What a Night at Versailles Actually Felt Like | Boring History For Sleep

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Before we wander anywhere near Versailles, give your mind a minute to come down from the day. Settle into the pillow, loosen your jaw, let your shoulders drop, and take a slow breath without trying to force anything.

If you have a fan going, let that steady sound do some of the work for you. Grab a sip of water, pull the blanket where you want it, and give yourself permission to stop keeping track of everything for a while. Then, once you're comfortable, we'll step into Versailles after dark.

Tonight, my tired Brotatoes, we're looking past the golden chandeliers to what an ordinary night inside the palace actually felt like. From crowded rooms and candlelight to servants still moving through the halls, and nobles trying to sleep in a place that was rarely truly quiet. If these calm little trips into the past help you unwind, a five-star review is always appreciated. And, as usual, let me know where you're listening from and what time it is for you. Now let the room around you fade into the background and we'll trade it for candlelight, long corridors and one very strange night at Versailles.

The sun goes down over the gardens of Versailles somewhere around five in the afternoon in winter, and in those last long minutes of daylight the fountains catch orange fire and the gravel paths shift from pale grey to amber, and the tall windows of the palace begin to hold the sky in their glass rather than pushing it away. Tonight you are going inside, not into the version of Versailles that appears in the official paintings where every room blazes with light and every surface shimmers and no one has tired feet, but into the version where 20,000 people actually spent their evenings, most of them performing, all of them exhausted, and almost every single one of them wearing shoes that were not designed with human comfort as the first priority.

The first thing to understand about Versailles at night is that it was not especially bright. This surprises almost everyone who encounters the idea for the first time, because the Hall of Mirrors, when it appears in photographs taken at a modern gala event, is genuinely spectacular, and because the famous number that attaches itself to the Hall of Mirrors is 20,000 candles. That number is real. Those 20,000 candles were absolutely lit. They blazed in 357 mirrors and reflected back on themselves and forward again, and filled an enormous gallery with a quantity of light that made it look by the standards of a 17th century eye like something out of a story told about the afterlife.

But 20,000 candles were not lit on an ordinary evening. 20,000 candles were lit for a grand fate, for a royal reception, for a diplomatic ceremony of the highest importance, for the celebration of a military victory significant enough to warrant setting every wick in the building alight at once, and paying the very considerable cost of that much wax and that much labour. On an ordinary Monday in October, the Hall of Mirrors had a more sensible number of candles, which meant it had excellent candlelight rather than theatrical candlelight, which meant the mirrors still did their work and the gilding still caught the flame, and the room still looked extraordinary by the standards of any other room in Europe. But the ceiling was in shadow, and the far end of the gallery was dimmer than the near end, and the overall effect was warm and golden and real rather than dreamlike and total. Candlelight is honest about its limits in a way that electric light is not. It lights the things nearest to it with some conviction, and it diminishes rapidly with distance. It creates a visible gradient between the hot centre of its reach and the soft dark at its edges. People who lived primarily by candlelight knew this gradient the way people who live by electric light know the layout of light switches. They knew which rooms were best lit and at what hours and where to stand within those rooms to have the most light fall on them, and they made these calculations automatically– the way you calculate where to sit at a restaurant table to be neither too far from nor too close to the door. The shift from afternoon to evening at Versailles began gradually, as it tends to in buildings of sufficient size to contain their own weather. The long rectangles of daylight that had been lying across the parquet floors through the afternoon began to shorten and then to angle and then to disappear as the sun moved behind the western façade. Servants moved through the staterooms and the apartments ahead of this transition, working room by room. Fresh tapers were set in the candlesticks. Candelabras that had been used and burned down to half height were replaced. The wall sconces in the major corridors were attended to. The timing was not casual. Allowing a candle to burn entirely down in a public room, and leaving its holder standing in a pool of cooled wax, was the kind of thing that reflected on the household. And the household had been organized over a period of decades to prevent the kinds of things that reflected on it.