King Louis XIV's finance superintendent, Nicholas Fouquet, decided to build himself a cha^teau on a grand scale. No expense was spared. The finest architects of the day were summoned and put to work. Landscape designers, too. And when the Cha^teau Vaux-le-Vicomte was finally complete, well, it was only natural Fouquet should decide that a house warming party was in order.

Bad move.

The event was beyond lavish and made the balls held by the "Sun King" look positively puny by comparison. The king, who had had persistent problems with the nobility since ascending the throne at the age of 5, was not amused. Definitely not. Three weeks later, Fouquet was arrested on hurriedly drawn up corruption charges, evicted from his dodgily financed cha^teau and lobbed into jail for life, never to be heard of again.

This still wasn't enough for the affronted Louis. He vowed to build himself a cha^teau 100 times larger than Vaux-le-Vicomte, hijacked the hapless former treasurer's design team, and -- le voila! -- Versailles was born.

The site chosen was not a promising one; a hillock overlooking marshland, it clearly belonged to Mother Nature.

Royal gardener Andre LeNo^tre was put to work to ruthlessly subdue her, a process that lasted for virtually all of the Sun King's reign. The initial problem was that Versailles had too much water, but after the marsh had been drained and the king's obsession with fountains developed to manic proportions, there wasn't enough of the stuff.

One of the more radical ideas for obtaining sufficient water was a 200-km-long canal tapping the distant Loire River.

Eventually, though, he settled on the Seine, and in an orgy of construction he built and dug nearly 200 km of tunnels, channels, aqueducts, cisterns, ditches and pump houses.

If you want to see the fountains in action, you have to visit Versailles on a Sunday or a special occasion. The rest of the week, they're not in operation. Budgetary considerations, apparently.

Size mattered to Louis, and it shows. The main cha^teau building is absolutely immense. During Louis' time 20,000 people lived here, apparently in a schizophrenic state of absolute grandeur and rank squalor. Surprisingly, given the amount of water splashing around Versailles, latrines were not given a high priority. Or any priority, actually. Masked balls, fireworks displays, outdoor oboe recitals and rigidly clipped lawns were, however, considered indispensable.

The gardens were open to the public right from the start, although occasionally the king had to order his guards to drive the crowds out when the multitude became so large that he could not move about freely. On a hot Spring day, when you feel as though you're sharing the gardens with the entire population of Europe, it's easy to sympathize.

The view from the cha^teau is dominated by the Grand Canal, which in its heyday was whimsically stocked with a fleet of frigates, gondolas (complete with imported Venetian gondoliers), scaled down warships and galleys.

It is now the domain of humbler rowing boats.

The 2-km-long canal is a trompe l'oeil; a deliberately contrived optical illusion. The viewer would naturally expect it to narrow as it recedes into the distance. It doesn't. The architect decided to gradually increase the width of the canal, creating a view that defies perspective.

The gardens themselves are vast, going on daunting. Louis designed various itineraries for garden viewing, the longest being 8 km. As a young man he traveled these routes on horseback or by carriage, but as age and gout got the better of him, the royal personage was wheeled around in an enormous pram.

Modern visitors can hire bicycles or hop aboard a miniature train to gain access to distant points of interest. They can also, of course, walk. But if they do so they can expect to be bored.

At risk of offending the French, it has to be said that much of Versailles is dull -- and too big. There are many points of interest -- there's the farm where Marie Antoinette pretended to be a shepherdess and fed her lambs cake, before her head was chopped off by revolutionaries during the Terror; there is the Trianon Palace, nostalgically named after the village that was demolished to make way for its construction; there are grottoes and whatnot -- but between them there's a great deal of nothing much. Just grass or gravel.

In England, great gardens work in tune with their environments. Nature is nurtured.

But not here.

Nature has been clipped and flattened and shaved, suppressed and reordered. The topiary is ruthless (and quite frequently either depressingly sterile or just plain silly), the trees are regimented, the lawns are unsullied by flowers and no mole in its right mind would come within miles of the place. Six thousand moles were exterminated in the first six months of construction by one hyperactive gardener.

Give them their due, though. What they lack in natural vigor the gardens more than make up for with rampant statuary and fountains.

Louis was crazy about statues depicting Greek mythology. He commissioned plump-bottomed Cupids smothered in grapes, Lycian peasants turning into frogs at the behest of Jupiter, Titans being buried in magma, rapes, orgies, dragon slayings, sea monsters pulling divine beings through ponds, and lots and lots of naked people. All done in the best possible taste, of course.

And all there because of Fouquet's house-warming party. Oh la la!