Dad-Daughter European Trip: Paris | The Majestic Palace of Versailles

So after a whole year of editing and sorting photographs, I finally kicked off a series of blog posts documenting the most epic dad-daughter European trip of (probably) our lifetime. 29 days through 6 countries via planes, trains and automobiles. Today’s post returns us to Paris, where our trip began back on December 7th, 2023, as we pay a visit to the regal Palace of Versailles.
 
The Palace of Versailles, whose origins date back to the seventeenth century, was successively a hunting lodge, a seat of power and, from the nineteenth century, a museum. With the gardens and the Palaces of Trianon, the park of the Château de Versailles spreads over 800 hectares.
 
Today the Palace contains 2,300 rooms spread over 670,000 square feet. About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.
 

Dad-Daughter Trip 2023/24: Palace of Versailles

In 1607, the future Louis XIII came to Versailles for his first hunting trip and discovered a forest and meadows noisy with pheasants, boars and stags (you know, the kind of stuff hunters like).
 
Crowned king in 1610, he next came in 1621, and his liking for the location only grew stronger. So in late 1623 the king decided to build a small hunting lodge where he could stay the night and which he first used in June 1624.
 
With the lodge being called “unworthy of a king” by the king’s court, Louis XIII decided to rebuild it in 1631. Construction continued until 1634 and laid the basis of the Palace we know today.
 


 
The history of Versailles, however, is inextricably linked with the figure of Louis XIV who decided to extend it beyond the chateau that had grown out of the hunting lodge of brick and stone first built by his father.
 

 
The King built a masterpiece with which he would forever be associated. Louis XIV even moved the seat of his court and government to Versailles in 1668-69, making the palace the de facto capital of France.
 


 
Following the end of the Franco-Dutch War with French victory in 1678, Louis XIV appointed as First Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who would benefit from a restored budget and large workforce of former soldiers. Mansart began his tenure with the addition from 1678 to 1681 of the Hall of Mirrors.
 

 
The Hall of Mirrors, the most famous room in the Palace, was built to replace a large terrace designed by the architect Louis Le Vau, which opened onto the garden. The terrace originally stood between the King’s Apartments to the north and the Queen’s to the south, but was exposed to bad weather, and it was not long before the decision was made to demolish it.
 

 
Le Vau’s successor, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, produced a more suitable design that replaced the terrace with a large gallery. The whole length of the Hall of Mirrors (73m) pays tribute to the political, economic and artistic success of France.
 

 
There are 357 mirrors in the hall, which at the time were among the most expensive items to possess. Political successes are also illustrated through the 30 painted compositions on the vaulted ceiling by Charles Le Brun, first painter to the king, which depict the glorious history of Louis XIV during the first 18 years of his reign.
 

 
Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI made interior alterations to the palace but in 1789 the royal family and French court returned to Paris. For the rest of the French Revolution (1789-1799) the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents (although the Palace came through the period of the French Revolution relatively unscathed), and the population of the surrounding city dwindled.
 


 
It was not until the 1830s that meaningful repairs were made to the palace. A museum of French history was installed within it, replacing the courtiers apartments of the southern wing. The palace returned to the world stage in June 1919, when, after six months of negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the First World War, was signed in the Hall of Mirrors.
 

 
Between 1925 and 1928, the American philanthropist and multi-millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave $2,166,000, the equivalent of about thirty million dollars today, to restore and refurbish the palace.
 

 
The palace and park were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979 for its importance as the centre of power, art, and science in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s a place you can easily spend a few hours walking around (inside and outside). We certainly did…
 

Stay tuned for more images from our time in Paris, featuring a look inside the Sainte-Chapelle and the Musée du Louvre.
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All photographs taken by the Sony A7RV using the FE 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, and the Xiaomi 13 Ultra, a remarkable camera phone that features a variable aperture 1-inch main camera and Leica co-engineered Summicron lens [Xiaomi photographs are watermarked with an X on the lower right]