“I lied,” he wrote in 1894.

But how?

In these unpublished, intimate pages, Pierre de Nolhac, a major figure in heritage conservation and a leading personality whose life was caught between two centuries, the late 19th and the early 20th, gives us a unique insight into the beginnings of the metamorphosis of Versailles and its behind-the-scenes world, from a human perspective: a fascinating dive into the soul of one of the greatest servants of French heritage.

Through his notebooks, the melancholy scholar is revealed in all his ambivalence: torn between his scientific and literary aspirations and his growing obsession with the palace, which he set out to save from oblivion.

Behind the image of the curator lies a tormented man, concerned with transmission and haunted by the passage of time. With remarkable acuity, Nolhac dissects the intellectual and institutional stakes: literary networks, academic ambitions, political tensions and museographic revolutions. As we read, we witness Versailles slowly taking hold of his mind, until he became the first historian of the palace’s workings and the architect of its renaissance.

A document of rare richness, where historical rigor blends with the introspective insights of a scrupulous writer, in all his complexity, scholar, strategist, poet and man of doubts.

Historian, poet and curator, Pierre de Nolhac (1859-1936) was one of the great architects of the renaissance of Versailles.

Director of the Palace Museum from 1892 to 1920, he led an ambitious policy of restoration and historical reinterpretation of the palace, contributing to its preservation and international renown. Before devoting his life to Versailles, he was a specialist in the Italian Renaissance, notably through his work on Petrarch. He published numerous monographs on the Medici and Valois courts, demonstrating his interest in the intellectual and artistic history of Europe. Elected to the Académie française in 1922, Nolhac’s career was marked by a metamorphosis of the Palace of Versailles, in contrast to the Louis-Philippe museum of the previous century. The institution still owes a great deal to this visionary.

Edited by Claire Bonnotte Khelil and Martine de la Forest Divonne

with Les Belles Lettres, 2025

Number of pages: 368

Dimensions: 16 x 24 cm

Publication date: May 23, 2025

ISBN: 978-2-25145-701-7

French