ST.-GOBAIN

The short railway journey from Amiens on the Somme to La Fere on the Oise takes you through a country which, on a fine summer's morning, reminds one of the old Kentuckian description of an agricultural paradise--'tickle it with a hoe, and it laughs with a harvest.' As, in one direction, Picardy extends into the modern Department of the Pas-de-Calais, so in other directions it includes no inconsiderable part of the modern Departments of the Oise and of the Aisne. In this way it touches the central province of the Ile-de-France, the main body of which is now divided into the three Departments of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, and the Seine-et-Marne. From Amiens to La Fere, therefore, the pulse of the French capital may be said to throb visibly about you in the rural beauty of a region which owes its value and its fertility less to the natural qualities of the soil than to the quickening influences of the great metropolis. For centuries Paris lived mainly on the Ile-de-France, and the Ile-de-France on Paris. Since the steam-engine and the railway have opened, both to the province and to the capital, the markets of all France and of all Europe, both the province and the capital are infinitely more prosperous than in the old days when the lack of communications and the lawlessness of men made them dependent one upon the other. The steppes of Russia and the prairies of America now compete with the grain-fields of the Ile-de-France; the timber of the Baltic with its timber; and I have no doubt that, during his six years in the prison of Ham, Louis Napoleon drank there better Chambertin than ever found its way to the table of the Grand Monarque at Versailles, after a certain enterprising peasant walked all the way from his native province to the capital, beside his oxcart laden with casks, to prove to the king the merits of the true Burgundian vintage.

Certainly it would never occur to anybody now in Soissons or Laon to make the journey to Paris, as people did a hundred and fifty years ago, to drink the water of the Seine, as being 'the best in the world, and a specific against burning fevers and obstructive ailments.'

But the vast commons which lay waste throughout the Ile-de-France a hundred years ago are now green with crops; meadows have replaced the marshes; orchards and gardens on every side show what the Campagna of Rome may become, at no distant day, if Italy can make her peace with the Church, and the Italian capital remain, on terms of justice and reason, the capital of the Catholic world.

Before the Revolution the Generality of Paris contained 150,000 arpents of waste commons; the Generality of Soissons 120,000 arpents. In 1778 a writer deplores the spectacle, 'within thirteen leagues of the capital, of vast marshes left to be inundated because they are common lands, producing not a single bundle of hay in a year, and affording scanty pasture to a few miserable cattle.' In a single hamlet this writer found 35 poor families feeding 22 cows and 220 sheep on 1,100 arpents of common land! I believe there are philanthropists in England and Scotland who think the enclosure and cultivation of common lands a crime against humanity; and it would be edifying to listen to a 'conference' between them and the shrewd, prosperous small farmers and gardeners who are tilling these great s.p.a.ces to-day in the Ile-de-France. One of the few plainly advantageous results of the headlong Revolution of 1789 was the transfer into many private hands of the immense estates which were held by the abbeys and the clergy in and around Paris; and this transfer might perfectly well have been brought about by steady and systematic means without shaking the foundations of property and of order. We might then have seen throughout France what we see in England--the gradual and pacific evolution of a great industrial and commercial society on lines not contradicting, but conforming to, the traditions of the nation.

The influence of the capital, of course, has had much to do with the extraordinary development in these regions of all kinds of horticulture.

Nurseries, kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens occupy an increasing area of the Ile-de-France, and a constantly growing proportion of its inhabitants. M. Baudrillart says that in the single Department of the Seine-et-Oise this proportion has increased tenfold since 1860, and he puts it down for that Department in 1880 at 50,000 persons out of a total population of 577,798.

The proportions can hardly, I should think, be much smaller in the Departments of the Aisne and of the Oise. How much this industry adds to the beauty of the country I need not say. Its influence is shown in a notable increase of the love of flowers among the population generally.

