Under leaden skies, Laurent Choffé is rallying his troops. Choffé’s team of gardeners, landscape architects and metalworkers are racing to put the finishing touches on the restored Bosquet du Dauphin, one of the oldest groves at Versailles. Sunk in mud up to their calves, a pair of sweating workers struggle to maneuver a heavy section of pipe to fit it into the fountain. After watching them slip, slide, heave and get nowhere, Choffé suggests they take a break. As a light rain starts to fall, he turns to the crew to discuss the urgent matter at hand—where to set up the tables for the pot (pronounced "po"), the traditional workers’ celebration, marking the grove’s completion. What if the rain delays the event, I ask. Will there still be a pot?

Choffé shoots me a quizzical look. "Mais oui, Monsieur, le pot est sacré!" he says with a Gallic shrug and tongue firmly in cheek. It’s vintage Versailles; even if the weather won’t cooperate, the restoration—and the fete—must go on.

The wrestling match between man and nature is an old, old story at Versailles, the former seat of French kings, 13 miles west of Paris. In the 17th century, Louis XIV, the Sun King, created the perfectly trimmed, geometric garden to show his control not simply over his subjects but over nature itself. Versailles sets the standard for the formal French style, with its rigidly linear Cartesian perspectives, clipped hornbeam hedges, flower beds of curlicue greenery and exuberantly baroque fountains, sprouting gilded gods, frogs and cherubs.

Gone with the winds

When 105 mile-per-hour winds ripped through the park in December 1999, uprooting 10,000 trees and peeling away the château’s lead roofing, it looked as if nature were wreaking her revenge. Trees planted at the end of the 18th century, when Marie Antoinette was playing the amorous shepherdess in her jewel-box theater, were flattened. A cherished Corsican pine, planted when Napoleon ruled—in reality, a remarkably chintzy emperor when it came to gardens—was gone with the wind. Roots four times as tall as a man were yanked from the earth, leaving craters the size of small swimming pools. The government brought in army crews from as far away as New Caledonia and French Guiana to help the 50 staff gardeners.

Although I live close to Versailles, I was away with my family in Nuremberg during the storm. Even there, some 500 miles to the east, the winds scythed down forests and gnarled umbrellas into wire sculptures. When we returned home, we were dismayed to see that two-dozen roof tiles had blown away and that our neighbor’s 50-foot pine had demolished a stone wall in our backyard. (This was no great loss: the pine was shading our terrace, and we wanted it gone anyway.) We counted ourselves lucky. Across France, 90 people were killed in the tempest that destroyed some 741,000 acres of forest.

When I visited Versailles shortly afterward, I was stunned by what I saw. Many of the graceful gardens and secluded groves looked like logging camps; bonfires dotted the landscape, and pungent smoke from burning green timber wafted across the chill air. Bulldozers and backhoes executed a clumsy, deafening ballet where the various Louises and their courtiers had once intrigued and gamboled. Wide swathes of the park were closed to the public as gardeners-turned-lumberjacks labored to clear away the fallen trees.

Jacques "Jacky" Durand, one of those gardeners, has tended the rambling woods of Trianon park and the mock-farming village of the queen’s Hamlet for nearly 25 years and knew every tree. Months after the storm, Durand, a trim, soft-spoken man, still winces as he recalls his first day back at work.

"Every one of the gardeners, myself included, had tears in his eyes while clearing away the damage," says Durand as he guides me across the Hamlet, pointing out bare spots where trees had been. "It was as if the storm had ripped something out of every one of us. We couldn’t walk along the broad allées, and we had to climb over branches like monkeys to make any headway."

As I gaze out over a pleasant rolling meadow carpeted with new grass, Durand brings me up short. "Doesn’t look too bad now, does it?" he inquires with a wan smile. "But that treeless meadow was dense with at least 300 trees. The storm tumbled them like dominoes."

On the bank of the Hamlet’s pond, the gardener indicates the spot where a 200-year-old tulip tree crashed down on a young 30-foot cypress with such force that it smashed the cypress to smithereens. "Replacing trees like those will take generations," he tells me.

The perfect storm?

