Lunéville: The Versailles of Lorraine

Required Activities

• Stand in the main court and read the plan: Boffrand designed an H and published it finished in 1745, but the wing that should run along the Vezouze on the north side was never built — it was meant for visiting foreign princes. Then walk round to the south-east corner, the part that burned on the night of 3 January 1719 and was rebuilt to look as it had, with as much of the salvaged stone reused as the duke could afford

• Start on the terrace on the east front and walk the Bosquets end to end, down the length of the Grand Canal to where the Pêcherie stood at the far end: laid out from 1710 by Yves des Hours, a pupil of Le Nôtre, extended from 1724 by Louis de Nesle, and pushed north over the marshes of the Vezouze that Stanislas bought and drained in 1738 and 1739 for his Nouveaux Bosquets

• Go into the royal chapel, the one part of the château thought worth listing as a monument as early as 1901, ninety-seven years before the rest of it — it spent the Revolution as a hay store and then as the local revolutionaries' meeting room, was restored between 1902 and 1904, and lost its roof again in the fire of January 2003, when the collapsing timbers brought masonry down with them. Find where the new stone meets the old

• Walk the north foot of the terrace, along the Grand Canal, and pace out the 250 metres where Stanislas had his Rocher built in 1742: an artificial range of sandstone hills and grottoes, threaded with paths and streams, in which the clockmaker François Richard set eighty-eight life-size automata working off hydraulics, a whole pastoral that Voltaire and Montesquieu came to see. Nothing of the automata is left — they were sold off as national property at the Revolution — so work out from the ground how much space eighty-eight of them needed