Versailles: The Original Hype House...of Horrible Hygiene
Crowned & Cancelled
Shallon Lester
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Before influencer mansions or Instagram clout, there was Louis XIV’s palace, Versailles — the world’s first Hype House. And spoiler: it reeked.
In this episode, Shallon Lester unpacks how The Sun King used glamour, gossip, and pure spectacle to keep France’s elite under his control — all while forgetting one tiny detail: plumbing!
Versailles was a feast for the eyes...and a nightmare for the nose.
But behind the wigs and perfume lies the real lesson: when you’re busy performing someone else’s idea of greatness, you end up choking on the stench of imitation.
Trendsetters build empires. Followers just clean up the mess.
Let's go to Italy! History comes alive on my 5-star European getaways custom crafted for luxury and sisterhood with alpha females from around the world! Check out my new Rome & Amalfi trip for 2026 🇮🇹 🍋
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It was a swampy summer afternoon in 1661, and Louis XIV had trotted a retinue of courtiers and servants and just your basic social climbers, 12 miles outside of Paris to survey an unremarkable mosquito-infested hamlet called Versailles. |
| 0:18.3 | There was no city, no palace, barely even roads, just his father's large but |
| 0:23.6 | kind of forgettable hunting lodge jutting out of the wild landscape. Nothing really worth tramping |
| 0:28.8 | out here to see. Louis had loved this chateau, though, as a boy traipsing through the woods with |
| 0:34.0 | his brother and his cousins. It was a place of nostalgia, wonder, and dreams. |
| 0:39.1 | But to the rest of his courtiers, it was just kind of a swamp. A palace, grumbled his entourage. |
| 0:46.3 | Here, he must be crazy to leave Paris for this. Louis was a lot of things. One thing he wasn't was crazy. |
| 0:56.8 | He was a man whose entire life was one giant trauma response. Now, look, when you think about how volatile life was for the average |
| 1:03.3 | peasant in the mid-1600s, poverty, murder, plague, random imprisonment, religious wars, regular wars, foreign invasions. |
| 1:12.7 | Just to name a few of your everyday horrors, not to mention the fact that childbirth, a broken leg, or even a cavity could kill you. |
| 1:20.1 | To say that the king was feeling traumatized might feel like some kind of joke. |
| 1:24.6 | But to Louis, it wasn't. |
| 1:27.1 | Louis was only five years old when his father died, |
| 1:29.4 | making him king in name, but the real power was held by his mother, Anne of Austria, and her advisor, |
| 1:34.4 | Cardinald Mazarin. During this fragile time, the French nobility in the parliament of Paris |
| 1:39.2 | launched a violent series of civil uprisings called the Fronde. riots broke out in Paris, nobles were demanding |
| 1:46.0 | more power, and judges resisted imposing royal taxation. I mean, can you imagine if the IRS was like, |
| 1:52.8 | I don't think we need to collect any taxes? No, just to say a big F you to our president, it would be |
| 1:57.5 | crazy. And at the time, Louis lived where all French monarchs did, the Louvre. |
| 2:02.8 | Now it's the world's most famous museum, and do not get me started on that god-awful glass |
| 2:07.7 | pyramid outside of it. I hate it with the fire of a thousand sons. I hate it. It's all the other |
| 2:12.2 | podcast. I can't. But once upon a time, the Louvre was a fortress palace, but not, it seems, an impenetrable one. |
... |
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