The project to build another flight of steps ending in the Salon of Hercules was never carried out.  Future guests were therefore admitted to the reception rooms by a dark, narrow entrance, or they made a long roundabout tour by way of the Queen’s staircase across the Marble Court.  The demolition of the stairway of honor was an irreparable loss.  No other piece of wantonness equaled it in the tumultuous history of Versailles.

However, there remain in the chateau a number of memorials to the judgment and good taste of the third master of the chateau, among them, the exquisitely decorated rooms of the King, re-made on the site of those dedicated to Louis XIV; the seven rooms of Madame Adelaide, and the suites set apart for the mistresses that succeeded one another in the favor of Louis the Fifteenth.  These apartments, evolved out of the confusion of orders and counter-orders, remain to-day as examples of the pure and elegant decorative styles of the eighteenth century.  Especially admired is the Council Room.  Richly adorned, but always in charming taste, it represents the transition period between the more severe ornamental art peculiar to the reign of Louis XIV and the warmer effects beloved by Louis XV.  Behind the Council Room were installed, on the west side of the Court of the Stags, a cabinet de bains (bath-room) and a little room called the Salon of the Wigs.  By these rooms access was gained to the Salon of Apollo.

The billiard-room, where King Louis XIV was wont to play with his hounds before retiring, became the bed-room of his heir.  After the year 1738, Louis XV occupied this chamber, and here he died thirty-six years later.  It then became the sleeping-room of the ill-starred Louis XVI—­who died in no bed.  Locks, door-knobs, chimney ornaments—­each detail in gilded bronze reflected rare taste and workmanship.  The bed stood in an alcove enclosed between two columns, railed in by a balustrade of elaborate design, and curtained by wonderful tapestries.  Ordinarily the King slept in this room; when he wakened in the morning he put on a robe and passed through the Council Room to the salon where the “rising” was celebrated with traditional pomp.

If Louis XV indulged in an orgy of building and repair, it was because he pined with an ennui that was only relieved by constant diversion.  If at the cost of unnumbered thousands of francs, Madame de Pompadour urged on her royal lover and contrived new outlets for his craze for building, it was because she was adroit enough to enliven by this means an existence that often palled upon him.  If, throughout the long series of decisions and contradictions regarding changes in the chateau, the Monarch commanded one day that a library and marble bath be added to the apartments of his daughter, and on another that useful halls, staircases and offices be removed; if he ordered the construction of a great Opera House with a facade like a temple, and, in another mood, made away with