ount
Ereme or Mount Desert, and it is still heavily wooded throughout almost
its whole extent.

The French Government also owns a very large domain around and beyond
St.-Gobain, about two-thirds, I am told, of the 10,000 hectares
constituting thirteen per cent. of the whole area of the Department of
the Aisne, which are still covered with forests.[6] These ten thousand
hectares are the remnant of the immense _sylvacum_ of the Laonnois, the
Andradawald of Eastern Gaul, through which Agrippa opened a great Roman
road connecting the capital of the world by way of Milan, Narbonnese
Gaul, Reims, and Soissons with the British Channel. At a short distance
from St.-Gobain a part of this ancient road running from south to north
through the lower forests of Coucy, is still in use, and is known by the
name of Queen Brunehild's Causeway. The chronicle of St.-Bertin, cited
by Bergier, attributes to that extraordinary woman the restoration of
this whole road throughout Gaul, and she certainly built a magnificent
abbey in the immediate neighbourhood.

[6] The total revenue derived from the woods and forests of the
State in France is set down in the Budget for 1890 at 25,614,300
francs, but the returns are 'lumped' and not given in detail. I am
told that the forests around St.-Gobain yield about 400,000 francs
of this revenue.

Encouraged by the wise administration of Colbert, an association of
glassworkers established itself at St.-Gobain in 1665 under the
direction of a 'gentleman glassworker,' M. du Noyer. Twenty years
afterwards, in 1688, a Norman 'gentleman glassworker,' M. Lucas de
Nehou, who had joined this association, invented the process known as
the _coulage_ of glass for mirrors, and this became the kernel of the
great industry of St.-Gobain. The association took the name, in 1688, of
the Thevart company, from De Nehou's most active colleague. It became
the Plastrier Company in 1702, and ten years afterwards, in 1712, M.
Geoffrin, the husband of the clever and enterprising friend of Voltaire
and the Empress Catherine, took charge as administrator of the
establishment. His wife really administered both the establishment and
M. Geoffrin. It was she who confided the direction of the works in 1739
to M. Deslandes, and she is fairly entitled to her share of credit for
the great progress made in the subsequent half-century down to 1789.
Under the First Consulate St.-Gobain had to give up the privileges it