The queen had the little playhouse built as part of her pretend village at Le Petit Trianon; she and her friends attended plays and operas there and even performed themselves. (Her Majesty once played Rosine in Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville.) The theatre is now so fragile (much of the interior is made of papier-mâché over wire mesh, just like a stage set) that it can only be used for performances once a year or so, but it has the only surviving 18th-century stage machinery in all of France. – Apollo
