Original subtitles

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Paris.

A city of perfection and passion.

And on its border, a palace filled

with secrets dark and strange.

The encrypted letters of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette,

the deadly skills of the musketeers,

and the invention of an assassination machine.

Secrets hidden in plain sight,

inside the Chateau of Versailles.

(mysterious music) (electricity sizzling)

(pages whooshing)

(bright music)

Every year on the outskirts of Paris,

10 million visitors flock to a museum

that was once a royal palace, Versailles.

In these rooms, kings ruled France and much of Europe

by convincing their subjects they were appointed by God.

- It's a theater, Versailles.

It's a place for a permanent show,

by the king of its unique person and power.

- [Narrator] From the arrival of the Sun King,

Louis XIV in 1682,

until the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789,

(people shouting) (guillotine thudding)

Versailles was the epicenter of the nation.

Here the monarchs

of France commissioned exquisite treasures,

made beautiful babies, and started bloody wars.

(soldiers shouting)

This solemn gallery is known as the Hall of Battles.

Many French regiments are represented here

including some that still exist today.

(soldiers shouting)

But this uniform was only worn for a few decades.

It has the white cross of the musketeer.

- [Announcer] "The Three Musketeers."

- [Narrator] In the movies, the musketeers

are happy-go-lucky warriors off on an adventure.

Porthos, Athos, Aramis, and the young D'Artagnan

thrust and parry their way to victory.

The cry of, "One for all and all for one."

(dramatic music)

But what was it really like to be a musketeer?

That is our museum secret.

(picture whooshing) (bright music)

The story begins at the 17th century Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte

where Louis XIV attended lavish parties,

accompanied by his musketeers.

These modern swordsmen are experts

in the musketeers' history and fighting technique

and today they've agreed to train a new recruit.

- Thank you very much, I'm Rob, nice to meet you.

- Michel. - Hi.

- [Narrator] Robert Miles is an actor

who's going to play D'Artagnan in "The Three Musketeers."

- So what are we gonna be doing today then?

- Ah, sounds good to me, okay.

To be here as a British actor fighting

these French former world champion stage combat fighters,

you don't get opportunities like that very often,

to be honest, and I'm really hoping

that I can make the most of it.

- One, you see?

Two, three.

- [Narrator] Rob also hopes to learn something

about the musketeers as people.

(men grunting)

It turns out that the fictional D'Artagnan

was based on a real nobleman from Gascony,

a region famed for producing fiery warriors.

- What about the attitude of D'Artagnan as a person?

Did he like fighting?

Did he do it because he had to?

- I am D'Artagnan.

- You are D'Artagnan, okay.

(speaking in foreign language)

- Okay, right. - Okay, let's fight.

- So he wants to fight.

- Yes. - Okay.

- Very quick to anger.

- Very quick to anger, okay.

That's good stuff to know.

All right, and is that because of where he comes from?

Is that a Gascon trait?

- [Michel] Gascon, Gascon.

- That's very, okay, I see.

(swords clanking)

- [Narrator] In reality, as in the movies,

musketeers trained to be deadly swordsmen.

(swords clanking) (man groaning)

(men laughing)

- Got me there, absolutely.

Made a mistake and it cost me my life.

- [Narrator] Hollywood's musketeers spar

with the Cardinal's men,

and their exploits are often played for laughs.

The real musketeers had a more serious mission.

The crosses on their uniforms symbolized their holy calling.

They were the king's bodyguards

which made them God's bodyguards.

Every musketeer swore to protect his God-king with his life.

When the king attended social functions,

like the ones at this chateau,

he faced potential threats from assassins.

At any second his musketeers might be put to the test.

- I'm sure you could be a musketeer.

- [Musketeer] Really?

- This is my father's sword.

(swords clanking) (dramatic music)

- It's a bit rusty, don't you think?

- Still sharp enough to run you through.

(swords clanking)

- [Narrator] Rob is starting to think

that the life of a musketeer would have been great fun

just like in the movies.

