Women and Versailles

"For these crowds hungry for a legend, excited by novels and sometimes simply by history, Versailles is above all redolent of the women who lived there, who gave it charm and ever-fresh adornment. It is well-known that many of them held, in their light hands,  the slackened reins of power." This excerpt from the compendium on Les Femmes de Versailles (1901) by Pierre de Nolhac, then curator at the château, reveals the extent of the cultural gulf that had slowly widened. In historiography, within a century kings and their mistresses swapped the "slackened reins of power" for an image as ornaments of the court. Without presenting Versailles as a den of royal females, nevertheless, women were diverse and numerous to shape its image. Probably their loss of political power, with Anne of Austria's exclusion from the Council in 1661, until Marie Antoinette's return in 1788, contributed to blurring their true position. The move of the court to Versailles in 1682 redefined the role of women, particularly in terms of the chateau layout. To do justice to this neglected side of its history, Versailles is staging three events happily unified by some fortuitous research. The harmony between the spotlight on…