By May 6, 1682, the grand moving-in day, the gardens were less a young man's fantasy than a terrifying work in progress employing 36,000 men and 6,000 horses. Vauban—whose star-shaped forts, along with the concept of a centralized military, inspired the Pentagon—built 21 miles of underground aqueducts, reservoirs, and tunnels. They were fed by the Machine of Marly, a monumental contraption comprised of 14 gigantic waterwheels and 223 pumps that carried water uphill from the Seine to feed Versailles's 2 canals and 1,400 fountains. The engineering marvel attracted tourists much as the Eiffel Tower does today, and the king himself wrote one of the world's first guidebooks, The Way to Present the Gardens of Versailles, which included a five-mile itinerary for visitors (along with an abbreviated version for inclement weather). Literally following in the footsteps of the king on his daily promenades, Paris printers designed multilingual itineraries for day-trippers, who could enter the château by renting an appropriate coat and sword at the front door. An inveterate outdoorsman, Louis helped popularize walking in all weather, giving rise to the world's first folding umbrella.

Courtiers were celebrities in their own right—minor deities in a new Olympus who actually dressed up as Diana, Mercury, et al. Most of all, they were shills for the art, invention, and wealth that allowed the Sun King's France to eclipse even Renaissance Italy. The first tabloid newspaper, Paris's Mercure Galant, reproduced lithographs of Versailles's elaborate parties, as well as the seasonal clothing and hairstyles of courtiers whose main political function was competing for the king's attention.

Consumers in Paris and across Europe could commission their own Versailles-style tapestries from the factories at Beauvais and Gobelins, created by Colbert as part of a campaign to transform France into the world's premier source of luxury goods. They could buy full-length mirrors, invented in France in 1685, and install them over fireplaces, just as Louis XIV did in his bedroom in a style called à la royale. And they could buy trickle-down versions of Versailles fashions from the Paris boutiques of the first commercial clothing designers.

Commoners excelled in new academies for ballet, literature, painting, science, and theater, established to promote the glory of the king. Versailles's kitchen gardener, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, was one such success. The former lawyer invented compost hotbeds that accelerated growth despite frost and allowed fruits and the king's beloved petits pois (young green peas more outrageously expensive than today's truffles) to be served six months of the year. Between 1682 and his death in 1715, the king ordered the performances of twelve hundred tragedies and comedies—by Molière, Corneille, and Racine—as well as concerts led by the composer and first modern conductor Jean-Baptiste de Lully.

The monarchy eventually collapsed under Louis XVI, but the concept of Versailles lived on—and in some unexpected places. Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, the son of a court painter, spent his childhood at Versailles and traveled to America with the Marquis de Lafayette to join George Washington's Revolutionary Army. In 1791, Washington asked the military engineer and landscape architect to design the new nation's capital. L'Enfant understood that what worked for an absolute monarchy would work for a fledgling democracy attempting to sow order out of wilderness. The view from Capitol Hill, down the tree-lined National Mall and across a landscape of traffic circles bisected by radial boulevards and peppered with national monuments, is Versailles's New World legacy.

Meanwhile, the first American president busied himself planting flowery parterres at Mount Vernon, and early-twentieth-century moguls like the Vanderbilts modeled their Newport, Rhode Island, mansions after the Grand and Petit Trianon. Today, in cities and towns across America, box hedges—another Versailles vestige—separate public sidewalks from private lawns. Americans may in their hearts be royalty-hating democrats, but in their deeds they are the proud garden-shear heirs of the Sun King's domain.