on carried out here for converting a not very satisfactory
private investment into cash at the expense of the State which really
would not discredit the most ingenious American 'railway king' of our
own times. This also concerned a canal, the canal which unites the Oise
with the Somme. This waterway became the property in 1728 of a
celebrated millionaire of that time, Antoine de Crozat, and after his
death fell, in the division of his estates, to the share of his
granddaughter, the Duchesse de Choiseul. It was not very profitable, and
it represented a capital which ought to have yielded 2,200,000 livres a
year. So a certain M. Laurent, who had built for the Duc de Choiseul his
magnificent Chateau de Chanteloup, near Amboise (pulled down fifty years
ago by Chaptal, the first great producer of beetroot sugar in France),
undertook to get the canal turned into money. The plate-glass works of
St.-Gobain were then under the direction of M. Deslandes, the clever
nominee of Mme. Geoffrin. M. Laurent tried to persuade M. Deslandes to
employ Picard coal (which could be brought by the canal) instead of wood
in the furnaces at St.-Gobain. M. Deslandes made the experiment, but
soon gave it up, as the coal smoke injured the plate-glass. He
consented, however, to take four boatloads of the Picard coal and use it
in the forges connected with the works. This was enough for M. Laurent,
who went to Paris with an invoice of the four boatloads of coal, laid it
before the Council with an elaborate paper setting forth the value to
the canal of a traffic necessary to carry on the manufacture of the
famous plate glass at St.-Gobain, and got the Council finally to
purchase the Duchesse's canal on his own terms. I really do not see what
M. Laurent had to learn either from the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau or
even from the American Declaration of Independence! If he had lived now
he would have been a sharp competitor with a countryman of mine, of whom
I am told in Chauny that he came here only a few years ago, inspected
the chemical works, looked into the composition of certain heaps of
rubbish thrown aside even by the sagacious managers of these works, and
setting up near one of the canals a genuine wooden American shed, so
applied to what he found in this rubbish certain processes for the
vulcanisation of indiarubber as to produce at very low cost certain
articles for which a great and increasing demand exists, and thus
founded a considerable indus