Crowds make Versailles more chore than a delight

Louis XIV's monumental palace of Versailles is one of the most influential buildings in history, setting a pattern for lush magnificence copied by anyone aspiring to the concept of "palatial" for the next 200 years. It is a "must see" for any visitor to Paris who's serious about art, architecture or history.

And that, I'm afraid, creates a problem. As huge as Versailles is, it's not big enough to accommodate all the crowds that flock through its gold-encrusted gates. Especially not without some innovative crowd management, a element completely missing here.

We arrived just before 11 on the Sunday of a holiday weekend. Admittedly, a high traffic time, but my memories of the palace were of a complex so sprawling that it swallowed crowds once they cleared the ticket office. I expected to wait a while for tickets, but not for an hour. We snaked back and forth through the courtyard without ever laying eyes on a palace employee who could tell us about the waiting time, or what would happen once we got our tickets. When we finally got to he head of the queue (being briefly distracted by an information desk that appeared to be the ticket office, but was not), we found just three employees dealing with the thousands. Over to the left, however, was a room full of 10 ticket vending machines, almost all of them unused. One or two staff members channeling visitors to those machines could have cut that queue significantly.

Of course, that would only have gotten you to the next queue faster. Because, after emerging from the trial of ticket procurement, we realised that the hundreds of people all snaking around the other side of the courtyard were waiting to get through security for the palace proper. We almost left at that point, but having invested £15 each and more than two hours (travel and queuing time), I was damned if I was going to give up. Another half hour found us in the inner courtyard, finally entering the building. Again without the help of any palace employee. We just followed the crowds.

It quickly became evident that the masses weren't going to disperse into a variety of spaces. Instead, everyone channels down the same path, doggedly following the signs for the Hall of Mirrors. Remember, this is a palace, and the spaces are vast. But with so many people, it might as well have been the Central line at rush hour. Body to body, shuffling forward, hardly able to move independently, no clear line of sight except up. Given that Versailles has few furnishings, and most of the sights are indeed walls and ceilings, I suppose that's a relief. But by this point you're grumpy, tired and feeling claustrophobic. Culture should be a delight, not a chore. This experience, sadly, is the kind of thing that puts many young people off history, art and architecture.

And then, amazingly, it got worse. Because jostling for floor space in this exquisite setting, fighting for attention between the bodies, the mirrors and the gold leaf, was an exhibition of Japanese sculptural cartoon art by Takashi Murakani. Brightly coloured plastic figures right out of a manga cartoon strip. Perhaps interesting at the Tate Modern, they were hideously out of context here, almost offensive against this august setting.

After 40 minutes of cattle herd tourism we emerged from the state apartments grumpy, unsettled and starving. To be amazed once again. This massive palace, with some of the biggest crowds for any attraction in Europe, has a cafeteria about the size of a small regional museum, with one cooler of sandwiches, a counter with a few quiches and pies behind, and three employees valiantly trying to feed the thousands. It was here that we found the only attempt at crowd management (clearly, this operation must be outsourced), with the manager ordering the queue and letting a handful of people in at a time to prevent a riot. By the time we finished eating, the gardens were closed for the grand display of fountains, a separate 25 euro ticket I hadn't purchased because I thought we wouldn't have the time. Changing our minds now would mean another hour back in the ticketing queue. We left.

So here's a first. Eight paragraphs into a blog entry about an architectural wonder without describing what we went to see. And that, of course, is the point. The whole experience was so unpleasant that it completely overshadowed any appreciation of or delight in the palace itself. It was only later that evening, reviewing some photos and reveling in the fact that I was no longer packed like a sardine into my environment, that my brain started to review what we'd seen.

The gold gilt on the gates and the main facade has been completely refurbished since my last visit and is quite jaw-dropping, especially when the sun hits it. From your first glance, it would have proclaimed that Louis had more money than God. The chapel, kept clear of tourists, is an exquisite space. Lots of work has also been done on the Hall of Mirrors in the last decade, with more refreshed gold and re-silvering on the mirror backs to make everything glisten. Most impressive to me were probably the complete restorations of both the King's and Queen's bed chambers, with lush, vivid fabrics on the walls and the imposing beds.

Go and see it. You have to do it, at least once. But try to avoid our mistake. If you can, go on a weekday, go when the place opens, and buy your tickets in advance. And then go to some of the places Versailles inspired. Schonbrunn Palace, outside Vienna, is smaller but just as lush and still in possession of much of its furnishings. In the Buckinghamshire countryside you'll find Waddesdon Manor, an impressive pile built by the Rothschilds and filled with the kind of interiors and furniture that filled Versailles before the revolution. The list could spiral on. The point is, see Versailles because you must. Then go to the places it inspired, filled with furniture purchased from its glory days, because they will fill you with wonder. Without dangerous overcrowding and Japanese cartoon figures to ruin your day.