(shouting in foreign language)

But what he doesn't know is that

when Louis XIV declared war, everything changed.

To understand what happened,

Rob visits Versailles' Hall of Battles

to meet historian, Elva Travion.

- Their mission first, was to protect the king's life.

But they also had the mission to fight in battles.

On the flag you can see a bomb falling

and the motto was,

"Where they fall, the death is running with them."

- I see, okay, right.

So wherever they go, death follows with them.

- Yes. - Right wow, biblical.

(both laughing)

- [Narrator] As the king's men, they were expected

to be the bravest and the ones to lead the charge.

- They were often called enfants perdue, lost children.

- Lost children, really? - Yes.

They were called so because there was a very high rate

of losses during the fight.

(men yelling)

(people chattering)

- [Narrator] In the movies, the story ends

with D'Artagnan receiving his commission and a musket.

In real life, D'Artagnan got a musket ball

through the throat and died on the battlefield.

So many musketeers were lost defending their God-king,

that Louis XIV retired the name of the company.

- Coming into this, obviously with only an understanding

of D'Artagnan from pop culture,

has really shown me how I can maybe do it differently

and perhaps change the performance

that I was intending to give prior to coming here.

- [Narrator] A darker, grittier D'Artagnan

may be just what is needed to revive the musketeer franchise

for a new generation.

Up next, the mysterious death of a king's mistress.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

At the palace of Versailles,

the kings of France chose their wives

to enhance political alliances,

and produce heirs to the throne.

But for love and for sexual pleasure,

kings looked elsewhere

to the ladies-in-waiting of their court.

Some of the most famous mistresses

in French history graced Versailles.

Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry,

and Louis XIV's Madame de Montespan.

- She was enormously clever

and the greatest beauty of her generation.

She was extremely passionate, extremely glamorous.

She gambled like a drunken soldier

and made love like a Parisian whore.

She was really quite an extraordinary character.

And it wasn't considered at all scandalous

to be the lover of the king.

- [Narrator] The inevitable illegitimate children

such liaisons produced were welcomed

as proof of a king's virility.

(dramatic music)

But there was a time when it was scandalous

to be a mistress.

(cannon booming) (men screaming)

In the turbulent 15th century,

much of France was occupied by the English.

The French king Charles VII was forced

to flee with his court from Paris to the Loire Valley.

(dramatic music)

Although Charles had a wife and children,

he was transfixed by the arrival

of a new lady-in-waiting, named Agnes Sorel.

(sweet gentle music)

Charles took Agnes to his bed.

(woman moaning)

But after six years as the king's mistress,

the young woman dropped dead of unknown causes.

How did Agnes Sorel die?

And did she leave a mark on history?

Those are our museum secrets.

(dramatic music)

In France today,

there is no history detective more accomplished

than forensic paleopathologist Philippe Charlier.

- My job is doing forensic autopsies.

So I have to take all the samples

to analyze them in order to say

what is the cause of death,

what is the circumstances of death, the manner of death.

I'm like a doctor but a too-late doctor.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Recently, Charlier went to the town of Loches

to investigate the death of Agnes Sorel.

Some suspected that her final resting place was here

in this medieval church.

Beside the alter there is a sarcophagus

with the wings of an angel

and an inscription that reads,

"The woman of beauty."

- So we wanted to exhume the body

or what remained of the body,

and to first confirm the identity of this individual

then try if possible

to find the cause of death for this woman.

- [Narrator] The burial urn contained a human skull.

Analysis of the teeth revealed it was that of a young woman.

And facial reconstruction matched the likeness

of Agnes Sorel.

(mysterious music)

Her coffin is next door to the castle

where she spent the last years of her life.

Here she bore King Charles three children

and also made her mark on the history of fashion.

- [Narrator] Agnes brought a style formerly reserved

for prostitutes to the king's court.

But she wasn't just eye candy.

She took a keen interest in politics.

Agnes learned that the war with the English was going badly

because her beloved king had run out of money

to pay his troops.

She used her considerable charm

to convince rich nobles to back the king.

