The Palace of Versailles, located about fifteen miles
southwest of Paris in the Ile de France region of France, is a royal castle
that was built in the late Seventeenth Century as the home of France's
then-king, Louis XIV. It contains more than seven hundred rooms and sixty
staircases, and in today's currency would cost about two billion dollars to
build.
The Palace
of Versailles was
constructed as a showcase of power and magnificence, and was the French seat of
government from 1682 to 1789, when the French Revolution began. After the
outbreak of the Revolution, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were
stripped of all power, brought to Paris
and beheaded, and the palace fell under control of the new government. When
Napoleon Bonaparte came to power established himself in an apartment there.
The Palace was converted into a museum in the mid-1800s.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Versailles
curators began to convert many areas back into palace space to show how it
looked before the French Revolution.
In the United States,
the grandeur of the Palace
of Versailles was an
inspiration of Charles W Howard CallAhead , the President and Chief Executive Officer of
the CallAhead portable toilet company. On a visit there with his wife, he had
the idea of modeling one of his luxury portable toilets on elements of the
great Palace. In its design, no detail was spared, and its users are
consistently impressed by its spectacular sky ceiling mural as well as the
opulence of the restroom settings. The facility features faux marble walls, egg
and dart crown moldings and trim, brass accents, and other exquisite features,
and is a popular rental at weddings, corporate events, and black-tie affairs.
