Louis XIV wanted a stage on which the whole French nobility would have to perform for him, and Versailles is what that ambition looks like in stone, gilt and gravel. His father's modest hunting lodge on a damp plateau west of Paris grew, over decades of building, into the palace you see now, and in 1682 the court moved out here for good. The Hall of Mirrors, the chapel, the endless enfilade of state rooms: all of it was designed so that a duke had to queue to watch the king get dressed. A long way from the Paris mob, too, which was rather the point, until the mob walked out here in October 1789 and fetched the royal family back to the city.
The gardens are the work of André Le Nôtre, and they are the real reason to come on a bike, because you arrive with a sense of scale already in your body. Ride the long axis to the Grand Canal, then out to the Trianons and Marie Antoinette's little play farm, the Hameau, and you begin to understand how much land a king could bend to a straight line. History did not stop with the Bourbons: the treaty that ended the First World War was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in 1919, in the same room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871.
As riding goes, be honest with yourself. This is the outer Paris region, so the approach is suburban traffic, roundabouts, traffic lights and the occasional delivery van parked in your lane. The nicer way in or out runs through the forests that ring the town, Fausses-Reposes to the east and the Forêt de Marly to the north, where the roads narrow, the trees close over and the air suddenly smells of leaf mould instead of exhaust. From there it is a pleasant run down to the Seine and Poissy, where Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye sits on its white stilts, a twentieth-century answer to all this baroque excess. Carry a Crit'Air sticker for anything near Paris; the low-emission rules are enforced.
Versailles itself is a proper city, so fuel, cafés, bakeries and bike parking are no problem; the streets around the Notre-Dame market are good for a long lunch. Go early on a weekday if you want the palace without the coach crowds, and save the park for the late afternoon, when the low sun turns the gravel gold and the fountains, on show days, are running.