Six years ago today I was with two of my best friends in Paris – one was living there at the time, and we had gone to visit her. It was one of the best trips and perhaps my favourite day was the one in which we went to the Palace at Versailles. It was a foggy, grey, December day (so foggy in fact that as it started to go dark mid-afternoon, we got a little lost in the gardens… they are huge!), which served only to magnify the brilliance of the gold leaf and beautiful design of the palace.

Here is a little snippet of the Royal Chapel, which was completed in 1710 at the end of the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. It is a magnificent space that looked to medieval Gothic architecture and harked back to antiquity (those columns say it all!).

Designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and completed by Robert de Cotte, it was the site of daily masses, celebrations and royal baptisms and weddings for almost eighty years.

The beautiful ceiling features the work of three different artists to represent the Holy Trinity: Charles de La Fosse’s The Resurrection, God is the Father in his Glory by Antoine Coypel and Jean Jouvenet’s The Descent of the Holy Ghost.

Perhaps most memorably, it was where Marie-Antoinette married the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI. Though they married by proxy on April 19th 1770, Marie-Antoinette arrived at the palace on May 16th, and that afternoon, she and Louis had a wedding ceremony in the Royal Chapel.