To Durand and visitors like me who witnessed the storm’s aftermath, Versailles looked like a total disaster. It was not. As it turned out, the worst storm in French history folded neatly into an ongoing 25-year master plan for restoring the park. "We have to avoid giving the storm too much importance," explains Pierre-André Lablaude, the park’s chief landscape architect. "There was considerable damage, but it also caused trees to fall that we planned on cutting down anyway, so the storm accelerated a process we had already begun." As Lablaude ranges about his office, he consults precisely rendered 17th- and 18th-century drawings of the gardens on the walls, pointing out areas where the renovation of the 369-year-old park is under way.

The long-range plan was initiated in 1990 after a freak storm knocked down 1,300 trees, a record until the 1999 devastation. Scheduled for completion in 2015, the plan calls for returning the 230 acres of the main palace gardens to the original 17th-century design by André Le Nôtre. The gardens surrounding the Petit Trianon, a stately neoclassic manor house, and the queen’s Hamlet will be restored as they existed in the late 18th century, when Louis XVI’s young wife Marie Antoinette retreated there from the prying eyes of the Bourbon court. Including the Grand Trianon—a sprawling retreat the Sun King constructed for his second wife, Madame de Maintenon—and its gardens, today’s Versailles takes in some 2,000 acres.

The glaring weakness of the park was that many of the trees had grown too tall to thrive on what was originally marshland. In Le Nôtre’s design, tree heights were limited to 36 feet, but some venerable giants grew as high as 120 feet. While some oversize trees had been cut down intentionally, those toppled by the storm also benefited the master plan. "We rediscovered magnificent panoramas that had been completely obscured," says Lablaude.

The first thing that strikes post-storm visitors is just how remarkably undamaged the park looks. The trees that were wiped out represent only 5 percent of the park’s total. Large sections of the park have been fenced off where 4,000 new trees—lindens, horse chestnuts, hornbeams, tulip trees and poplars—have been planted, and plans for another 6,000 trees are in the works. "Within 10 to 15 years, we’ll have the perfect view," predicts Lablaude.

Despite opening up the forest and leveling some aged trees, the storm left a stream of red ink in its wake, wreaking $16 million in damages to the château and $18 million in damages to the park. Miraculously, the wealth of antique statuary dotting the park escaped harm. "The trees were very polite," says Hubert Astier, president of the museum and park. "They fell beside the statues, not on top of them, except for one that had a leg broken off." Through the open window of his office we hear the incessant crunch of sneakers walking on pebbles, the signature chorus of Versailles’ ten million annual guests.

By far, the largest number of foreign visitors are American, drawn by the sumptuous extravagance of the palace and the historic connections between France and the United States that date back to the late 18th century when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were ambassadors to the French court. It was at Versailles that France committed itself to sending troops and arms to fight for the American Revolution and where the British signed the treaty ending that war. And it was at Versailles in 1919 that President Woodrow Wilson signed the treaty ending World War I.

Near and dear to American hearts

After the storm, Americans were among the first to volunteer their help. Of the 2,000 people paying to finance the planting of new trees under Astier’s adopt-a-tree program, 500 are American. American largesse dates back to 1924 when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., shocked by the dilapidated palace and gardens, donated nearly $1 million toward their restoration, and over the years, the Rockefeller family has injected another $23 million. Other Americans, as well as the Kress Foundation and the World Monuments Fund, have donated money and antiques. Recently, the American Friends of Versailles has raised more than half of the $3.5 million needed for restoration of the Bosquet des Trois Fontaines, one of 14 elaborate groves with fountains, statuary and topiary that Astier intends to restore in part with private funds.

Astier’s plans for Versailles are nearly as ambitious as those of Louis XIV, fueled by the government-mandated reacquisition of buildings and grounds that were once part of the prodigious royal domain. He envisions a research center devoted to European civilization in the 17th and 18th centuries and a school of equitation. Gérard Vié, the renowned chef of the local Michelin two-star Les Trois Marches restaurant, has been enlisted to open two new restaurants on the grounds. There’s even a plan to put small, motorized ferries in the Grand Canal to swan passengers the half-mile jaunt to Grand Trianon, though how they would maneuver among the rowboats and sculls already there is anybody’s guess. Astier is not worried. In Louis XIV’s day, the Grand Canal was jammed with gilt gondolas, a bark reserved for Jean-Baptiste Lully’s orchestra, and pint-size warships.

