The Marble Courtyard

The Palace of Versailles and its gardens are immense - featuring over 2,000 rooms and spanning 8,000 ha of gardens (3 times the size of Paris or 11,000 football pitches!)

Building it cost the equivalent of billions of euros and burned through around 25% of the French national budget per year.

The Palace was built as an extension of Louis XIV's father's hunting lodge.

You can still see the outline of the original lodge as you walk up the steps to the Palace.

Fun fact : the marble floor initially belonged to Louis XIV's Finance Minister, Nicolas Fouquet.

Fouquet's extravagant wealth and lifestyle threatened the king's position.

So Louis XIV imprisoned him, seized his chateau, enlisted his top artists and architects to work on Versailles - and stole his marble courtyard.

Any member of the public could wander around Versailles, provided that they wore a hat and carried a sword - so the palace would have been bustling with people.

So much so that a man once attacked Louis XV in this courtyard.

His punishment was brutal : he was burned with hot oil and then quartered by four horses galloping in different directions.