In the modern world, we give little thought to illumination-electric lamps are so bright, we think nothing of the evening.
In the time of Louis XVI, evening events were lit by candles-thousands of them-which were very expensive.
The question is: was illumination so expensive then, that most events (state dinners, receptions, parties, etc.) would be held during daylight hours?
And-I would imagine that most evening events would be held in halls like the famous “Hall of Mirrors”-to make the illumination easier.
Would a modern person find night events at Versailles to be pretty dim?
Or would enough candles be lit to make it reasonably bright?
Most people went to bed when the sun went down until relatively recently. However the cities have usually had some degree of illumination since the ancient times, in the ancient world they would have city street lamps which were sometimes nothing more than glorified torches or just different takes on the common oil lamp which was widespread.
By the age of Louis XIV there would have been a decent “night culture” amongst the aristocracy. They wouldn’t necessarily have bright, 60 watt or more electric bulb lighting as we are used to, but it’d be more of a dim light that you could easily drink, revel, and converse by but probably not easily read by it. Only people that truly needed to be doing close work all through the night (government officials, scribes of some types, etc) might have enough candles to provide adequate reading light.
While not super historically accurate, Showtime’s The Tudors does a pretty good job of showing what Henry VIII’s court would have looked like at night. In most episodes of the show where they are having night time revelry the court scenes are very dimly lit. So the court would typically not be going to bed at night time and it would also not be as brightly lit as we are used to today.
That’s in a “normal” aristocratic/royal court. Versailles was a different world that consumed something like 10% of France’s State revenues at its peak. It’s entirely possible they extravagantly had enough lighting that it was in fact quite well lit, at least in the rooms where people were congregating.
There was no practical reason to prevent events being held after sunset and Louis XIV regularly did so; he dined in public most days at 10pm and he held public receptions - the appartements - three times a week using the full suite of rooms in the Grand Appartements.
True, by modern standards, the light levels would have seemed rather gloomy, but contemporaries weren’t judging it by our standards and, to them, the effect seemed extremely impressive.
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon offers a good look at high society around that time. There are several beautiful candlelit scenes - Kubrick used special cameras to make full use of candlelight and no other artificial light sources, IIRC.