Louis XIII had the imposing Bic\u00eatre hospital ap-hp built for “soldiers crippled in the army”. Louis XIV converted it into a “hospice for poor beggars, a prison for the insane and a prison for swindlers and the most shameful class of libertines”. Under Louis XV, the establishment served as an asylum for nearly six thousand disinherited or disabled people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two comfort elements were sorely lacking in Bic\u00eatre: it lacked a water supply and a means of evacuating liquids from the vast estate. They began with the construction of a monumental water well that was admired by its contemporaries. Built from 1733 to 1735 to the designs of Boffrand, a great architect and first engineer of Bridges and Roads of France, it then served as a model for many other achievements of this type in the kingdom or in other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its depth is 57 meters and its diameter in the work is 5.20 meters. It has a useful height of 3 meters of water; this well is inexhaustible, because its base was dug in the coarse limestone where the water table and many springs are located. A platform 2 metres wide around its entire circumference was dug into the masonry, 4 metres above the water level, to allow workers to work and store the materials needed for its maintenance and repairs. In the centre, an imposing piece of machinery, revolutionary for the time, was used to draw water. A merry-go-round, powered by four to eight horses depending on the needs, brought up impressive buckets with a capacity of nearly 270 litres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No doubt anxious to make the best use of an abundant workforce available, the administration of the Bic\u00eatre ap-hp hospital replaced the horses for a time with prisoners or insane people from Bic\u00eatre; seventy-two were needed to move the enormous winch. 140 cubic metres of water were drawn daily to be poured into a reservoir with a capacity of 1,100 cubic metres, built behind the well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n