt, he says, ‘bizarre’ – but he has now settled into an apartment in the former ministers’ wing of the palace; as has his cat Grisette, who, he proudly informs me, featured prominently in speeches inducting Leribault into the Académie des Beaux-Arts last September.
We’re meeting a week after a leaked memo from the Louvre’s president, Laurence des Cars, expressed concern about the dilapidated state of the Paris museum’s buildings and its overcrowded galleries, so no doubt such issues are in sharp focus for Leribault (and, at the time of going to press, a trial of a case of lead poisoning suffered by restorers at Versailles more than 15 years ago is awaiting judgement). While Macron was embarrassed by the story into announcing a ‘great presidential project’ for the Louvre – set to be partly funded by increased entry prices – Versailles has had its own ‘Great Versailles Project’ running since 2004. During that time an impressive number of the palace’s buildings, rooms and sculptures have been restored, from the Galerie des Glaces, or Hall of Mirrors, to the great Apollo fountain, which regained its lustre in time for the Olympic equestrian events that took place in the grounds last summer. ‘The project started 20 years ago,’ Leribault says, ‘and it will go on for another 20 years.’
Conservation work on the ceiling of the Salon de Diane, January 2025
To see the latest restoration in progress, we have walked from his office in the Grand Commun – a vast structure in its own right built in 1684 to house and cater for Louis XIV’s ever-expanding staff – through a grand side gate (opened with an ancient-looking key), crossed the Cour Royale and entered the wing of the King’s Apartments. Yet another bunch of keys is produced and we ascend what is called the Louis-Philippe staircase (‘We’re using a short cut,’ Leribault says, making me wonder what the long way round would be.) At the top, construction hoarding conceals the entrance to the Salon de Diane, a gilded and marble-panelled hall in the King’s State Apartment that served, under Louis XIV, as a billiard room: tiered seating around the room ensured guests a good view of the Sun King’s skill with a cue. Once inside, we clamber up scaffolding to a hive of conservation activity under the room’s painted ceiling.
Nodding to one of Louis XIV’s great passions and to Versailles’s origins as a hunting lodge, the central panel features Diana, goddess of the chase, in her chariot painted by Gabriel Blanchard. Two other artists, Charles de La Fosse and Claude Audran the Younger, contributed to the overall scheme, which was designed by Charles Le Brun, the King’s First Painter, and executed between 1671 and 1680. Up close it is, as Leribault says, ‘in a terrible state’, with splodges of rust-red mastic speckling the canvas like a pox – scars from the last restoration in 1955. Here and there, small, clean sections of the painting have been outlined with dashes of white chalk – test patches that will be submitted to a conservation committee for approval.
Running all the way round the room’s lofty architrave below the canvas are gilt mouldings that bear the outlines of fleurs-de-lis. After Louis XVI and his court had left Versailles in 1789, Leribault explains, Revolutionaries assiduously erased royal insignia from palace decorations (they had their work cut out). The fact that they got up this close to the ceiling to remove these mouldings, which will now be replaced, is testament to their dedication.
On our way back down to ground level, Leribault indicates the spot usually occupied by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s majestically baroque bust of Louis XIV, sculpted during the Roman artist’s stay in France in 1665 (his designs for the Louvre, meanwhile, had been rejected). While restoration continues in the Salon de Diane, where the bust has been displayed since 1684, it will form the focus of an exhibition on Bernini in France this summer held in the Dauphine’s Apartment, which was restored six years ago.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s bust of Louis XIV, sculpted in 1665, takes pride of place in the Salon de Diane. Photo: © Thomas Garnier
Private and corporate sponsorship plays an essential role in these restoration projects. That of the Salon de Diane is being funded by Dior, together with the American Friends of Versailles, which operates within a strong tradition of transatlantic patronage of the palace. (Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of American Independence next year, the palace has planned an exhibition that commemorates a visit to the French court by Native American leaders in 1725.) Crossing the central approach to the palace, Avenue Rockefeller is named for Versailles’s most generous individual benefactor. When John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family toured France in 1923, he was shocked by the pitiful state of Versailles in the wake of the First World War. ‘There was no heating, so some paintings had frozen, ceilings were falling down – it was a disaster,’ Leribault explains. In the following four years, Rock- efeller made two major donations, amounting to 33 million francs, for the structure to be repaired, the palace’s roof to be replaced and the Petit Trianon and its hamlet restored.
Rockefeller’s generosity spurred the French state to action; regular funds for the upkeep of Versailles were first allocated in 1924. ‘The state is supposed to pay for the roof, security, fire protections – those essentials,’ Leribault says, but with cuts in public funding, ‘it’s a problem at the moment.’ For the basics too, then, institutions such as Versailles are having to look to private sponsorship. ‘When it’s a case of restoring a charming place like the Hameau, or a wonderful ceiling in the Salon de Diane, you can find sponsors. When it’s a question of plumbing, it’s not so easy.’
