Where a leading figure lives is always important, for his or her house tells us a great deal about their character. One might call this "architectural diplomacy". Louis XIV built the Chateau of Versailles as the embodiment of his absolutist rule. Until then, French kings had lived a peripatetic life, in the capital, in the Île-de-France and in the Loire valley; Versailles changed all that, and no French king or emperor ever dared to live there after the Revolution, a sign that the static remote era of monarchy was now over.