Near by is a fine property called "Les Bruyeres," a royal estate of Napoleon III. It was created and developed by the emperor and was always referred to as a Parc Imperial. Perhaps the most banal of all the royal souvenirs around Paris is that gigantic mill-wheel known as the Machine de Marly, down by the Seine a few miles beyond Malmaison, just where that awful cobblestoned roadway begins to climb up to the plateau on which sits the chateau of Saint Germain and its park. Because it is of unesthetic aspect is no reason for ignoring the famous Machine de Marly, the great water-hoisting apparatus first established in the reign of Louis XIV to carry the waters of the Seine to the ponds and fountains of Versailles. It was a creation of a Liegois, named Rennequin Sualem, who knew not how to read or write, but who had a very clear idea of what was wanted to perform the work which Louis XIV demanded. For a fact the expense of the erection of the "Machine," and the cost of keeping its great wheels turning, were so great that it is doubtful if it was ever a paying proposition, but that was not a _sine qua non_ so far as the king's command was concerned. It had cost millions of _livres_ before its wheels first turned in 1682, and, if the carpenter Brunet had not come to the rescue to considerably augment the volume of water raised (by means of compressed air), it is doubtful if there would ever have been enough water for the fountains of Versailles to play even one day a year, as they do now every happy Sunday, to the delight of the middle-class Parisian and the droves of Cookites who gaze on them with wonder-opened eyes. The water was led from the Machine de Marly to Versailles by a conduit of thirty-six arches where, upon reaching a higher level than the gardens, it flowed by gravity to the fountains and basins below. This aqueduct was six hundred and forty-three metres long, and twenty-three metres high. It was a work which would have done credit to the Romans. A far greater romantic sentiment attaches itself to the royal chateau of Marly-le-Roi than to the utilitarian "Machine," by which the suburb is best known to-day. The history of Marly-le-Roi appears from the chronicles the most complicated to unravel of that of any of the kingly suburbs of old Paris, though in the days of the old locomotion a townlet twenty-six kilometres from the capital was hardly to be thought of as a suburb. Marly-le-Roi, at any rate, with Marly-le-Bourg and Marly-le-Chatel, was a royal dwelling from the days of Thierry III (678). The neighbouring region had been made into a countship by the early seventeenth century, and Louis XIV acquired it as his right in exchange for Neuphle-le-Chateau in 1693, incorporating it into the domain of Versailles.