The Canal de l'Eure, made necessary by the insufficient water supply for the

Château de Versailles The Palace of Versailles ( ; french: Château de Versailles ) is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, France. The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed ...

and the water features of its

gardens A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate bot ...

, was designed for

Louis XIV of France , house = Bourbon , father = Louis XIII , mother = Anne of Austria , birth_date = , birth_place = Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France , death_date = , death_place = Palace of ...

by his military engineer Vauban, based on preliminary surveys by Philippe de La Hire. The population of the town of Versailles multiplied by a factor of ten during the first decade or so of the court's residence. Having exhausted all the nearer water sources, Louvois, at the king's command, organized the planning of this "Canal Louis XIV", which was never in fact intended to be navigable. Its length was over 80 kilometers. Waters of the Eure were diverted somewhat downstream from Pontgouin and were led to the Etang de la Tour, today in the department of

Yvelines Yvelines () is a department in the western part of the Île-de-France region in Northern France. In 2019, it had a population of 1,448,207.château de Maintenon The Château de Maintenon is a ''château'', developed from the original castle, situated in the ''Communes of France, commune'' of Maintenon in the Eure-et-Loir ''Departments of France, département'' of France. It is best known as being the priv ...

, purchased by

Madame de Maintenon Madame may refer to: * Madam, civility title or form of address for women, derived from the French * Madam (prostitution), a term for a woman who is engaged in the business of procuring prostitutes, usually the manager of a brothel * ''Madame'' ( ...

in 1675, its arches ranging in three colossal tiers, nevertheless seemed to

François-René de Chateaubriand François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocrati ...

"a work worthy of the Caesars".Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, tr.,''The Memoirs of François René Châteaubriant'' 1902:238

Notes

*This article is based on a translation from French Wikipedia. {{DEFAULTSORT:Eure, Canal de Aqueducts in France Canals in France Buildings and structures in Versailles Infrastructure completed in the 17th century