h under this statute in Bologna, Florence, Mantua,
and other Italian cities. Even in Venice the glassworks were rigidly
confined to the island of Murano, in order to keep the workmen from
coming into contact with strangers visiting the city. When the Republic,
in 1665, as a matter of policy allowed a certain number of glassworkers
to go to France, at the request of Colbert, and to take service there
under Du Noyer at Paris, in his manufactory of mirrors, these workmen
were forbidden to teach their trade to any Frenchman. The result, as I
have said, was that Du Noyer finally brought about a combination with M.
de Nehou, the owner of certain glassworks at Tour-la-ville in Normandy,
that De Nehou came to Paris, that out of their joint enterprise
eventually arose the company now known as the Company of St.-Gobain,
that the French workmen trained by De Nehou did excellent work, and that
De Nehou put himself in the way of making, towards the end of the
seventeenth century, his invention of plate glass, which finally drove
Venetian mirrors out of the markets of the world. The Venetian mirrors,
charming as they are from the aesthetic point of view of decorative art,
are simply blown glass rolled flat, cut, polished, and tinned. The art
of making them came, like other arts, to Venice from the East, and in
the sixteenth century the Venetian mirror was the true 'glass of
fashion' all over Europe. The famous 'Galerie des Glaces' at Versailles,
of which Louis XIV. was so proud, was filled up with mirrors of 'French
manufacture after the fashion of Venice,' as the royal expense-rolls
state, and it took De Nehou and his workmen five years--from 1678 to
1683--to do the work. Eight years afterwards, in 1691, he presented King
Louis with certain 'large mirrors of plate glass,' the firstfruits of
his invention, made in 1689. In 1693, he was made Director of the 'Royal
Manufactory of Grand Mirrors,' and the manufactory was established in
the ruined Chateau de St.-Gobain.

A hundred years afterwards, in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Venice
with a French army and made an end of that 'most serene' republic, as he
did, not long afterwards, of the least serene republic at Paris. He put
Berthier in command, and a commission of French savants, of which
Berthollet was a member, proceeded to pick the locks and investigate the
mysteries of Venetian art. Their report upon the Venetian glassworks was
to the effect that France knew more about the ma