page_title: Château de Marly
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Château de Marly / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Pferdeschwemme des Schlosses Marly
context_page_description: The Château de Marly was a French royal residence located in what is now Marly-le-Roi, the commune on the northern edge of the royal park. This was situated west of the palace and garden complex at Versailles. Marly-le-Roi is the town that developed to serve the château, which was demolished in 1806 after passing into private ownership and being used as a factory. The town is now a bedroom community for Paris.
  At the Château of Marly, Louis XIV of France escaped from the formal rigors he was constructing at Versailles. Small rooms meant less company, and simplified protocol; courtiers, who fought among themselves for invitations to Marly, were housed in a revolutionary design of twelve pavilions built in matching pairs flanking the central sheets of water, which were fed one from the other by formalized cascades.
  After the French Revolution, about 1800 the chateau was sold to a private owner. He demolished it in 1806 after his factory there failed. The hydraulic "machine" that pumped water for Versailles was also demolished. Only the foundation of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's small château, the pavillon du Roi remains at the top of the slope in Marly park.
context_section_description: The works at Marly were begun in the spring of 1679, on 22 May, before Louis had moved his court permanently to Versailles. The king was looking for a retreat on well-wooded royal lands between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye that were well-watered and provided a grand view. Marly was chosen.
  Robert Berger has demonstrated that the design of Marly was a full collaboration between Jules Hardouin-Mansart and the premier peintre Charles Le Brun, who were concurrently working on the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. Mansart's elevations for the pavilions were to be frescoed to designs adapted from a suite that Le Brun had recently drawn. The frescoed exteriors of the otherwise somewhat severe buildings created a richly Baroque ensemble of feigned sculptures against draperies and hangings, with vases on feigned sculptural therms against the piers— all in the somewhat eclectic Olympian symbolism that Le Brun and the King favoured everywhere at Versailles.
  The decor of the pavillon du Roi featured Apollo, the Sun King's iconographic persona, and Thetis. Other pavilions were dedicated to other Olympians, but also to Hercules, and to Victory, Fame and Abundance. Construction was completed by 1684, though the overcharged painted programmes were simplified and restrained in the execution.
  The Sun King attended the opening of the completed hydraulic works in June 1684  and by 1686 development was sufficiently advanced for the King to stay there for the first time, with a selected 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 could provide: the Rivière or Grande Cascade dates to 1697–1698. Versailles was provided with water from Marly.
  The famous description of Marly in the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon were written in retrospect and, for the initiation of Marly,  at second hand; when Saint-Simon wrote, in 1715, Marly's heyday was ending, with the death of Louis XIV that year. Louis' heirs found the north-facing slope made Marly damp and dreary, and rarely visited.
  The "river" was filled in and grassed in 1728. During the Revolution the marble horses by Guillaume Coustou the Elder, the Chevaux de Marly, were transported to Paris (1794), to flank the opening of the Champs-Élysées in the soon-to-be-renamed Place de la Concorde. (They are now in the Musée du Louvre, along with many other Marly sculptures.)
  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, including the lead from its roof. Napoleon bought back the estate the following year; the empty gardens and the surrounding woodland park still belong to the State.
caption: The horse watering pool at the Château de Marly.
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