- [Narrator] With these resources,

Charles defeated the English and secured his borders.

To show Agnes his appreciation,

the king did something no French king had done before.

He made her his official mistress.

- The official mistress was effectively a job at court.

She would have her own apartment,

she would have her own servants,

she would receive visits in her own right

as a significant member of the court.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] Church elders were horrified

that a mere mistress should be given such high status.

Undeterred, Charles went one step further.

He showed his love for Agnes

by making their children legitimate.

This infuriated Charles' eldest son

who feared the children would

one day threaten his claim to the throne.

Her enemies had reasons to want her dead.

But to discover proof that she was murdered,

Dr. Philippe Charlier needed to determine her cause of death

by examining the physical evidence.

- [Philippe] We found a lot of eggs and a lot of parasites

inside the remains of the body.

- [Narrator] Charlier also detected

small amounts of mercury.

- Why mercury?

We know that mercury was used

during this period, Middle Ages, Renaissance,

for the cure of internal parasites.

- [Narrator] The mercury could be explained

as medication.

But when Charlier did the same test on her hair,

the mercury levels spiked.

- This testified really of a very large amount

of mercury in the two or three days before death.

- [Narrator] Perhaps someone added mercury to her medication

or forced her to ingest it.

Either way, Agnes received a lethal dose.

- So it was maybe an accident, it's possible.

But maybe it was also crime in order

to destroy the most important influence she had on the king.

- [Narrator] But if someone took her life

to end her influence, they failed.

From that time on,

being the king's mistress was no longer scandalous.

- It was really a career and a very serious one at that.

And one for which many, many women were

very happy to compete.

The first official mistress was Agnes Sorel

and after that it was used for every woman

who occupied the position of the favored lover of the king.

- [Narrator] After her death,

Agnes Sorel was long mourned by her king.

We suspect that on her coffin are traces of his tears.

(dramatic music)

Next on Museum Secrets, the queen loses her head.

(guillotine thuds)

(dramatic music)

For modern visitors to its gilded halls,

Versailles can feel like a setting

for lifestyles of the rich and famous.

And that's because it was.

Those who lived here were the celebrities of their day

and the dazzle reminded everyone who was boss, the king.

- The king is a holy person,

has been chosen by God

to be the king of France.

- [Narrator] So in 1789, King Louis XVI was unprepared

for the revolution when his subjects stormed the Bastille,

declared all men equal,

and four years later sent him to the guillotine.

(guillotine thudding)

But though his death changed history,

his wife is better known.

Marie Antoinette,

portrayed as a spoiled, childish libertine who said,

"Let them eat cake,"

when told that starving French peasants had no bread.

- It's a sort of tragic glamor of doomed celebrity,

about Marie Antoinette.

- [Narrator] But was she just a shallow celebrity?

The victim of circumstances she didn't understand?

The truth is a museum secret.

(dramatic music)

The story begins in Versailles,

three months after the fall of the Bastille.

- 5th of October, rumors reach Versailles,

the furious starving mob was preparing

to march on the palace.

The royal family was held very much to blame

for the famine that was afflicting the country.

- [Narrator] In the middle of the night,

a violent faction stormed the palace

looking for Marie Antoinette.

- The queen like a magnet has really concentrated

all the hatred in France.

- [Narrator] They attacked and killed her bodyguards.

Marie Antoinette did not intend to be the next victim.

She took a secret passageway.

- So the queen went through these small doors,

leading to the king's apartment

and she reached at the end this main door

and unfortunately the door was locked from the other side.

There was a valet of the king not very far

who heard and who unlocked it.

- [Narrator] Marie Antoinette had saved herself

but her ordeal had just begun.

- At dawn this whole area was full

of furious, shouting people demanding

to see the royal family.

- [Narrator] The king promised

to look into the shortage of bread.

Then rioters shouted for a word from the queen.

(people shouting)

- The million dollar question about Marie Antoinette,

the one that every school boy knows,

did she say, "Let them eat cake"?

Well she certainly spent a great deal too much money

on dresses and jewels,

but she really didn't say anything quite so callous.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] In fact, she said nothing.

