Versailles never had enough water, so fountains were switched on as the king approached.
Louis XIV's gardens had so many fountains that no water supply could run them all. Gardeners whistled to one another as the king walked by, turning each fountain on just before he arrived and off once he had passed. The quest for water consumed a third of Versailles' building costs.
When Louis XIV began expanding his father's gardens in the 1660s, he employed the team that had built his disgraced finance minister's château at Vaux-le-Vicomte, including the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. The result, some 800 hectares laid out in the French formal style that Le Nôtre perfected there, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its glory was water: fountains, basins and the Grand Canal. But Versailles sits on a plateau with no great river.
The early fountains drew on nearby ponds, pumped by windmills and horses to a reservoir on the roof of a grotto and then fed downhill by gravity. It was never enough. Fountains visible from the palace could be kept playing, but those hidden in the groves ran only as needed. In 1672 Jean-Baptiste Colbert devised a system in which fountain-keepers signalled with whistles as the king approached, so each fountain came on in time and went off after he passed.
The engineering grew ever more heroic. A river, the Bièvre, was dammed and diverted. From 1685 the Machine de Marly used huge waterwheels on the Seine and more than 200 pumps to lift water about 100 metres to an aqueduct; leaks and breakdowns meant it delivered only about half the expected flow, yet the gardens still used more water each day than the whole of Paris. A canal from the river Eure, 160 kilometres away, employed more than 20,000 soldiers at its peak before war stopped it in 1689, unfinished. Even so, fountains usually ran at half pressure; running them all at full strength was saved for special occasions.
Water supply systems made up about a third of Versailles' building costs under Louis XIV. Today the Grandes Eaux shows recycle water from the Grand Canal with modern pumps, topped up by rainwater collected in cisterns so that the gardens need not draw on the town's drinking supply.
Source: Wikipedia — Gardens of Versailles · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
