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Courtly manners are contagious; they are caught at Versailles.
Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.
Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.
Versailles was a gulf into which the labor of France poured its earnings; and it was never full.
It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.
Growing up in Versailles is like growing up in a museum, and the people living there are almost the security.
The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.
The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.
Wasn't the Treaty of Versailles, wasn't that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals? Don't get me wrong. I'm not pro-Holocaust.
Why are men talking about what clothes they're wearing? It's so unmanly, I think. It's like Versailles before the Revolution, without the style.
To walk into the hall of mirrors of Versailles as Louis XIV and deliver a monologue on your own in an empty hall of mirrors is like no other experience.
I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.
It was my dream, and probably the dream of every one of us, to bring about a revision of the Versailles Treaty by peaceful means, which was provided for in that very treaty.
When a Frenchman reads of the garden of Eden, I do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of Versailles, with clipped hedges, berceaus, and trellis work.
After the Versailles treaty, the U.S. could have chosen to become a global economic loan shark, but we didn't, and let a lot of the tab slide. So not all lending and borrowing is bad.
I would point out that Japan's proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference on the principle of racial equality was rejected by delegates such as those from Britain and the United States.
Essentially, Louis XIV created exclusivity. If we look at how we live our lives today, many of us are members of clubs or gyms. We search out exclusivity. He created the world of fashion at Versailles.
Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.
One of the many pleasures of 'Versailles' is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was.
The king and the dauphin both like to see me on horseback. I only say this because all the world perceives it, and especially while we were absent from Versailles, they were delighted to see me in my riding habit.
I got makeup tests and hair tests for 'Versailles,' and the main thing they were obsessed with was that my hands were disgusting. I had three years of Irish dirt under my nails. I had to have manicures and everything.
As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants.
I'd always been extremely fascinated by the French Nuit Blanche, which is a weekend that they have in Paris where they keep all the museums open until dawn. You can go and hang out in Versailles in the middle of the night and watch the sun come up.
I live in, literally, the same home when I was swiping my first bank card and wondering if I'd have to put back the Charmin. We still don't have a dishwasher. My mom has done all these gardens so now my house looks like the garden shack in the middle of Versailles.
Never in a million years would I want to live at Versailles with Marie Antoinette or anybody else. I hate to tell you this but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream.
I'm interested in power. I'm interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.
The love of Louis XVI for mechanical works is well known. He had a little workshop at Versailles where he amused himself making locks, assisted by Francois Gamain, to whom he was much attached and with whom he spent many hours in projecting and executing mechanical contrivances.
I hate to tell you this, but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream. It gave me the mental equivalent of one of those toothaches you get when you bite into something too sweet.
When my elders mentioned 'The War,' they invariably meant that of 1914-1918, even after 1939, for the Second World War was merely the continuation of the first, 'an armistice of 20 years,' as Marshal Foch had accurately predicted at the Versailles Peace Conference, with some changes of side.
Yes, I love going to fittings and talking about the history of a costume. For 'Versailles,' a play set in 1919, the costume designer told me that pocket squares had just been introduced. The tango was becoming fashionable in London, and dancers used them to mop their brows. I love to learn fascinating stuff like that.
It is hard to imagine Andre Le Notre laying out the exquisite landscape designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte, and later the magnificent Chateau de Versailles, with no high hill to stand on, no helicopter to fly in, and no drone to show him the complexities of the terrain. Yet he did, and with extreme precision, accuracy, and high style.