Before acquiring a taste for ruinous wars, the young Sun King certainly knew how to throw a party. Between 1661 and 1682, when the palace was largely a construction site, the gardens were a movable feast of plays by Molière, music by Lully, ballets with Louis dancing as a costumed Apollo, fountain shows and incomparable fireworks displays that painted the night sky with light. The whole symphonic concoction served as an immense, well-oiled propaganda machine. Underlying the dazzling revels, pleasure gardens and allegorical statuary was the unmistakable message of the king’s absolute power and glory.

History repeats itself in witty extravagance

True to Louis’ predilection for spectacles, Astier has opened up the palace and gardens to summertime extravaganzas. Les Fêtes de Nuit is an interpretation of the king’s passions for hunting, dancing and mistresses. This giddy charade features a costumed cast of 200 (most of them local amateur extras), hunters on horseback charging around the Bassin de Neptune with a pack of Irish hunting dogs, fountains that spew sparkling gushers of fire and others that send water sprays soaring 70 feet into the air. This wordless pageant is witty and delirious, with a crescendo of fireworks surpassing any I’ve ever seen.

One pellucid Sunday afternoon in July, I join the crowds gathered for Les Grandes Eaux Musicales. For 90 minutes, visitors promenade like Louis XIV and his courtiers, listening to the music of Handel, Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau and marveling at the waterworks. As the taped baroque music resounds through the garden, I wander down to the recently restored Bosquet de l’Encelade, dominated by a soaring colonnade of arched trelliswork topped by gilt urns. In the center, water spurts from the mouth of the gilt giant Enceladus, crushed beneath a rain of rocks, also spurting jets of water. According to Greek myth, the giant made the fatal mistake of challenging Zeus and was buried under the stones of Sicily for his effrontery. To any nobles who might dare challenge the king, the lesson of retribution was clear. All they had to do was to look around the gardens. Key pieces of statuary—and in fact Le Nôtre and the entire team responsible for creating the palace and park—had been summarily expropriated from the ill-fated Nicolas Fouquet, the finance minister, who had committed the unpardonable mistake of outshining the king’s sun.

A palace fit for a piqued king

In 1661 Fouquet threw a lavish party at his palace at Vaux-le-Vicomte, 33 miles southeast of Paris. Livid that an underling could flaunt a 6,000-guest blowout of music, ballet, fireworks and haute cuisine set against an ostentatious display of sculpture, painting and furniture, the 23-year-old Louis had Fouquet arrested for embezzlement and imprisoned for life. Soon after, the king packed off Vaux-le-Vicomte’s sculptures and furniture, and commanded Le Nôtre, the painter Charles Le Brun, architect Louis Le Vau and horticulturist Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie to lead the transformation of Versailles.

Louis couldn’t have chosen a worst possible place to build his palace. Most of the surrounding land was marsh. But sentiment overruled practicality. Louis had a fondness for the place where his father had come to hunt deer and wild boar and decided to make the old stone-and-brick hunting lodge the core of his future palace. Perhaps just as importantly, Louis set his heart on Versailles because it was a place where he could escape with his new girlfriend, the striking Louise de la Vallière. Here he could be a world away from the court.

Besides, the more miasmal the setting the greater the challenge to the arrogant king. According to Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, a historian who lived at court, Versailles was the "gloomiest and most thankless of places, without view, without woods, without water, without soil, for all is either sand or bog, consequently with an air that cannot be pure." The king, he wrote, "delighted in tyrannizing over nature, subduing it by force of art and money."

And force nature Louis did. Mountains of earth were moved to build up the land around the palace. Entire forests of fully grown trees were uprooted from 50 miles away and transported to Versailles, where they died by the thousands; but more were hauled in, and soon the woods began to take shape. Bending water to the Sun King’s will proved an even more colossal undertaking. Le Nôtre drained the low-lying swamp into a giant cross and dubbed it the Grand Canal to flatter Versailles with comparison to Venice. Through an ingenious system of canals, ditches and pipes, water flowed from Rambouillet Forest 25 miles away to fill the 50 gravity-fed fountains. The Francine brothers invented pumps and windmills to recirculate water from the Grand Canal to the château’s rooftop reservoirs. At the height of construction, there were some 36,000 laborers.