She stared down the mob until a few began to chant,

"Long live the queen."

But others shouted "bitch" and "whore".

By nightfall, the royals were ordered to Paris.

(people yelling)

- It was a hideous journey.

The royal family looked out of the windows of their coach

to see the heads of the two bodyguards stuck

on bleeding pikes being waved

at the windows of their carriage.

- [Narrator] They spent the next four years

under house arrest until the revolutionaries decided

France couldn't move forward while the king was alive.

They solved the problem.

(guillotine thudding)

But for some, the king's execution wasn't enough.

(somber music)

- Marie Antoinette was brought here

to the Conciergerie in August, 1793.

- [Narrator] Prisoners of the revolution were kept here

while awaiting trial.

- The trail of Marie Antoinette

was an absolute shame and disgrace, absolute.

No respect of the rules, no chances left to the defense.

- [Narrator] Her celebrity had made her a target.

- Most of the accusations

by witnesses were entirely specious.

She was accused of spying, of contempt for the people,

of orgiastic behavior, of drunkenness,

even though she was a well-known teetotaler.

Perhaps the worst of them was that she had committed incest

with her then seven-year-old son.

- [Narrator] And so it appears

the revolutionaries convicted an innocent victim.

Or maybe not.

In the French National Archives

are several revealing letters written by Marie Antoinette

while she was under arrest.

- One of Marie Antoinette's most important correspondents

was her old friend and some say lover,

the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen.

- [Narrator] These letters were written in a secret code.

- A code word would be chosen for each letter

after which different letters would correspond,

line by line alternately,

to produce a new set of phrases.

- [Narrator] The code could only be deciphered

with a key word.

- What's moving, I suppose,

about the key word here is that it is courage.

It seems a fairly desperate cri de coeur.

- [Narrator] You might think these were love letters.

But they're not.

They're about politics.

- Marie Antoinette was intensely aware

of France's political situation.

She spent a great deal of time at her correspondence

with her potential allies.

- [Narrator] She pleaded with von Fersen

and other foreign leaders to help restore the monarchy

by invading France.

- This is high treason.

She betrayed her country.

(people shouting)

The hate was too strong.

She had to die.

- Marie Antoinette remained remarkably calm and composed.

As she walked up the steps to the scaffold,

she had accidentally stand on the executioner's foot

for which she apologized very graciously

saying that she hadn't done it on purpose.

- It's a tragic fate.

From so high to so low.

- [Narrator] Marie Antoinette understood the political storm

that was about to engulf her.

But she could not stop it.

(guillotine thudding)

As for Versailles, no royal celebrity

would ever live here again.

But the dazzling show goes on

in a palace now owned by the people.

(somber music)

Coming up, the secrets of an inventive assassin.

(dramatic music)

After the French Revolution of 1789,

no royal would inhabit the halls of Versailles.

But post-revolutionary history hangs on its walls.

A soldier named Napoleon rose to rule France

and all of Europe.

(men shouting) (horses neighing)

His formidable army numbered 600,000.

But after a failed attempt to conquer Russia,

and a final defeat by the British at Waterloo,

France fell into turmoil.

This is the period portrayed in the many versions

of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

In July of 1830, an insurrection broke out.

But the new revolutionaries,

called the Republicans, could not prevail.

Instead, a nobleman named Louis Philippe was crowned king.

Historian Monroe Price is an expert on this chaotic era.

- Violence against Louis Philippe and his regime

began very soon after the July Revolution.

And this was basically because of the Republicans

who were furious that a republic had not been a result

of the July Revolution

and that the revolution had been stolen

from them by Louis Philippe.

- [Narrator] In a gallery of Versailles closed to the public

this painting depicts an event that happened five years

after Louis Philippe's coronation,

when a royal procession went horribly wrong.

- [Narrator] The trouble's cause is hard to see,

but if one looks closely at a second floor window,

there is a puff of smoke.

What happened here is a museum secret.

(dramatic music)

Our story begins in the slums of Paris.

