Yellow Lamartine marble

Yellow Lamartine marble is a marble stone also called "Flowery Yellow".
It is extracted from the quarries of Pratz in the Haut-Jura, of which the most important is the quarry of Champied, open from the end of the 19th century until the end of the 1930s.

It is a limestone of yellow color with red or purple veins, not really a marble but rather a marble stone.
Champied's quarry was operated by the Company of Molinges marble works (Compagnie de la Marbrerie de Molinges)  between 1845 and 1930, under the direction of Nicolas Gauthier. The quarry provides in 1898, 120 m³ of Yellow Lamartine marble. Nicolas Gauthier, owner of the Company of Molinges marble works, built a foreman's house around 1899.

The quarry of Champied is an open pit, which poses some problems of extraction: it is necessary first to eliminate the first layer of rock (not the rock of the marble), before starting the exploitation strictly speaking. The quarry was abandoned in the late 1930s, when the evacuation of this useless rock, as the rubbles, became too important and expensive.

Lamartine Yellow Marble takes its name from the rich local owner, father of the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine.


DARRAS, Maurice, in The marble works. Characteristics of marbles, stones and granites. Study of deposits and exploitation of quarries. Work and shaping. (La marbrerie. Caractéristiques des marbres, pierres et granits. Etude des gisements et de l'exploitation des carrières. Travail et façonnage. - Paris : Dunod et Pinat, 1912) says:

"The marble of Pratz has a very fine yellow color and a particularly delicate drawing and would undoubtedly be more used if its price was not so high, reason which made it supplanted by yellow jaspers whose decorative aspect is similar. Its value is 5, its difficulty 4 and its resistance is almost zero because of its fragility and its natural defects. This waste is obviously the cause of the increase of its price. "