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Versailles does not exist because people wanted to live there. It exists because Louis XIV decided in 1661 to move the French court away from Paris, where an earlier king had been humiliated by a mob, and to build the grandest residence in Europe in a marshy hunting ground outside the capital. The town that grew around the palace was planned from the beginning as a support structure for royal power. The noble families who received land grants in the 1670s built townhouses deliberately designed to echo the palace's architectural language.

The result is a city with a peculiar DNA.

The Palace of Versailles and its gardens - the Hall of Mirrors, the Grand Trianon, the 800-hectare park with its geometrically arranged water features - are among the most visited sites in the world. But the town itself, the residential streets of Notre-Dame and Saint-Louis quarters with their 18th-century facades and covered market, has a human scale that most visitors miss entirely. The covered market at Place du Marche Notre-Dame, open since 1842, sells Ile-de-France produce to locals who have simply grown up alongside one of France's most famous monuments.