Whether it’s pipework or passementerie, all this restoration work, as Leribault says, ‘is also a way to keep these traditions alive’. Beyond its continuous patronage of working artisans, Versailles is in the process of establishing an on-site training centre for heritage and crafts. Based in the Great Stables, the ‘Campus Versailles’, Leribault explains, is a joint project with CY Cergy Paris University and the Académie de Versailles ‘to develop interest in all those métiers d’art – metalsmithing, gilding, stuccowork, masonry, cabinetmaking, and so on. The idea is to try to find solutions for so many young people who don’t really know what to do. And we need all these professions for our luxury industries, which in France is so important.’
Expertise in many of these métiers has recently revived the private apartments of two of Versailles’s most controversial women: Madame du Barry and Marie Antoinette. The former, a one-time courtesan who succeeded Madame de Pompadour as Louis XV’s mistress, was given a large suite of rooms on the second floor of the palace, directly above the King’s Private Apartments (a discreet staircase conveniently connected the two). These rooms reopened for limited guided tours in 2022, after an 18-month closure to repair severe damage from leaks and general wear and tear – they had last been restored in the 1940s.
Portrait of Louis XV (1720), Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757). Château de Versailles
‘Everyone throughout the palace tried to eat a little bit of the neighbouring apartments,’ explains attaché de press Barnabé Chalmin as he opens now-pristine shutters to reveal views over the Cour Royale and the town beyond. ‘In the Ancien Régime they called it La Guerre des croisées – punning on the word for “crusader”, but in old French croisées means windows; so people would go to war to gain another window, or in other words another room.’ As the king’s mistress, Madame du Barry had a distinct advantage in the ‘war of the windows’, taking over no fewer than 14 rooms. She caused a stir, too, for demanding that the principal spaces be decorated white and gold – a privilege usually preserved for royalty. While the gilding here, cleaned and restored, is indeed splendid, more eye-catching is the rococo, chinoiserie-inflected stuccowork picked out in sage green, lilac pink or ocean blue. The finish is known as vernis Martin, named after four brothers who developed varnishes and other paint effects in the 18th century, and here is intended to imitate porcelain or unglazed biscuit porcelain.
Madame du Barry’s bathroom, where the stuccowork’s vernis Martin finish has been restored. Photo: Christophe Fouin; © Château de Versailles
Research also prompted the repainting of the apartment’s parquet floor in yellow, with the shade drawn from a recipe in the 18th-century treatise L’Art du peintre, doreur et vernisseur by Jean-Felix Walin. ‘It’s not something everybody likes,’ Chalmin says, but it was a practice found throughout the less official apartments at Versailles in the 18th century. ‘The parquet floors here were often made of cabinetmakers’ offcuts, in different types of wood, and so since the flooring was multicoloured, they painted it to make it uniform. And, because these rooms are relatively small with small windows, this colour produces more light.’
While, later on, curator Élisabeth Maisonnier shows me one of the palace’s most impressive recent acquisitions – a sensitive pastel by Rosalba Carriera of Louis XV as a boy – the focus for augmenting the collection is on bringing back original furniture and objets d’art: ‘the right piece in the right place’. Identifying furniture from Madame du Barry’s apartment is even more of a challenge than for elsewhere in the palace. The Revolutionaries made meticulous inventories of everything at Versailles ahead of selling it all off (excluding works that went to the Louvre) – down to the last handkerchief, Chalmin says. ‘These records are a huge source of information for our curators. But they don’t exist for Madame du Barry’s time here because she left before the Revolution, taking all her belongings with her.’ When Louis XV died in 1774, his mistress, having had just four years to enjoy her newly made apartment at the palace, was banished from Versailles (a fact that did not save her from the guillotine in 1793). A few examples of her furniture, however, have been traced and brought back over the years. Two of them are masterpieces by the cabinetmaker Martin Carlin, who specialised in incorpo- rating porcelain or other hard materials into his furniture: a table with an Italian pietra dura top featuring an owl and other birds amid exquisitely rendered foliage; and a rosewood jewellery cabinet with Sèvres porcelain panels and gilt-bronze embellishments. For all that much of the court looked down on her humble origins, Madame du Barry was a taste maker. ‘Once she had commissioned and received this piece,’ Chalmin says, ‘all the members of the royal household wanted their own – the Duchess of Mazarin, the Comtesses of Artois, Provence… We know of nine versions.’
