Marie-Martin Marcel de Marin (1796–1850) was a French composer who led both personal and professional lives that are worth reviewing today. He was a mathematician, an expat, the Captain of Versailles' Dragoons, a violinist and – above all – a composer. His harp compositions are very different from the repertoire of his contemporaries. His music features quite a peculiar mix of stylistic elements of various origins, including the heritage of the great Baroque composers and the early 18th-century style of French keyboard music. He succeeded in creating a language for the harp that was acclaimed as revolutionary during his lifetime and is still today worth rediscovering, revealing Marin to be a forerunner of a style that was found in harp music only at the beginning of the 20th century.