to find a small farm, worth about ten thousand francs, for
her near Marsac. She meant to invest her own fortune in this way.

The tall Cointet's plot was formidably simple. From the very first he
considered that the plan of sizing the pulp in the vat was
impracticable. The real secret of fortune lay in the composition of
the pulp, in the cheap vegetable fibre as a substitute for rags. He
made up his mind, therefore, to lay immense stress on the secondary
problem of sizing the pulp, and to pass over the discovery of cheap
raw material, and for the following reasons:

The Angouleme paper-mills manufacture paper for stationers. Notepaper,
foolscap, crown, and post-demy are all necessarily sized; and these
papers have been the pride of the Angouleme mills for a long while
past, stationery being the specialty of the Charente. This fact gave
color to the Cointet's urgency upon the point of sizing in the
pulping-trough; but, as a matter of fact, they cared nothing for this
part of David's researches. The demand for writing-paper is
exceedingly small compared with the almost unlimited demand for
unsized paper for printers. As Boniface Cointet traveled to Paris to
take out the patent in his own name, he was projecting plans that were
like to work a revolution in his paper-mill. Arrived in Paris, he took
up his quarters with Metivier, and gave his instructions to his agent.
Metivier was to call upon the proprietors of newspapers, and offer to
deliver paper at prices below those quoted by all other houses; he
could guarantee in each case that the paper should be a better color,
and in every way superior to the best kinds hitherto in use.
Newspapers are always supplied by contract; there would be time before
the present contracts expired to complete all the subterranean
operations with buyers, and to obtain a monopoly of the trade. Cointet
calculated that he could rid himself of Sechard while Metivier was
taking orders from the principal Paris newspapers, which even then
consumed two hundred reams daily. Cointet naturally offered Metivier a
large commission on the contracts, for he wished to secure a clever
representative on the spot, and to waste no time in traveling to and
fro. And in this manner the fortunes of the firm of Metivier, one of
the largest houses in the paper trade, were founded. The tall Cointet
went back to Angouleme to be present at Petit-Claud's wedding, with a
mind at rest as to the future.

Petit-Claud had