Madame du Barry’s restored apartment on the floor above the King’s Private Apartments. Visible against the far wall is a Sèvres porcelain jewellery box commissioned in the 1770s from master cabinetmaker Martin Carlin. Photo: © Didier Saulnier
Louis XV gave one to Marie Antoinette in 1770, and nearly 20 years later it was among the few possessions she took with her to the Tuileries Palace in October 1789. It now stands in the second-floor boudoir of her private apartments – which were fully restored over several years and reopened in 2023 – near a rosy-cheeked portrait of the young dauphine from 1772 by François-Hubert Drouais, one of the few representations of her before she became queen. For this room and a neighbouring dining room, the palace has worked with Maison Pierre Frey to line the walls and seating with an exuberant ‘Great Pineapple’ cotton; reprinted from an original 1783 design held in the Musée de la Toile de Jouy archives, the fabric would have been vastly expensive to make, and may even have been the very print commissioned by Marie Antoinette when she had the rooms redecorated in 1784.
Portrait of Marie-Antoinette (1772), François-Hubert Drouais. Château de Versailles. Photo: Christophe Fouin; © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN
Perhaps the most charming space in these appartements privés is a petite octagonal room named the Méridienne after the daybed occupying a mirror-clad alcove on one side. As with the Gold Room nearby, the design of this boudoir was entrusted to the architect Richard Mique. Exquisite gilt ornamentation by the Rousseau brothers celebrates the union of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI with pierced hearts, Cupid’s bows, rose petals, Jupiter’s eagle and Juno’s peacock; the queen was pregnant with her second child, and gilt dolphins – the symbol of a dauphin – were a not-so-subtle hint at the hoped-for male heir. Luckily, things turned out as forecast on that front, and Marie Antoinette gave birth to a boy one month after the room was finished. This latest restoration has recreated the original lilac-coloured gros de Tours swathed around the alcove and the window, and covering the seating. The trimmings alone are fit for a queen.
The Méridienne Room on the ground-floor of Marie Antoinette’s private apartments was fitted out in 1781 and lies directly behind the bedchamber of the Queen’s State Apartments. Photo: Christophe Fouin; © Château de Versailles; Dist. RMN
Just outside this jewel box of a room, my guide opens a jib door in the panelling and I find myself behind the vast canopied bed in the equally vast Queen’s State Bedchamber, peering out at a crowd of tourists who are looking my way to admire the bed from the other side of an ornate guardrail. For the briefest of moments, I get a glimpse of what it was to be Marie Antoinette – and bid a hasty retreat into her cosseting backstage rooms. The queen was in that great bedchamber on the night of 5 October 1789, when a crowd of poissardes and soldiers of the national guard broke into the royal palace and made for her room. They decapitated several bodyguards and would almost certainly have killed Marie Antoinette on the spot had she not escaped through a second hidden door on the other side of the bed.
Versailles’s history from that date on may be less glamorous, but Leribault is keen to encourage visitors to look beyond Marie Antoinette and the Bourbon kings. Napoleon, of course, left his mark (though not as strong a mark as he intended: he commissioned designs for a complete remodelling of the palace, and got as far as ordering 80km of Lyon silk for the interiors, now kept in the Mobilier National): the palace holds the largest collection of Napoleonic paintings and sculptures anywhere. It was Louis Philippe, the ‘citizen king’, who converted Versailles into a museum. ‘He destroyed many apartments to create La Galerie des Batailles, etc,’ Leribault says, ‘but on the other hand he saved the whole place, because you need a good roof. He created rooms devoted to the Revolution, to Napoleon, he made an effort to be inclusive.’
Part of his legacy are the so-called Africa Rooms, galleries for which he commissioned Horace Vernet to paint huge battle scenes from France’s colonial conquest of North Africa under his reign. One of these canvases, The Capture of the Smala of Abd El-Kader (1843), runs the entire length of its gallery, an unspooling reel of charging cavalry, broken bodies and panicked livestock. Ordinarily these galleries are used for temporary exhibitions – with the Vernet paintings hidden. Spotting a gap in the schedule, however, Leribault took the opportunity to place these bellicose panoramas in dialogue with work by contemporary painter Guillaume Bresson, who sets realist scenes of urban violence within a classical framework (until 25 May). Leribault’s longer-term plan is to move temporary exhibitions elsewhere and to keep the Vernet rooms open in their own right. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘it’s a difficult subject and it needs explanation, but I think it’s better to show things than to hide things.’
An exhibition of paintings by Guillaume Bresson installed in the Africa Rooms. Photo: Didier Saulnier
Showing more is Leribault’s principal aim. To mark this year’s 150th anniversary of the Third Republic, when parliament sat at Versailles, the purpose-built Congress Hall has opened to the public for the first time, along with a connected presidential apartment. Similarly, a rarely seen wing of the Grand Trianon used by Charles de Gaulle, its interiors relatively untouched, will also welcome visitors. ‘It’s a much deeper palace than many people realise,’ Leribault says – bringing to mind the experience of one of Marie Antoinette’s servants, who saw the queen’s private rooms for the first time only in 1789, though he had worked in the palace for two decades. Now, again, there’s a sense of throwing open doors previously closed – even if, here and there, the right key is still required.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.