The English villages no longer have the monopoly which they certainly once had of flower-plots before and around the cottages, and of plants carefully tended and blooming in the cottage windows. Years ago d.i.c.kens used to say that London was the only capital in the world in which you could count upon seeing something green and growing somewhere, no matter how gloomy otherwise might be the quarter into which you strolled. This is beginning to be true of not a few French towns and cities, while the conditions of successful horticulture, in its various branches, give the aspect of a garden to the rural regions in which it flourishes. The nursery gardens, which are the most extensive, seldom cover more than eight hectares; seed gardens range in extent from half a hectare to a hectare; the fruit gardens from half a hectare to two hectares; the gardeners who send up 'cut flowers' to market usually concentrate their activity upon half a hectare of soil. These cultivators are all capitalists in a small way, the least important of them requiring a capital of from four to five hundred pounds sterling. And land so employed is very often let on leases of three, six, or nine years, at thirty-five pounds a hectare.

It is a curious thing that what may be called the 'Home Departments' of France around Paris should be so much richer in these highly-developed and remunerative forms of cultivation than the home counties of England around London. Why should flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as a rule, be so much better, so much cheaper, and so much more plentiful in the French than in the English capital? The superiority of the French markets cannot arise wholly from a difference of climate. Great risks are run in this respect by the horticulturists of Picardy and the Ile-de-France. M. Baudrillart tells a story of a large flower-gardener in the Seine-et-Oise who, during the severe winter of 1879-80, found his gardens deep in snow one morning, and, upon examining them, carefully made up his mind that he stood to lose nearly 2,500_l._ sterling worth of his best plants. That same evening he left for England, brought back eleven waggon-loads of plants to supply the place of those killed by the cold, and, by the spring, not only covered his losses but made a profit.

With its 'polygon' and its promenades the little city of La Fere, set in the midst of well-tilled and fertile fields, has a martial air which harmonises with its history. During the religious wars which ended with the coronation of Henry of Navarre, this small Catholic stronghold was besieged, taken, and retaken no fewer than four times in twenty years; and, if we may believe an old sixteenth-century local ballad, the Huguenots behaved in a way which showed that the 'Reformation' had not improved their morals. The 'Deploration des Dames de la ville de La Fere tenues forcement par les ennemis de la religion catholique' draws a doleful picture of life in a conquered city three centuries ago.

Est-ce pas bien chose a.s.sez deplorable De voir (helas) son haineux a sa table Rire, chanter et vivre opulement De ce qu'avions garde soigneus.e.m.e.nt?

En nostre lict quand il veut il se couche, Faict nos maris aller a l'escarmouche Ou a la breche, enconstre notre foy, Pour resister a Jesus et au Roy.

There are soldiers enough in La Fere to-day, for it is an artillery station, as it was when Napoleon got his training here, but the peace of the picturesque little fortress-town is less troubled by them than by the politicians. A little local newspaper published here, which I bought of an urchin at the uninviting but thriving station of Tergnier, was full of paragraphs deriding and denouncing the clergy, which might have been inspired by that model patriot and philanthropist Curtius, who proposed in the year one of the Republic that the Government should make a bargain with the Deys of Tunis and Algiers to ransom the French held as slaves in those countries, exchanging them for French priests 'at the rate of three priests for one patriot'!

'What sort of a newspaper is this?' I asked a cheery, red-faced old man, well and substantially dressed, and, as he afterwards informed me, a cattle-breeder and dealer on his way from Amiens to Laon.

'That journal, Monsieur?' he replied with a kind of 'sniff': 'that leaf?

It is a cabbage-leaf, Monsieur!' 'C'est une feuille de choux!' As for himself he was a Republican--no, not a Boulangist--but he had voted for Boulanger, and he would vote for him again. There must be an end of all those taxes. It was too strong. The land could not pay them. In his country a farm worth 30,000 francs eight years ago, to-day would not sell for 20,000 francs. The farms that were mortgaged would not pay the amount of the mortgages. Look at the taxes on cattle! These free-traders at Paris want to drive us out of our markets with meat on the hoof, and killed meat, from all the ends of the world. Here they are trying to patch up that treaty of commerce with Italy, and bring back all those competing cattle from Sardinia. That's a pretty idea! and for those Italians, who owe France everything and now lick the boots of M. de Bismarck. And now the Paris Chamber of Commerce wants an International Congress on treaties of commerce. The devil take the treaties of commerce!'