Despite these Herculean feats, Louis still did not have his dream—enough water to run all of the fountains all of the time. Instead, footmen sprinted ahead during his daily walks to turn the fountains on and off as he passed by. Ever determined, Louis decreed a truly megalomaniacal scheme to divert the Eure River, 26 miles away. A pharaonic task force, numbering 20,000 soldiers and 10,000 local laborers, slaved to erect a double-tiered aqueduct intended to rise a mind-boggling 450 feet. Unfortunately, Louis’ focus shifted to yet another war. The troops were dispatched, leaving the project forever unfinished. Today, the aqueduct to nowhere—only one story but massive nonetheless—ornaments a golf course.

Louis, the Sun King, Scissorhands

Louis was obsessed by his gardens, hovering over the minutest detail. He wrote at least six versions of a slim guidebook outlining precise instructions on the proper route for inspecting the gardens. Later editions changed the prescribed tour so that the elderly, gout-afflicted monarch could avoid steps. Louis wielded a mean set of shears, excelling in the arts of pruning and grafting. He delighted in taking foreign emissaries to his high-walled kitchen garden to astonish them with the dizzying array of exotic fruits and vegetables growing under newfangled greenhouses. Serving lettuce in January and strawberries in March provided yet another demonstration of the king’s power, proving that even the seasons bowed to his divine whim.

As willful and demanding as Louis was, he had the good sense to give the modest Le Nôtre a free hand in designing the gardens. When Le Nôtre was young, he was an apprentice to his gardener father, and helped create the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Later, he oversaw the Luxembourg Gardens and Fontainebleau before Fouquet hired him for Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Le Nôtre was a genius at manipulating geometry and perspective, and he invented countless clever techniques for tricking the eye. While Versailles’ grand axes, expansive parterres and almost too-perfect proportions are the landscape architect’s signature pieces, it is in the hidden groves that Le Nôtre was truly inspired. Wandering along narrow paths, I stumble onto them by surprise. They are delightful, like living rooms of greenery inviting a visitor to sit and while away some time watching water spraying skyward, rippling down terraces or cascading over rocks.

For more than 20 years Le Nôtre was the uncontested master of the gardens, but gradually he was supplanted by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, a talented opportunist who slowly undid much of his teacher’s work. Mansart, says Lablaude, wanted a garden in marble. In wheedling Louis’ permission to destroy Le Nôtre’s Bosquet des Sources and erect the Colonnade Grove, Mansart got his wish; a stark circle of Carrara marble featuring François Girardon’s marble the "Rape of Persephone." The chiseled Colonnade made me pine for Le Nôtre’s antic greenery and jaunty fountains. When Louis asked Le Nôtre what he thought of the makeover, the normally reserved old gardener shot back an uncharacteristically impertinent zinger of a put-down: "Well Sire, what do you expect me to say? You have made a stonemason into a gardener and he has served you a dish of his own making." Touché!

Le Nôtre exacted his revenge with the Salle de Bal, a joyous amphitheater of water spilling over terraces with rock work and shells. This was his final work for Versailles. In the Sun King’s day, the royal family and the court gathered to watch dances performed on a platform island stage placed in the center of the grove. Le Nôtre was inspired, Lablaude later explains, after the old master returned from a trip to Rome, to incorporate fountains as magnificent as the Villa d’Este and an amphitheater suggested by the Colosseum into the Salle de Bal.

In search of the genius that was Le Nôtre

When I round the corner into the Bains d’Apollon I see the dramatic change in styles from the 17th century to the 18th. Le Nôtre’s ordered symmetry gives way to Romantic artist Hubert Robert’s theatrical creation for Louis XVI. Where nature was once trim and tidy, here it is released. Waterfalls tumble out of shadowed caverns, flowing over mossy boulders into a pond decorated with clumps of flowers and ferns. If Le Nôtre himself were to loaf and invite his soul on the shady lawn, I can picture him shaking his curly wig in loud lament: first Mansart rips out my beloved hedges and goes overboard with the marble; now this Robert lets nature run amok as if civilized Frenchmen were meant to live in the jungle. I can imagine the grizzled gardener itching to get his hands on some shears to snip away at the Baths’ confounded greenery.

