Grove Koger
Some time back I happened across a painting by one Pierre-Denis Martin titled Vue de la Machine de Marly. I had never heard of Monsieur Martin, or Marly, or the Machine de Marly, but I was intrigued, so I made a note of the painting and did some research.
Pierre-Denis Martin, it turns out, was a French painter of historical subjects and the like who lived from 1663 to 1742. The Machine de Marly, or Marly Machine, that he painted in 1723 (and that you see at the top of today’s post) was a massive water-lifting and pumping station built on the banks of the Seine some 7.5 miles from Paris. And Marly itself, or more precisely Marly-le-Roi, was the site of a reservoir that was part of this complicated water-supply complex.
The machine featured 14 waterwheels, each of them more than 39 feet in diameter, designed to draw water up in buckets from the river. In turn, several series of suction and treading pumps forced the water farther up the bank to several series of catch basins, eventually depositing it in the Aqueduct of Louveciennes (seen above in a vintage postcard), for a total vertical rise of some 500 feet. The aqueduct then carried the water to the vast Palace of Versailles and the nearby Château of Marly. Oddly enough, there’s precious little groundwater beneath Versailles, hence the need to transport such an enormous amount to feed the palace’s many, many fountains and jeux d’eau, or water features.
The devilishly intricate Marly Machine was the work of hydraulics engineer Arnold de Ville, whose employees took seven years to complete the project. King Louis XIV was present at the machine’s inauguration in 1684. Although I mention above that the complex fed the fountains at Versailles, I don’t mean that it fed them adequately, for, as impressive as it was, the Machine de Marly simply couldn’t supply enough water. As if to make up for that inadequacy, it was extraordinarily noisy, as everyone living near it could attest.
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