Palace of Versailles audio guide,
five stops, free.

You are standing on the level where the king stood. The floor of the chapel is one storey below you: this gallery is the royal tribune, the usual arrangement for a palace chapel and a strange one for a church. Every morning, usually at ten, the whole Court came here for Mass. Louis the Fourteenth sat up here with his family. The ladies of the Court took the side tribunes. The officers and the public were down there in the nave, which means that for the length of the service most of the room was looking up at the king rather than at the altar.

He almost never came downstairs. The king went into the nave only when he took communion at the great religious feasts, for the ceremonies of the Order of the Holy Spirit, and for the baptisms and weddings of the princes and princesses of the royal family, which were held in this chapel from 1710 until 1789. One of those weddings was on the sixteenth of May 1770, when the dauphin Louis Auguste married an Austrian archduchess called Marie-Antoinette.

This is the fifth chapel Versailles has had since the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, and the last one. Jules Hardouin-Mansart put the design in front of the king in 1699, then died in 1708, two years before the work was done; his brother-in-law Robert de Cotte finished it in 1710. It was the last building Louis the Fourteenth put up here, and it was dedicated to Saint Louis, who was both the king's patron saint and his ancestor, with deliberate echoes of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris that Saint Louis had founded.

Now look up. Hardouin-Mansart designed the vault without a single transverse rib, so it runs as one unbroken surface, and three painters split it between them. In the centre, Antoine Coypel's God the Father in his Glory. In the apse, Charles de La Fosse's Resurrection. And directly above you, over this tribune, Jean Jouvenet's Descent of the Holy Ghost, which is the painting the king had over his head every single morning.

Then find the organ above the altar. Clicquot built it, and King David is carved in relief on the case. François Couperin played it. The music here was famous across Europe, motets sung right through the service, and it came at the Court from above the altar and around that instrument while everyone sat facing the wrong way, watching the king pray.

Seventeen windows on one side, seventeen mirrored arches on the other, and seventy-three metres of floor between the War Room behind you and the Peace Room at the far end. Stand still and follow the light. It comes in through the glass, crosses the room, and comes back at you off three hundred and fifty-seven mirrors. That number is the whole point. Venice held the monopoly on mirror-making, and a mirror was among the most expensive objects a person could own. Putting three hundred and fifty-seven of them on one wall was not decoration. It was a statement about the economy: France can make these now, and make them this large.

None of this was meant to be here. Louis Le Vau had built a broad open terrace on this spot, facing the garden, between the King's Apartments to the north and the Queen's to the south. It was awkward and it caught the weather, and it did not survive long. Le Vau's successor, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, filled it in with a gallery. Work started in 1678 and ended in 1684. The vanished terrace is why you get this view: walk to the middle of the room, look out, and you are looking straight down the Grande Perspective that André Le Nôtre laid out along the east-west axis.

Now look up. Charles Le Brun covered the vault with thirty painted compositions, and they are not mythology for its own sake. They are the first eighteen years of Louis the Fourteenth's personal rule, from 1661 to the peace treaties of Nijmegen, told through allegories borrowed from antiquity. Victories, reforms, the reorganisation of the kingdom, all of it dressed as ancient history.

Then look at the tops of the red marble pilasters. Le Brun designed those capitals himself, at Colbert's request, as a new order of architecture that people called the French style. In each one there is a fleur-de-lis under a royal sun, with a Gallic rooster on either side. The Latin word for a rooster was gallus, which is the joke, repeated in gilded bronze the length of the room.

Most of the time this was simply a corridor. Courtiers and visitors crossed it daily and stood about in it waiting. It became a stage only occasionally, when the throne was carried in and set on a platform at the Peace Room end, and a foreign embassy was made to walk the whole seventy-three metres with the Court seated on tiers along both sides, watching. The Doge of Genoa did that walk in 1685. The ambassadors of Siam in 1686, of Persia in 1715, of the Ottoman Empire in 1742.

And on the twenty-eighth of June 1919 the treaty that ended the First World War was signed in this room, which is why the word Versailles means one thing to a historian of the seventeenth century and something entirely different to everybody else. Presidents of the Republic still receive official guests here.

One last thing, and it is recent. The chandeliers are not part of the original decoration. They are accessories, and the set most visitors have seen in photographs was hung in 1980 to suggest the atmosphere of the rare grand balls held here. The palace now says that lighting contradicted what Louis the Fourteenth actually built. Since the summer of 2025 some of the chandeliers have been coming down in favour of the twenty-four torches and their girandoles, and the room is quieter for it, shadows and reflections instead of blaze. The ceiling is the winner. Le Brun's thirty paintings have not been this well lit in forty years.

Nearly ten metres of canvas, and the man at the centre of it is doing the crowning himself. Napoleon stands with a crown raised in both hands over Josephine, who is kneeling in front of him. Behind him, seated, is Pope Pius the Seventh, who had come from Rome to give the anointing and then watched the emperor take the crowning out of his hands. That had been settled with the pope in advance, which somehow makes it worse.

The ceremony was on the second of December 1804 at Notre-Dame. Reims was impossible, too closely tied to the old Capetian kings. The Invalides was considered and dropped. The cathedral won.

Now the part nobody mentions. The famous version of this painting is in the Louvre, and this is not somebody else's copy of it. This is David's own second version. He was allowed two: one for the Gobelins to turn into a tapestry, and one that a group of American businessmen appear to have commissioned in 1808, hoping to tour it around American cities the way people toured dioramas. David began that one in Paris, never finished it, and took the canvas with him when he went into exile in Brussels. The city gave him a large room in the Town Hall, he worked there for ten months, and it was done in 1822. He wrote it on the picture. Look at the bottom left corner: begun in Paris in 1808, finished in Brussels in 1822, in my exile.

It did tour. London in the winter of 1822, then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York again by the end of 1827. Then it came back to France and nobody would buy it, because of its size. It sold in 1898 for thirty-two thousand francs to Paris Singer, who hung it at Oldway Mansion in England. France bought it from his heirs for sixty thousand dollars, it arrived at Versailles on the thirteenth of May 1947, and it was unveiled in this room in June 1948. It took the place of the original, which had gone to the Louvre in 1889 and never came back.

Because this version was finished in 1822, it is not identical. Some faces have been aged. Costumes and hairstyles have been brought up to date. A few figures were swapped for others. The handling is drier, and most of the actual painting was done by Georges Rouget, David's pupil, working under his master's eye.