Dogs, cats, horses but also coatis, Indonesian cassowaries, tigers, gazelles, monkeys and elephants populated Versailles under the Ancien Régime: an exhibition entitled "The King's Animals" is held from this Tuesday until the 22nd. February brings the menagerie of the famous castle back to life.

At the time of the Sun King, exotic animals served as an attraction but were also the subject of scientific, artistic and philosophical studies.

Through 300 paintings, tapestries, sculptures, familiar objects and stuffed animals, the exhibition traces the history of this extraordinary zoo, teeming with pelicans, sultana hens, ostriches, parrots and panthers, often offered as gifts to the kings of France, as well as than the historical and cultural vision of it by the privileged contemporaries of the time.

Louis XV and the cats

“From its creation,” explain the curators of the exhibition, “the Palace of Versailles has fostered the development of a new relationship with the animal world. At the Court, a fierce resistance to the Cartesian theory of animal-machines developed: in the palaces of the kings of France, we never doubted that animals had a soul ”. In Versailles, no one ignores the tenderness of Louis XIV for carp, that of Louis XV for cats and the first elephant of Versailles, an elephant offered to Louis XIV by the King of Portugal, whose skeleton is presented in the frame of the exhibition.

Among the animals that inhabit the courtyard, outside the menagerie, and whose exhibition also tells the story: horses, more than 2,000 in total, at the heart of daily life and of the great royal ceremonies, divided between the great stable (hunting and war horses) and the small (draft and saddle horses);

the dogs, painted by François Desportes who accompanied the Sun King on a hunt to paint his favorite bitches such as "Zette" and "Nonette" in natural postures, or the little monkeys, which populated the apartments at Versailles, were considered to be toys and were offered to court ladies and children.

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