In the 1830s, it was home to impoverished war veterans

including a man named Giuseppe Fieschi.

- He was a extraordinary man in fact.

He'd been a soldier in Napoleon's army

and had actually survived the retreat from Moscow.

So he was certainly a tough man

and had some brains, intelligence, and practical skill.

- [Narrator] Fieschi fell in with republican conspirators

who wanted to assassinate King Louis Philippe.

They had learned

that an upcoming royal procession would travel down one

of the central boulevards of Paris.

In return for a fortune, Fieschi agreed to shoot the king

and swore to safeguard the conspirators' identities.

To begin his preparations,

Fieschi visited the Boulevard du Temple

and rented an upstairs room.

From here the king's procession would be

within musket range.

But there was a problem.

Muskets take many seconds to reload.

Fieschi would need to kill the king with the first shot

or there would be no time for a getaway.

He wasn't sure it could be done.

(musket booming)

On a gun range near Paris,

Monroe will explore what was going on in Fieschi's mind.

- Fieschi prepared for his attempt

on King Louis Philippe's life with great care.

He knew that he was facing a moving target.

The king was going to be on horseback.

He was going to be surrounded

by several of his sons and his staff.

So it was quite a difficult target to hit.

- [Narrator] Targets representing Louis Philippe

and his retinue have been placed at a distance

from a marksman equal to the distance

from Fieschi's window to the street below.

(musket booming)

- As you see, it's unlikely with just that one shot,

he'd have hit Louis Philippe.

- [Narrator] Fieschi knew it.

But as a war veteran,

he also knew firsthand the deadly power of massed muskets.

(muskets booming)

Fieschi wondered how could that firepower be employed

by a lone assassin?

Necessity was the mother of invention.

- This machine we see here is the so-called,

has come to be known as the infernal machine

named after its inventor,

and its first and so far only operator, Giuseppe Fieschi.

It is 25 musket barrels arranged on a wooden frame.

- [Narrator] The night before the king's procession,

things did not go as Fieschi had planned.

- [Monroe] He and his collaborator, Morey,

charged all the musket barrels with bullets and buckshot.

- [Narrator] What Fieschi didn't know was

that Morey tampered with some of the barrels.

The conspirators didn't trust Fieschi

to keep their plot secret.

The next morning, the king's procession approached

along with a boisterous crowd.

(people shouting)

- He would have heard certainly a great deal of noise,

he'd have heard drums beating,

he'd have heard military music.

And he must have been extremely tense.

There was no way of knowing

whether the machine would in fact work.

Fieschi set off his machine by putting a match

to the powder train at about the 13th musket barrel.

- [Narrator] Many barrels fired true.

But some exploded in Fieschi's face.

(man screaming)

In the street, the barrage wreaked havoc.

(people shouting)

- The scene was almost indescribable

and very shocking and terrible.

18 people around the king were killed.

22 people injured.

- [Narrator] But the assassination attempt failed.

- He missed the king by a whisker,

almost literally a whisker.

- [Narrator] Fieschi himself was not so lucky.

He'd been hit by shrapnel from an exploding barrel.

- It made a gash in his forehead that was so deep,

that when he was arrested,

his brain could be seen beating through the gore.

- [Narrator] The king's surgeons saved his life

so he could face justice.

He never knew that one of his own group

of conspirators was responsible for the exploding barrels,

so he kept his side of the bargain

and refused to incriminate the others.

- Fieschi had pleaded guilty so it was perfectly clear

that he would go to the guillotine.

- [Narrator] Louis Philippe commissioned this painting

to commemorate a moment of terror

and his near escape from death.

The king would keep his throne as the last king of France.

(guillotine thudding)

While Fieschi would lose his head.

Coming up, the secret of a monk's elixir.

(dramatic music)

Inside the Versailles palace,

museum director Beatrix Saule has agreed to reenact a ritual

from the days of Louis XIV.

Once a day, this baton was paraded through the halls

to signal a momentous event, the king's dinner.