At the station of La Fere I found waiting for me, one lovely morning in July, the _coupe_ of M. Henrivaux, the director of the famous and historical gla.s.sworks of St.-Gobain. When Arthur Young visited these works in 1787, he found them turning out, in the midst of extensive forests, 'the largest mirrors in the world.' The forests are less extensive now, but St.-Gobain still turns out the largest mirrors in the world. To this year's Exposition in Paris it has sent the most gigantic mirror ever made, showing a surface of 31.28 metres; and the glory of St.-Gobain is nightly proclaimed to the world at Paris by the electric light which, from the summit of the Eiffel Tower, flashes out over the great city and the valley of the Seine an auroral splendour of far-darting rays, thanks to St.-Gobain and to the largest lens ever made by man.

St.-Gobain, however, has other claims upon attention than its unquestioned rank as the most important seat of one of the most characteristic and important manufactures of our modern civilisation. In a most interesting paper upon the life and labours of M. Augustin Cochin, one of the most useful as well as one of the most distinguished of the many useful and distinguished Frenchmen whose names are a.s.sociated with this great industry, M. de Falloux describes the works of St.-Gobain as 'an industrial flower upon a seignorial stalk springing from a feudal root.'

The description is both terse and pregnant. The history of this great and flourishing industry, stretching back now over two centuries and a half, is a history of evolution without revolution.

There is nothing in France more thoroughly French than St.-Gobain, nothing which has suffered less from the successive Parisian earthquakes of the past century, nothing which has preserved through them all more of what was good in its original const.i.tution and objects. The establishment is like a green old oak, and, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, its days have been joined each to each 'by natural piety.'

The place which it first took through privilege and favour, and could have taken in no other way, it has kept ever since for nearly two centuries and a half, and now holds by virtue of skill, energy, and that eternal vigilance which is both the price and the penalty of free compet.i.tion.

The 'Knights of Labour' in our America of to-day put the cart before the horse when they undertake to make labourers knights. The Middle Ages knew better, and went to work in a wiser fashion by making knights labourers. As early as the thirteenth century the gla.s.sworkers of France had great privileges granted them, and an old proverb explains this by telling us that 'to make a gentleman gla.s.sworker--_un gentilhomme verrier_--you must first get a gentleman.' As soon as it was established that by going into such a costly and artistic industry as this, a gentleman did not derogate from his rank, the first important step was taken towards the emanc.i.p.ation of industry. The gla.s.sworkers were exempted from _tailles, aydes et subsides_, from _ost, giste, chevaulchier et subventions_, or, in other words, military taxes could not be levied upon them, nor troops quartered upon them, nor requisitions made upon them. The _gentilhomme verrier_ had the right to carry a sword and to wear embroideries, to fish and to hunt, nor could the lord of a domain refuse to him, in return for a small fee, the right to cut whatever wood he needed for his furnaces, and to collect and burn the undergrowth into ashes for his manufacture. It was the richly and densely wooded country about St.-Gobain which led to the establishment at this spot in 1665 of the gla.s.sworks since developed into the great establishment of our day. Even now, though gas has long since taken the place of wood in the manufacture, and towns and farms have grown up in the neighbourhood, no less than 2,440 hectares of the 2,900 which make up the territory of St.-Gobain proper are still in woodland; and the forests extend far beyond the limits of the commune which bears the name of the Irish Catholic prince St.-Gobain, who came here in the seventh century, as St. Boniface went to the Rhine, to evangelise the country, and built himself a cell on the side of the mountain which overlooks the gla.s.sworks. Here he did his appointed work, and here, on June 2, 670, he was put to death. The mountain was then known as Mount 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 const.i.tuting 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 _sylvac.u.m_ 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 a.s.sociation of gla.s.sworkers established itself at St.-Gobain in 1665 under the direction of a 'gentleman gla.s.sworker,' M. du Noyer. Twenty years afterwards, in 1688, a Norman 'gentleman gla.s.sworker,' M. Lucas de Nehou, who had joined this a.s.sociation, invented the process known as the _coulage_ of gla.s.s for mirrors, and this became the kernel of the great industry of St.-Gobain. The a.s.sociation 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 ent.i.tled 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 had enjoyed and face the modern conditions of success. It has proved its claim to its ancient privileges by its triumphs ever since it surrendered them. The history of its relations with the crown and with the courts under the _ancien regime_ is a most curious, interesting, and instructive chapter of the political and social, as well as of the industrial, annals of France, and it has been admirably told by M.