Not me. It’s perfect as is.

While the restoration of the main palace gardens is starting to take shape around Le Nôtre’s original design, the Trianon area, including the Grand Trianon, the Petit Trianon and the queen’s Hamlet, will take far longer. "Since 80 percent of the trees were knocked down there, it could take more than a century for the woods to regrow," explains chief gardener Alain Baraton.

Here, at the Trianon, as in the palace gardens, the storm yielded a few unexpected benefits. In Marie Antoinette’s day, the queen could look down from her bedroom in the Petit Trianon across fields of wheat and oats to keep an eye on her mock farm and village in the Hamlet. But, according to Baraton, the 19th-century gardeners planted trees randomly and blocked this view. The storm obliged by knocking them down. "It will be the first time the garden has ever been replanted to look as it did in the time of Marie Antoinette," he says.

A decade before Marie Antoinette became queen in 1774, Louis XV had transformed the gardens around Petit Trianon into one of the most advanced botanical collections in Europe, with an elaborate hothouse sheltering 4,000 varieties of plants. Unfortunately, Marie Antoinette, not yet 19 years old when she became queen, had scant interest in botany and ordered the legendary collection of plants removed to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the hothouse dismantled. In its place, she constructed a heady variation on the Anglo-Chinese garden then in vogue, a romantic fantasy landscape replete with artificial grottoes, a river and a merry-go-round, the latest toy from China.

Taste in gardens, like political thought, had shifted radically since the Sun King and Le Nôtre laid out designs that illustrated man’s control over nature. Robert’s Bains d’ Apollon were a prime example. Under the influence of Rousseau, man was now intended not to master nature but to return to it. Absolutism—whether in taming subjects or nature—was on the wane.

In the late 18th century, there was a growing scientific curiosity about American animal and plant life, piqued in part by the Notes on Virginia written by the new ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson. The king’s chief gardener was even dispatched to the New World to bring back native trees, some of which were flattened in the storm two centuries later. In a symbolic gesture, Baraton and Astier made a pilgrimage to the United States and brought back a Virginia tulip tree and a swamp cypress. They were planted on the first day of spring.

Marie Antoinette's charmed Hamlet

Despite the storm damage, the queen’s Hamlet is still a charmed place, dripping picturesque melancholy and set off by impressive stands of oak, sycamore and chestnut. Rolling meadows lead down to a lotus-covered lake bordered by a miniature half-timbered village. Restored in the 1930s, the village is an operetta set waiting for players. As in Marie Antoinette’s day, there is still a working farm with seasonal harvests of wheat and oats. Next to the thatched roof buhrstone barn, goats, geese, roosters, rabbits and smallish gray pigs bring life to a well-tended pen. Nearby fields are studded with hay rolls as tall as a man. Gone from the houses are the sumptuous interiors filled with gold, silk and marble that made such a joke of the artfully dilapidated exteriors. When the mob arrived to end the party on October 5, 1789, and force the royal family to Paris, Marie Antoinette was sitting in her grotto, lost in reverie.

"People still speak seriously of seeing the ghost of Marie Antoinette," muses Baraton, quick to add he’s never seen it. Instead of bestirring ghosts, the gardener intends to conjure up the perfumed air of the 18th-century gardens.

"My dream is to plant lilac trees so that, years after a visit, you’ll be able to whiff a long-forgotten scent that summons up a memory of Trianon," he says.

"Like Proust’s madeleine and the remembrance of things past?" I ask, joking.

"Exactly," he replies with a grin.

I volunteer that my own olfactory memory of Versailles would be the smell of cedar from one of the stupendous stumps posed like sculpture storm relics on the path leading up to Grand Trianon from the Grand Canal.

"You like my sculpture?" he says, perking up. "I’m delighted. I think they are perfect mementos of the immense strength of the storm. That particular tree was exactly 194 years old, planted for the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise. I could have written its background on a label, but I did not. Would you like to know why?"

He continues, without waiting for a reply. "I want people to count the tree rings and guess the age. I’ve heard people guess 100 years, 200 years, even 400 years. Incredible! We have to leave something to the imagination. We have to keep some things a mystery, no?"

Oui.