(bright music)

By royal decree, his subjects were allowed

to watch him eat his usual enormous meal.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, 200 kilometers away

in this French monastery,

a humble monk led a much simpler life.

This monk shared just one thing with Louis XIV,

they were both born in the year 1638.

The two men would never meet,

but their lives would intersect in an intimate way.

How this happened is a museum secret.

(dramatic music)

At Versailles, the courtiers catered

to every whim of Louis XIV.

The monk on the other hand, had to cater

to the whims of his Abbot who ordered him to make wine

to pay for the monastery's upkeep.

Unfortunately, the monastery was located

in a northerly province.

The winters sometimes killed grapevines.

(speaking in foreign language)

To wine enthusiast, Alexandre Loire,

and vintner Richard Geoffroy,

the monk's vineyard is a small miracle.

- Here the background is really

the Clos Sacre, it's really the original the vineyard.

- [Narrator] Not only was the climate cold,

the soil was chalky.

- It's very hard for the roots of the vines

just to progress in the chalk.

The greatest wines always come from marginal situations.

Greatness always comes on a constraint, never comfort.

- [Narrator] The constraints the monk had

to contend with were not only aboveground,

but below in the monastery's wine cellars.

- During winter, the yeasts are slowing down their activity.

So people realized that

at springtime the wine was fermenting again.

- [Narrator] Double fermentation causes

carbon dioxide bubbles.

- At that time, bubbles in the wine were not considered

as a competitive advantage.

It was more a defect of the wine.

- [Narrator] And the carbon dioxide

also caused the bottles to explode.

With religious zeal, the monks strove

to minimize the bubbles and maximize the taste

by combining green and red grapes in a unique way.

- He has been the very first man

who decided to blend the grapes prior to press them.

And he succeeded to create

what he called later the best wine in the world.

- [Narrator] When Louis XIV tried the monk's wine,

he loved it.

For the monk, life was good.

The wine was named for his home province

which happens to be called Champagne.

But for Louis XIV as the years passed,

life became excruciating.

His heavy diet had caused a swelling

of the extremities called gout.

The royal feet became a royal pain.

But no matter what his doctor's told him,

he wouldn't cut back on dinner.

Or on the glass of champagne he had with every meal.

His senior physician claimed champagne was good for him,

while others insisted it was worsening his condition,

and even shortening his life.

At the time there was no way to prove who was right.

At this modern wine testing lab in Champagne,

Alexandre Loire hopes to discover the answer.

- Is it possible to know

if the wine of Champagne is good for health or not?

- In order to assess this,

I'm going to use this device which is capable

of measuring the total antioxidant capacity.

- [Narrator] Health-giving antioxidants

are sometimes in the form of Vitamin C

which happens to be a modern treatment for gout.

Dr. Hoda has found high levels of antioxidants in red wine.

While in white wine, they're much lower.

As for champagne, you might think

that because it looks a lot like white wine,

it too will be low in antioxidants.

Dr. Hoda is about to find out.

- [Narrator] In fact, champagne has double the antioxidants

of white wine, which makes sense,

because just as it was in the monk's day,

today's version is a unique blend of red grapes and green.

- [Narrator] So champagne probably eased the king's gout

and it certainly didn't shorten his life.

Louis XIV lived to the ripe old age of 77.

He died in 1715.

Coincidentally, so did the monk who made champagne.

Oh, and one more thing.

His name was Dom Perignon.

(gentle music)

Next on Museum Secrets, the Sun King goes supernova.

(dramatic music)

(mysterious music)

King Louis XIV clad Versailles in stone.

But his palace is all about light.

- If we start with this room, his official state bedroom,

it's built on an east, west access

so that the sun rises when the monarch rises

and sets when he goes to bed.

- [Narrator] During the day, sunlight from the gardens

filled Louis' great hall of mirrors.

Anyone who gazed upon him here,

would be blinded by reflected brilliance.

The message was, I am the Sun King.

I alone have the power to bestow life or withhold it.

But while Louis was the self-proclaimed source of light,

he also liked to be enlightened.

