There Palace of Versailles Celebrate its long 400 years and with style. On this occasion, visitors can actually enter the doors of the museumMarie Antoinette’s private apartment, finally open to the public again. It is one of the most secret and refined rooms of the old royal residence, hidden behind a door in the bedroom of the last Queen of France.
Marie Antoinette’s Secret Rooms at Versailles
“A fascinating place for anyone interested in the last glorious days of the French monarchy.” This is how Laurent Salomé, director of the National Museum of the Palace of Versailles and Trianon, defines the apartment where Marie Antoinette took refuge to rest from the court and spending time with her children and a few friends, away from prying eyes but also the place where the Queen retreated when mobs attacked the palace before her arrest during the French Revolution in 1789.
Few people in the world can claim to have set foot in this pristine area of the former royal residence. The apartment was returned to the public after 10 years From research, restoration and acquisitions it is a hidden world revealing bedrooms, a boudoir, a library and even a billiard room on two floors overlooking an inner courtyard.
You can admire all the furniture in the rooms, but also the boiserie, the gilding, the luxurious embroidery, the precious paintings, the eclectic canvases by Jouy with floral or exotic motifs such as: pineapple that embellish the wall coverings of the boudoir. The reason why this fruit is the protagonist in the royal apartments is due to the fact that in 1493 Christopher Columbus brought it to Europe from the New World, where, due to its rarity, it had become a symbol of wealth and wealth . During the modern renovations, archivists also found references to fabrics and materials chosen by the Queen for curtains and upholstery.
A journey through history
Aside from the details and the resurrected heritage preserved in these rooms, visitors are offered a true immersion in history. Born in Austria, Marie Antoinette was 14 when she came to France to meet the future Louis XVI. to marry. The Queen carefully maintained her apartments and continued to remodel, expand, arrange and embellish them until 1788. There Decoration was his true passion. He furnished these rooms with the most elegant furniture and testified to the harmony and perfection of the French decorative arts at the end of the Ancien Régime.
His desires for changes to the rooms and his impatience to get the job done were also said to have drawn the ire of the king’s chief architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel. Spread over two floors, this previously hidden world will “offer a new understanding of history, with this paradox between public and private life, etiquette and intimacy, an exceptional story compressed into a few square meters,” said Catherine Pégard, President of the Palace of Versailles since 2011.
These rooms are so small that they can only be visited by groups of a maximum of 10 people. They are a concentration of valuable details offered to visitors a new insight into Marie Antoinette’s life, which raised a thousand questions about the ruler’s intimacy after the reopening of other chambers and the queen’s farm, was considered the embodiment of frivolity and unbridled passion for the ephemeral. Although the reconstruction was complicated by the lack of historical documents, the curators really did their best to give the impression of entering a place “that the Queen has just left”.