s, but which increased their output from
5,724,624 tons in 1882 to 6,148,249 tons in 1883. Then, beyond the
Channel, England, which had sent into France, in 1882, 3,560,149 tons of
coal, in 1883 sent in 3,818,205 tons; and, finally, from Germany in 1883
France took 1,186,769 tons against 1,035,418 tons. These figures will
suffice to show the importance of Anzin as a coal-field. It draws its
prosperity from roots struck deep into the soil nearly a century and a
half ago, and long before the traditional institutions of France were
thrown into the melting-pot, amid the cheers of a mob in the streets, by
another mob which called itself a National Assembly.

At the beginning of the last century, when, as I have said, there was
but a single house in all the present territory of Anzin, coal was not
known to exist in this part of France. In the Low Countries, then
Austrian, and just beyond the French frontier, coal was mined, and it
came into the head of an energetic dweller in the little town of Conde
that what was found in Hainault might be found also in French Flanders.
His name was Desambois, and he was not a rich man. But he succeeded in
getting from Louis XV. a concession in 1717 authorising him to seek for
coal within a considerable range of territory till 1740. The Crown even
gave him a small subsidy. But the Mississippi bubble burst while he was
struggling with the difficulties which surrounded him when he first
struck certain imperfect veins of coal; and in the stress of that great
crash he found himself obliged to part with his rights for the sum of
2,400 florins to two gentlemen of the _noblesse_, though not of the
great _noblesse_, the Vicomte Desandrouin de Noelles, and M. Taffin.
There is a portrait in the Musee at Valenciennes of M. Desandrouin which
shows the qualities one would expect to find in a man who so long ago
and in such circumstances undertook such an enterprise with a limit of
no more than eighteen years before him. These two connected with
themselves a brother of Desandrouin, a 'gentleman glassworker' at
Fresnes, and two brothers named Pierre and Christophe Mathieu. They
worked on, undiscouraged but unsuccessful, for twelve years, until,
finally, on June 24, 1734, Pierre Mathieu, who was a trained engineer,
found at Anzin the long-sought vein of bituminous coal.

This auspicious day is commemorated on the simple slab which marks the
burial-place of Mathieu in the communal church of Anzin. When one