What Was Life Like Living in Versailles?
By Kate Brame
Daily life for courtiers, the king, and servants at Versailles wasn’t as great as some people might make it out to be. You would not want to live there, it was gross and there are a lot of reasons why. But first of all, Versailles was huge. There are 2,300 rooms in the palace, two different stables, a huge garden, a park, a royal tennis court, and the Estate of Trianon. All of which is spread out over 800 hectares(1976.84 acres).
Inside the palace there are multiple secret passageways inside the walls that Marie Antoinette and other nobles used so that they wouldn’t be seen by guests or courtiers. They’re hidden behind walls and camouflaged doors.
Couriers(someone frequently seen at court) scratched on doors with their fingers instead of knocking because knocking was seen as rude and brutish. But they weren’t allowed to open doors either so an usher had to do it for them.
Nobles and couriers also had to go to the king’s room to see him wake up and fall asleep every single day. That’s really weird… Anyway, another surprising fact about their daily life is that the palace had bad plumbing so sewer waste would leak into the many rooms.
That is one of the reasons why it smelled so bad there. Another reason is that there were chamber pots behind curtains where people would relieve themselves. Since back then, in the 16-1700s, they didn’t have separate bathrooms for everyone yet.
“Winters meant courtiers were left freezing in their poorly insulated living quarters.” This quote is from a video on life in Versailles by the Youtube channel Weird History. Courtiers were frozen in their rooms in the winters because fireplaces couldn’t heat the palace very well because of how big it is.
No couples held hands because they weren’t allowed to but it would have been hard anyways because of the women's dresses. Instead, they had to hold their arms out at a 90 degree angle and the ladies would rest their arms on top of the gentlemen’s. Women also wore large dresses that were so heavy that they would make the women topple over from time to time, mainly in the 18th century when that type of dress was most popular.
And when King Louis XIV was living at Versailles, he usually ate cold meals because of how far away the kitchen was from his room. He also avoided taking baths regularly because he lived in a time where people thought bathing brought diseases.
Another king, Louis XV, drank hot chocolate so often that it became a popular drink at Versailles just because the king liked it. Louis XV and Louis XIV are different people but it gets confusing sometimes.
In conclusion, life at Versailles had some ups and downs, but maybe more downs than ups. Many people lived in the palace of Versailles over multiple decades. It didn’t even start out as a fancy place for France’s courtiers and nobles. It began as a hunting lodge. But even so, Versailles was not a place that you would want to go to before the French Revolution when the palace was seized.
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