The Gondis stemmed from a family of Florentine bankers established at Lyon in the first years of the 16th century, who had arrived at the court of France in 1543 in the train of Catherine de' Medici.

In the 1570s, the Queen offered Jérôme de Gondi a dwelling at Saint-Cloud, the Hôtel d'Aulnay, which became the nucleus of the château with a right-angled wing that looked out on a terrace.

On 8 October 1658, Hervart organised a sumptuous feast at Saint-Cloud in honour of the young Louis XIV, his brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (Monsieur), their mother Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin.

It appears that Mazarin pressed the sale, contributing to a policy of building a network of royal châteaux to the west of Paris and relieving the excessively enriched Hervart from the fate of Nicolas Fouquet, whose fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte precipitated his fall and imprisonment.

In October 1677 five days of magnificent feasts in Louis XIV's honour inaugurated the new decorations and demonstrated the splendour of Monsieur's ménage.

Following Le Pautre's death in 1679, the work was continued by his executive assistant Jean Girard, a master mason rather than a full-fledged architect, and perhaps by Thomas Gobert.

After protracted negotiations, the château de Saint-Cloud was bought in 1785 by Marie Antoinette, who believed that the air there would be good for her children, and was fond of the idea of leaving them a private and serene residence.

Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, who had not visited the château since his morganatic marriage with Madame de Montesson, was induced to part with it for 6.000.000 livres.

[6] After the sale of the palace was officially finished, Marie Antoinette set about transforming her new private home, which was intended, from 1790 to 1800, to house the court while the château de Versailles was renovated.

She set to transforming Saint-Cloud in 1787-88 by her preferred architect Richard Mique, who enlarged the corps de logis and the adjacent half of the right wing; he rebuilt the garden front.

The château was at first refurnished from the Garde Meuble with furnishings collected from other royal residences, but soon furniture was commissioned for Saint-Cloud, showcasing the Queen's patronage of the arts and tastes.

Gilded chairs and marquetry commodes with gilt-bronze mounts in the Louis XVI style were being delivered to Saint-Cloud right up to the opening days of the French Revolution.

In 1790 the royal family, imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace in Paris since 6 October 1789, managed to spend the summer here; those were their last days of privacy and freedom.

After the monarchy was abolished, the château was declared a bien national and emptied, its furnishings sold off in the Revolutionary sales, along with those of the other royal residences.

The pediment of the château's right wing, one of the preserved parts of the building, was bought by Ferdinand I of Bulgaria and integrated into his Euxinograd palace on the Black Sea coast.

Since December 2006 there has been a movement to reconstruct the château de Saint-Cloud, chiefly led by an association and aiming at a primarily privately-financed project rather than a government one.