Augustin Cochin in his book on the manufactory of St.-Gobain from 1665 to 1866.

A drive of less than an hour through a highly cultivated rolling country, made attractive by well-grown trees and luxuriant hedgerows, brought me to the clear, bright, prosperous-looking town of St.-Gobain.

Its two thousand inhabitants owe their well-being, in one form or another, to the great company, and among the most comfortable as well as the most picturesque dwellings in the place are the houses built by the company, and conceded on very favourable terms to the families of men employed in the works. Piles of timber attested the activity of the forest administration. The people I pa.s.sed, singly or in groups, saluted the director's carriage in a friendly, good-natured way, which seemed to show that here, at least, the 'irrepressible conflict' between capital and labour has not yet pa.s.sed into the acute stage. A fine old church of the thirteenth century, with a tower of the sixteenth, and the n.o.ble trees which cover the slopes and shade the roadway of St.-Gobain, are no more in keeping with the standard English and American type of a manufacturing town than is the parklike domain in the midst of which rise the main buildings of the great manufactory itself.

There M. Henrivaux gave me a cordial welcome. The chateau of St.-Gobain, in which the offices of the company have long been established, is a vast square edifice of the time and the style of Louis XIV. It occupies the site, and, I believe, comprises one remaining wing of an earlier chateau, which was stormed and partially destroyed by the English in the fourteenth century. Henry IV. was seigneur of St.-Gobain, and when the gla.s.sworks company, at the end of the seventeenth century, bought the domain and the buildings from the Count de Longueval, then governor of La Fere, the t.i.tle of the crown to the property had to be extinguished as well as his.

Nothing can be finer in its way than the wide panorama of forest-clad hills and rolling vales, dotted here and there with towns, villages, and chateaux, over which you gaze from the terrace in front of this unique establishment. It has its pleasure-grounds and its park. Within the main building, besides the extensive suite of apartments a.s.signed to the director, who resides there with his family, is another handsome suite of apartments, reserved for the administrators, six in number, whenever they may choose, collectively or severally, to visit St.-Gobain. These apartments are furnished with stately simplicity, and the whole interior preserves the grand air of the eighteenth century. The _fleurs de lis_ still adorn the lofty chimney-pieces, the waxed floors are sedulously polished, and, as M. Henrivaux says, could the ghost of Lucas de Nehou have returned to St.-Gohain only a year or two ago, he would have been welcomed at the entrance gate by a Swiss wearing the royal liveries of the House of Bourbon, and resting majestically on his halberd, like the guards of the Scala Regia in the Vatican. This imposing warden has now pa.s.sed away, at the ripe age of a hundred and two, and M. Henrivaux tells me that he was more alert and active to the last than his more celebrated contemporary at Paris, the venerable Chevreuil.

When a new administrator first makes his appearance at St.-Gobain, I am told, he is received with music by day and an illumination at night, a grand ma.s.s is celebrated in the chapel dedicated to the royal Irish martyr, and the whole place a.s.sumes for a moment the aspect of another age.

In one of the _salons_ of the administration, two pictures commemorate visits paid to the manufactory: one, under the Restoration, by the d.u.c.h.esse de Berri, the mother of the Count de Chambord; the other, under the Second Empire, by the Empress Eugenie--pathetic pictures both, making the room a place wherein to 'sit upon the floor and tell strange stories of the deaths of kings.'

Beside the canvas in which the Empress appears--a graceful, gracious woman in the prime of her life and her beauty--hangs a small mirror in a gilded frame, silvered by her own imperial hand in the great workroom of the manufactory. The work was well and deftly done, but so delicate is the process that when the light strikes athwart this mirror at a particular angle, you can clearly trace a faint hair line of shadow traversing it, the ineffaceable record of a ripple of laughter which broke from the Empress's lips at some gay remark made by one of the personages grouped about her while her hand was completing its task.

I spent a delightful day with M. and Mme. Henrivaux, inspecting all parts of the manufactory of mirrors, visiting the houses provided for a considerable number of the workmen and their families, on terms most advantageous to them by the company, and inquiring into the working of the co-operative a.s.sociation founded by M. Cochin.

This a.s.sociation is an a.s.sociation of consumers only, not of producers.