- He always was very anxious that he hadn't been quite

as well educated as a king ought to be,

so he was always trying to make up for this.

He wanted to read history books,

he wanted to know what as happening in philosophy,

in the sciences.

He would bring the best people to him to do that.

- [Narrator] In 1666, Louis created

the French Academy of Sciences.

To allow his academy to explore the heavens,

he built a world-class observatory in Paris.

In the 17th century,

its telescopes revealed the craters of the moon,

and the gap in the rings of Saturn.

And in 1858, a French astronomer built a telescope here

that was more powerful than any made before.

- There was a kind of revolution.

Leon Foucault who walked in this observatory,

invented the modern reflecting telescope.

- [Narrator] This telescope revealed a mystery

that led to a discovery about the origin of life on earth.

It's a museum secret

that Louis XIV would find hard to believe.

(gentle music)

Our investigation begins

at a modern observatory in Toronto, Canada.

Astronomer Ray Jayawardhana is the kind

of cutting edge thinker that Louis would have invited

to join his academy.

- Astronomy is quite difference from the other sciences

in that most of what we know comes from just decoding light.

- [Narrator] The decoding started with Isaac Newton.

- Isaac Newton used a prism to spread sunlight

into the colors of the rainbow.

- [Narrator] He called the colors in sunlight a spectrum.

Soon after, prisms would reveal the spectra

of earthly sources of light.

- It was long known that different elements burn

with different colors.

And when scientists looked through a prism,

they realized that each element had a distinct spectrum.

For instance, when we look at helium gas through a prism,

we can see its distinct spectrum.

- [Narrator] The same is true for other elements.

Astronomers wondered, if earthly elements can be identified

by their spectrum,

perhaps a prism can reveal the elements burning in a star.

(dramatic music)

And that brings us back to the Paris observatory

to the first astronomers

to use the powerful Foucault telescope.

- Charles Wolf and George Rayet were two astronomers

working in this observatory around 1860.

They don't want to only look at the star itself,

but they want to have the spectrum,

so they have to use this device which is a prism.

And they put that in front of the eyepiece like that

and then they could see the spectrum of the star.

- [Narrator] Through a prism,

most stars look much like this.

But when Wolf and Rayet scan the constellation Cygnus,

they found three stars that displayed bright spots

of yellow and blue.

- And they could see very bright emissions

at certain places on the spectrums.

This is very special.

These are the only stars which have this characteristic.

- [Narrator] They were named Wolf-Rayet stars.

But Wolf and Rayet never discovered

which elements give them their unique spectrum.

- So this remained a mystery for many, many years.

- [Narrator] In the 20th century,

more powerful telescopes allowed astronomers

to see Wolf-Rayet stars in a close-up view.

- And here's an image taken with Hubble Space Telescope,

one of the Wolf-Rayet stars that we know of.

As you can see, the actual star is right at the center

but surrounding it is all of this other material.

- [Narrator] With modern instruments,

the spectra of the swirling material

reveal a primordial brew.

- [Ray] In those outer layers are elements

like carbon and oxygen and nitrogen

that were cooked up inside those stars.

These layers are being expelled into space.

- [Narrator] These stars are the early stages

of something much bigger.

- Astronomers believe that Wolf-Rayet stars

will go on to explode fully, completely as supernovi.

Supernova are spectacular explosions that really seed

our galaxy with the elements that are essential for life.

The oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood,

and calcium in our bones comes from these stars.

And if not for those elements, we wouldn't be here.

So Wolf-Rayet stars are vital for life as we know it.

- [Narrator] Life that includes you and me,

and the Sun King Louis XIV.

Louis believed that he had the power to bestow life

but in reality, Wolf-Rayet stars are the real Sun Kings.

(mysterious music)

In a museum where royalty and revolution meet,

for every mystery we reveal, far more must remain unspoken.

Secrets of unbalanced minds,

(guns popping)

and of courageous hearts,

hidden in plain sight inside the Chateau of Versailles.

(dramatic music)

(eerie music)

(logo whooshing)