I'm currently smashing my way through the Canadian production of Versailles on SBS and loving every bit of it. It's bringing back some serious memories of when I visited in 87. I honestly had no real idea what to expect before I arrived, mostly because I wasn't as hung up on historical everything as much as I was on chefing everything back then.
This place is huge and I mean huge. 700 rooms, 67 staircases, and 1,200 fireplaces, and it's spread out across 2,014 acres. It has two forests out the back, a canal big enough that the Sun King Louis XIV sailed gondolas on it, 1,400 fountains (check out The Fountain of Apollo below) and by all accounts a shitty and unsanitary place to live unless you were top of the Royal tree.
There were a lot of people living at Versailles, pretty much all of the French nobility crammed into the place because Louis said so. Imagine the smell?! Well they countered that by planting a shit tonne of flowers. Each year, 210,000 flowers and 200,000 trees were planted there for visitors to roam through and admire. Side affect, the smell of the flowers was so strong that it was said to overpower the guests and make a lot of them ill. Good times, hard being a noble in the 17th century eh?
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