A showcase for French achievement, Versailles inspired royal imitations in Dresden, Munich, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, and Vienna, but was itself the result of Louis XIV's own palace envy. Louis XIII had died in 1638, leaving his four-year-old son titular head of a troubled kingdom. As part of an effort to reassure subjects following the Fronde rebellion, chief minister and de facto ruler Cardinal Mazarin put Louis on display in châteaux and towns across the realm. The boy king dripped with gold in public, but the crowds never saw the threadbare cushions in the royal coach or the holey bedsheets and tattered nightclothes, nor did they hear his pleas for pocket money—all of which left him feeling financially, emotionally, and politically insecure.

After Mazarin died in 1661, the twenty-two-year-old king declared his intention to rule alone. He dispensed with the post of chief minister, ousted the clergy, and removed all nobles from privy councils. The finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, had rescued the kingdom from bankruptcy and had become one of the richest, most powerful, and flashiest men in France. Louis, who couldn't afford to be upstaged, requested a dinner invitation to Fouquet's newly renovated château, the Louis Le Vau–designed Vaux-le-Vicomte, with paintings by Le Brun, gardens and canals by Le Nôtre, and an unheard-of fifty fountains.

Jean-François Vatel, the best chef in France, served dinner on solid gold platters, while a new ballet, with a libretto by Molière, was premiered for the occasion. By the time the fireworks went off over the grand canal, where a model of one of Fouquet's whaling vessels pursued a flame-breathing cetacean, Louis had all the ammunition he needed to try the finance minister on charges of abusing state funds. He promptly impounded all the furnishings at Vaux-le-Vicomte—including the bronzes, the paintings, the tapestries, and the silverware—and even appropriated the ballet master and the pastry chef. (The ill-fated Vatel went to work for Louis's brother, and later committed suicide when the king came for dinner and the fish arrived late to the table.)

At the time of the fateful dinner, Louis was living outside Paris in the twelfth-century Château de St-Germain-en-Laye, where he had fled with his mother during the Fronde. He had married the daughter of the king of Spain—a fertile, dull girl who refused to learn French—and had developed the habit of taking mistresses to Versailles to chase stags in the moonlight or to dance in the glades. However, the real loves of his life were war, fame, and building, and he commissioned the proven team of Le Vau, Le Nôtre, and Le Brun to improve his peacetime playground.

By 1670, Le Vau had wrapped two residential wings, known as "the envelope," around the core of Louis XIII's hunting lodge. After Le Vau's death, when Louis decided to live at Versailles permanently with the entire court, architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart further enlarged the château, constructing the Hall of Mirrors (from 1678 to 1684) and erecting the vast north and south wings to house nobles and ministers. A control freak who told his underlings not to sign "even a passport" without his consent, the Sun King often visited the site and ordered changes to the window heights, plantings, and other design details.