Its original statutes were drawn up very carefully by M. Cochin, and as they have been as carefully observed by the members and the managers, it is the opinion of M. Henrivaux that the experiment has proved to be a success. This may be inferred from the fact that the t.i.tle of 'co-operative' has been a.s.sumed in the town of St.-Gobain by a bakery, which seems to be managed on the principles of private compet.i.tion under the 'co-operative' flag. If the 'trademark' were not popular, it would hardly have been a.s.sumed.

The company also encourages societies among its own workmen and in the town for educational purposes, including a philharmonic and a choral society, and is liberal in its expenditure upon the schools, both here and at Chauny, the seat of its very important chemical works.

At St.-Gobain alone, I understand, it is now making an outlay of some sixty thousand francs on new school-buildings, which is a larger sum than the total of the taxes paid by the people of the place. The 'budget' of the commune amounts to 27,500 francs, or rather more than ten francs _per capita_ of the population. Obviously the prosperity of the gla.s.sworks makes the prosperity of St.-Gobain, which, but for them, would doubtless soon relapse into the proportions of the little hamlet gathered, twelve hundred years ago, by the Irish evangelist about the miraculous fountain, which is said to have been evoked by him with a blow of his staff, and which still flows beneath the shelter of his church.

When Arthur Young visited St.-Gobain a hundred years ago he congratulated himself on his 'good luck' in hitting upon a day when the furnaces were in full blast and the _coulage_ going on. A traveller of the present day who should reach St.-Gobain armed with the letters of introduction necessary to secure his admission into the works, and find the furnaces not in full blast and the _coulage_ not going on, would be in very bad luck indeed.

For while in 1789 St.-Gobain was a privileged company, enjoying, for the output of its works here and in Normandy, and in the Faubourg St.-Antoine at Paris, a chartered monopoly, the output of its works to-day, under the wholesome pressure of compet.i.tion with a fair field and no favour, is enormously greater than it was a century ago, both in volume and in value; and the position of St.-Gobain among the gla.s.sworks of the world is at least as high under the presidency of the Duc de Broglie, in 1889, as it was under the presidency of the Duc de Montmorency in 1789. Yet the company is still administered, not indeed according to the letter of its original statutes of the time of the Grand Monarque, but in the spirit of those statutes. It is an ancient dynasty which has simply accepted the changed conditions of modern life and modern activity, and conformed its operations to them without abandoning its fundamental principles. The successful advance of this great industry, through all the changes, convulsions, and developments of the past century, is quite as instructive as are the successive catastrophes of French politics during the same time. 'I think,' said M.

Henrivaux to me, 'that when you compare the St.-Gobain of 1702 with the St.-Gobain of 1889, you will perhaps agree with me that there is some force in our double motto, 'tradition dans le progres et heredite dans l'honneur.'

It is a curious fact that Lucas de Nehou, the inventor of plate gla.s.s, was originally induced by the founders of St.-Gobain to leave his own establishment at Tour-la-ville in Normandy and come to their works in Paris, because the Venetian gla.s.sworkers who had been invited by Colbert into France, refused to instruct the French workmen in their 'art and mystery.' They could not be blamed for this. Venice was then the acknowledged headquarters of the gla.s.s manufacture, and it was the unchangeable policy of the 'most serene Republic' to keep all her secrets to herself. A fundamental statute ordained that if any artisan or artist took his art into a foreign country he should be ordered to return. If he did not obey, his nearest relatives were to be imprisoned, in order that his affection for them might lead him to submit. If he submitted, his emigration should be forgiven, and he should be established in his industry at Venice. If he did not submit, a person was sent after him to kill him, and after he was well and duly killed his relatives were to be released. In the thirteenth century Venetian artists suffered death under this statute in Bologna, Florence, Mantua, and other Italian cities. Even in Venice the gla.s.sworks 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 gla.s.sworkers 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 gla.s.sworks 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 'gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s,' 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 gla.s.sworks was to the effect that France knew more about the matter than Venice. 'The industries of Venice,' said these irreverent conquerors, 'as precocious as the industries of China, have stood still like them.'

