The Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette's pastoral hideaway in the grounds of Versailles Chateau, is about to reopen after being restored to the way it was the day the doomed queen left in 1789 to face the guillotine.

The 5.3-million-euro (7.8-million-dollar) revamp is likely to fuel the growing cult of the divisive French queen who in recent years has been the subject of a slew of new biographies as well as a major film starring Hollywood actress Kirsten Dunst.

"The idea (behind the renovation) is that you are privileged, the queen is not there, and you can come in and have a look," said Pierre-Andre Lablaude, the chief architect of the Chateau of Versailles who oversaw the year-long renovation.

"We really want to present it as a lived-in house," he said as he showed AFP around the square building in which an army of master craftsmen and women worked feverishly to get the Trianon ready for its reopening next Thursday.

The Petit Trianon, designed by the architect Gabriel for Louis XV and seen as a jewel of neoclassical style, was given to Marie Antoinette as a wedding present in 1774 by her husband Louis XVI.

She retreated to the three-storey house built in pink-hued stone to escape the rigid protocols of the court, and even had a theatre and a hamlet there where she could play at being an actress or countrywoman.

The renovations, funded by Swiss watchmaker Breguet, have aimed to restore the drawing rooms and bedrooms, the furniture, the servants' quarters and the kitchens to as close as possible to what they were on October 5, 1789.

The aristocratic part of the house, with its 10 separate apartments, had previously been open to the public, but the servants' quarters were mostly not shown to visitors because they were used as ticket offices or as staff rooms.

"We wanted to show the contrast between the ground floor and the 'noble' floor," said architect Lablaude as he stood below the vaulted ceiling of the kitchens.

Next to the kitchen is a room where a contraption had been built to allow the servants to place meals on a table and then hoist the table through a trap door to the dining room, so that the royals would not have to see their staff.

That device was however never completed.

October 5, 1789 was the day that Marie Antoinette went back to Versailles, where a revolutionary mob the next day brought the royal couple to Paris to face imprisonment, and in 1793 death by guillotine.

Sent from the imperial household in Vienna at just fourteen-years-old for an arranged marriage aimed at bringing peace between France and Austria, Marie Antoinette had long been portrayed as a historical villain.

She is arguably best remembered for her extravagant tastes and for her execution for treason at the frenzied height of the French Revolution.

Historians have long argued about whether she was a feckless child-queen or a tragic victim of the march of history.

But in recent years opinion appears to have swung back in her favour.

Her most prominent recent outing was a 2006 film by Sofia Coppola, a fun-filled romp with a pulsating modern soundtrack.

Earlier this year, a major Paris exhibition took a look at the beheaded queen through hundreds of belongings and artworks associated with her life.

Of the millions of annual visitors to the sumptuous Versailles Chateau, southwest of Paris, only a few hundred thousand find their way through its extensive grounds to the Petit Trianon.

But that number is now likely to increase significantly after the renovation, said Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the president of the Versailles foundation and a former culture minister.

The restoration of the Petit Trianon is just part of a vast, 20-year programme to make sure Versailles retains its position as a major world heritage site that showcases the past and trumpets contemporary culture, he noted.