Château de Marly

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Image:Marly 1724.jpg The Château de Marly was located in what has become Marly-le-Roi, the commune that existed at the edge of the royal park. The town that originally grew up to service the château is now a dormitory community for Paris.

At the Château of Marly, Louis XIV of France escaped from the formal rigors he had constructed at Versailles. Small rooms meant fewer company, and simplified protocol, but courtiers fought so for invitations to Marly that guest houses were built in matching pairs flanking the central sheets of water that were fed one from the other by prim formalized cascades.

The château is no more, nor the hydraulic "machine" that pumped water for Versailles. Only the foundation of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's château remain at the top of the slope in Marly park.

1 History
2 Remains
3 The Marly "machine"
4 External links

[edit] History

The works at Marly were begun in 1679, before Louis had moved his court permanently to Versailles. The Sun King attended the opening of the completed hydraulic works in June 1684 [1] and by 1686 development was sufficiently advanced for the King to stay there for the first time, with a picked entourage. The theme of Marly was that it was a simple hunting lodge, just enough to accommodate the Royal Hunt. In 1688 the Grand Abreuvoir à chevaux was installed on the terrace, a mere "horse trough." Throughout the rest of his life, Louis continued to embellish the wooded park, with wide straight rides, in which ladies or the infirm might follow the hunt, at some distance, in a carriage, and with more profligate waterworks than waterless Versailles—watered from Marly in fact—could provide: the Rivière or Grande Cascade dates to 1697–1698.

Image:75-Paris-Avenue des Champs-Elysée et les Chevaux de Marly-ND.JPG

Marly's heyday ended with the death of Louis XIV (1715). Louis' heirs found the north-facing slope at Marly damp and dreary, and rarely visited. The "river" was filled in and grassed in 1728. During the Revolution the marble horses by Coustou, the Chevaux de Marly, were transported to Paris in 1794, to flank the opening of the Champs-Élysées in the soon-to-be-renamed Place de la Concorde.

In 1799/1800, Marly was sold to an industrialist, M. Sagniel, who installed machinery to spin cotton thread. When the factory failed in 1806, the château was demolished and its building materials sold, even the lead of its roof. Napoleon bought back the estate the following year; the empty gardens and the surrounding woodland park still belong to the State.

[edit] Remains

At the end of the 19th century several connoisseurs purchased leases on the individual garçonnières, cleaned up the overgrowth, recovered some bruised and broken statuary and recreated small gardens among the ruins: Alexandre Dumas, fils and the playwright and collector of 18th-century furnishings Victorien Sardou.

The Cour Marly of the Louvre museum was inaugurated in 1993. It contains mostly works of art from Marly, displayed on three levels.

[edit] The Marly "machine"

Image:Sisley machine.jpg

La machine de Marly by Pierre-Denis Martin, 1723

Providing a sufficient water supply for the fountains at Versailles had been a problem from the outset. The construction of the Marly hydraulic machine, actually located in Bougival, driven by the current of the Seine moving fourteen vast paddlewheels, was a miracle of modern hydraulic engineering, perhaps the largest integrated machine of the 17th century. It pumped water to a head of 100 meters into reservoirs at Louveciennes (where Madame du Barry had a dining pavilion in the 1760s), whence it flowed to fill the cascade at Marly (when the king was there) or the fountains at Versailles (when the king was there)—though not both—with a sufficient head, passing through an elaborate underground network of reservoirs and aqueducts, to drive the fountains at Versailles.

In the nineteenth century, various other pumps replaced the originals, and the last was taken out of service in 1967.