The Palace of Versailles, Versailles · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

For all its gold and mirrors, the thing Versailles never had was water. Louis XIV built his palace on drained marshland with no river nearby, then filled the gardens with more than fifty fountains and hundreds of jets, and there was never enough water to run them all at once. Not even close. So the court invented a beautiful piece of theatre. As the king strolled the gardens, a team of fountaineers, most of them from the Francine family who ran the waterworks for generations, hid in the bushes with whistles. A courtier walking ahead would give a signal, and the men would rush to open each fountain just as Louis reached it, then shut it off the moment he had passed so the water could be saved for the next one along. The Sun King spent his whole life believing his fountains all played together in one endless spectacle. They never did. He was simply followed, everywhere he went, by a wave of water switched on seconds before he arrived. To feed even this illusion they eventually built the Machine de Marly, fourteen giant waterwheels and over two hundred pumps hauling water up from the Seine, one of the engineering wonders of the age, all so a king need never see a fountain standing still.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.