In this age of jointstock companies and limited liabilities, it may be interesting to see on what terms the original founders of the Company of St.-Gobain put their heads and their purses together, to establish a great industrial enterprise. Their articles of a.s.sociation were signed by twelve a.s.sociates on February 1, 1703, some ten years after William Paterson and Lord Halifax laid the foundations of the Bank of England and of the British public debt. The capital of the company, estimated at 2,040,000 livres, was divided into twenty-four shares of 85,000 livres each, called 'sols,' and these again into twelve parts each, called 'deniers,' making a total of 288 'deniers.' These curious designations, taken from the currency of the time, were used down to the overthrow of the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1830. The owners of these shares, or 'deniers,' bound themselves solemnly never to make a loan, but to meet all the expenses of the enterprise by a.s.sessments in proportion to their holdings, and always to keep in hand a fund for current expenses of at least one million of livres. They were to receive ten per cent. on their capital, a special honorarium of 1,000 livres a year apiece, and a fee of two crowns for attendance at meetings. All misunderstandings were to be settled by arbitration, and all the proceedings were to be secret.

Under these articles St.-Gobain grew up, prospered, withstood the shock of successive political revolutions in France, and kept its place in the front of the great industrial movement of the nineteenth century down to the year 1830.

During this long life of over a century and a quarter, the payment of dividends seems to have been suspended for three years only, and that after the Terror, from 1794 to 1797. In 1792, when the Girondins and the Jacobins were tearing France to pieces between them, and courting foreign invasion as a stimulus to domestic anarchy, the works were stopped for a time in Paris, at Tour-la-ville and at St.-Gobain, but only for a time. The very able director of the company, M. Deslandes, originally selected, as I have said, by Madame Geoffrin, and who had vindicated her good judgment by managing the affairs of the company with success for thirty years, resigned his post in 1789. He was a model disciplinarian of the old school.

In 1775, finding that some of the workmen at Tour-la-ville had been seduced from their duty by a gla.s.smaker at La Fere-en-Tardenois, M.

Deslandes called upon the Intendant at Soissons to clap them into prison. Turgot, the friend of Franklin, objected to this, but M.

Deslandes gave him plainly to understand that 'a government which should tolerate such misconduct would be detestable.'

When a great mirror was to be cast at St.-Gobain, M. Deslandes always took command of the works in full dress, his peruke well powdered and his sword by his side. Clearly such a director as this was out of keeping with a king who would not let his officers fire upon a howling mob, and who put on a red cap to oblige a swarm of drunken ruffians.

M. Deslandes was followed into retirement by several of the administrators of the company, who emigrated, and in 1793 the Republic caused the cashier of the company, M. Guerin, to be guillotined on the heinous charge of corresponding with his former employers and friends beyond the frontier. Naturally this crime was committed, like so many similar crimes of that day, with an eye to the main chance. The shares of the administrators who had emigrated were confiscated, in the names of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and the confiscators sent sundry 'patriots' to sit on the administrative council of the company. Their incompetency was so ludicrous and mischievous that Robespierre, representing the State which had thus stolen an interest in the enterprise, could not stand it. He actually 'requisitioned' two n.o.blemen--two 'aristocrats'--among the as yet undisturbed owners of the property, to come forward and direct it, just as the leader of a successful mutiny of convicts on board of a transport might 'requisition' the deposed captain and mate of the vessel to carry her safely through a storm!

With the return of law and order in the person of the Corsican conqueror things resumed their normal course at St.-Gobain; and as I have already said, the company flourished under its old organisation down to the establishment of the Monarchy of July. Then the owners of the 'deniers'

put themselves and their property under the general Civil Code, in the form of what is called in modern France a 'societe anonyme,' and at the first general meeting of the 'societe' in April 1831 the accounts of 128 years, over which no question had ever arisen among the representatives of the original holders, were presented and approved. Certainly this must be admitted to be a most noteworthy case of 'l'heredite dans l'honneur.'

The new 'societe' has greatly extended and strengthened its operations since 1831. The works at Tour-la-ville have been abandoned, the site sold, and the workmen transferred to St.-Gobain. The gla.s.sworks of St.-Quirin, the proprietors of which, on the abolition in 1804 of privileges in general, had taken to making plate gla.s.s, were taken over in 1858 by the St.-Gobain company, together with certain other works at Mannheim in Germany and the chemical works at Cirey, and the 'societe'