st, that is all; it is the same on all sides, solidity
is drying out. So this problem is one of the first importance for
literature, science, and politics.

"One day, in my office, there was a hot discussion going on about the
material that the Chinese use for making paper. Their paper is far
better than ours, because the raw material is better; and a good deal
was said about this thin, light Chinese paper, for if it is light and
thin, the texture is close, there are no transparent spots in it. In
Paris there are learned men among the printers' readers; Fourier and
Pierre Leroux are Lachevardiere's readers at this moment; and the Comte
de Saint-Simon, who happened to be correcting proofs for us, came in
in the middle of the discussion. He told us at once that, according to
Kempfer and du Halde, the _Broussonetia_ furnishes the substance of the
Chinese paper; it is a vegetable substance (like linen or cotton
for that matter). Another reader maintained that Chinese paper was
principally made of an animal substance, to wit, the silk that is
abundant there. They made a bet about it in my presence. The Messieurs
Didot are printers to the Institute, so naturally they referred the
question to that learned body. M. Marcel, who used to be superintendent
of the Royal Printing Establishment, was umpire, and he sent the two
readers to M. l'Abbe Grozier, Librarian at the Arsenal. By the Abbe's
decision they both lost their wages. The paper was not made of silk nor
yet from the _Broussonetia_; the pulp proved to be the triturated
fibre of some kind of bamboo. The Abbe Grozier had a Chinese book, an
iconographical and technological work, with a great many pictures in it,
illustrating all the different processes of paper-making, and he showed
us a picture of the workshop with the bamboo stalks lying in a heap in
the corner; it was extremely well drawn.

"Lucien told me that your father, with the intuition of a man of talent,
had a glimmering of a notion of some way of replacing linen rags with an
exceedingly common vegetable product, not previously manufactured, but
taken direct from the soil, as the Chinese use vegetable fibre at first
hand. I have classified the guesses made by those who came before me,
and have begun to study the question. The bamboo is a kind of reed;
naturally I began to think of the reeds that grow here in France.

"Labor is very cheap in China, where a workman earns three halfpence a
day, and this cheapness of