Chateau de Versailles

    Voltaire once said, "When you arrive at Versailles, from the courtyard side you see a wretched, top-heavy building, with a facade seven windows long, surrounded with everything which the imagination could conceive in the way of bad taste. When you see it from the garden side, you see an immense palace whose defects are more than compensated by beauties."

   2143 windows, 1252 fireplaces, and 67 staircases. The gardens included roughly 1400 fountains, using water pumped up from the Seine. The length of the garden front is 670 meters. The Chapel, one of the last parts built (Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Robert de Cotte, 1710), is one of the architectural highlights.

    This was the lavish palace of the Sun King, Louis XIV, where he kept his entire court and all fellow advisers roomed in his palace.  He used this as a control mechanism to keep them in line by making them feel guilty if they contradicted him while they were his guest.  Later, it was the singing place for the creation of the German Confederation, and the treaties of both World Wars.