The Salle des Gardes de la Reine — the Queen's Guard Room — is the first of the rooms in the Queen's Apartment sequence and the one with the most dramatic Revolutionary history. It was here, on the night of 5–6 October 1789, that the Queen's bodyguards fought off the first wave of the revolutionary crowd that had broken into the palace. Two of the guards were killed. Marie Antoinette fled through the connecting door to the King's apartment, and the royal family never returned to Versailles.
The room is decorated with two large ceiling paintings and a marble floor in a bold geometric pattern. The painted ceiling by Noël Coypel depicts stories from Roman history: appropriate for a guard room, where soldiers were meant to contemplate heroic precedents for their service.
Standing in this room, after the overwhelm of the gilded state rooms, it is possible to imagine the scene more precisely than almost anywhere else in the palace: the darkened corridors, the sound of the crowd, the guards dying on this floor. Versailles accumulates this kind of specific weight if you pay attention.