IN THE AISNE
ST.-GOBAIN
The short railway journey from Amiens on the Somme to La Fère 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 Fère,
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 spaces 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 Dickens
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 Fère, 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 'Déploration des Dames de la ville de La Fère
tenues forcément 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 assez déplorable
De voir (hélas) son haineux à sa table
Rire, chanter et vivre opulément
De ce qu'avions gardé soigneusement?
En nostre lict quand il veut il se couche,
Faict nos maris aller à l'escarmouche
Ou à la brèche, enconstre notre foy,
Pour résister à Jésus et au Roy.
There are soldiers enough in La Fère 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 Fère I found waiting for me, one lovely morning in
July, the _coupé_ of M. Henrivaux, the director of the famous and
historical glassworks 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 mètres; 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
associated 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 constitution 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
competition.
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 glassworkers of France
had great privileges granted them, and an old proverb explains this by
telling us that 'to make a gentleman glassworker--_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 emancipation of industry. The glassworkers 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 glassworks 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 glassworks. 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
constituting 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 _sylvacum_ 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 association of
glassworkers established itself at St.-Gobain in 1665 under the
direction of a 'gentleman glassworker,' M. du Noyer. Twenty years
afterwards, in 1688, a Norman 'gentleman glassworker,' M. Lucas de
Nehou, who had joined this association, invented the process known as
the _coulage_ of glass for mirrors, and this became the kernel of the
great industry of St.-Gobain. The association took the name, in 1688, of
the Thévart 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 entitled 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 régime_ 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 passed, 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 passed into the acute stage. A fine old church of
the thirteenth century, with a tower of the sixteenth, and the noble
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 château 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
château, which was stormed and partially destroyed by the English in the
fourteenth century. Henry IV. was seigneur of St.-Gobain, and when the
glassworks company, at the end of the seventeenth century, bought the
domain and the buildings from the Count de Longueval, then governor of
La Fère, the title 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
châteaux, 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 assigned 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
passed 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 mass is celebrated in the chapel dedicated to the royal Irish
martyr, and the whole place assumes 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
Duchesse de Berri, the mother of the Count de Chambord; the other, under
the Second Empire, by the Empress Eugénie--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 association founded by M. Cochin.
This association is an association 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 title of
'co-operative' has been assumed in the town of St.-Gobain by a bakery,
which seems to be managed on the principles of private competition under
the 'co-operative' flag. If the 'trademark' were not popular, it would
hardly have been assumed.
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 glassworks 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 competition 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 glassworks
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 progrès et hérédité dans
l'honneur.'
It is a curious fact that Lucas de Nehou, the inventor of plate glass,
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 glassworkers 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 glass 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 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 æsthetic 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 Château 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 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 association were signed
by twelve associates 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 assessments 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 glassmaker at La Fère-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. Guérin, 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
noblemen--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 'société anonyme,' and at the
first general meeting of the 'société' 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'hérédité dans
l'honneur.'
The new 'société' 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 glassworks of
St.-Quirin, the proprietors of which, on the abolition in 1804 of
privileges in general, had taken to making plate glass, 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 'société'
assumed the name under which it is now known of 'The Company of Mirrors
and Chemical Products of St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey.' In 1863 it
bought up the works at Stolberg near Aix-la-Chapelle in Rhenish Prussia,
in 1868 a minor manufactory at Montluçon in the Department of the
Allier, and finally during this current year 1889 it is establishing a
manufactory at Pisa in Italy.
The operations of the company, as it now exists, extend to six
manufactories of mirrors, six manufactories of chemicals, a mine of iron
pyrites, a salt mine, many thousand hectares of forests in this
department of the Aisne and in the province of Lorraine, and to a local
railway connecting St.-Gobain with Chauny, where the plate glass cast at
St.-Gobain is polished and the mirrors are silvered. At St.-Gobain,
besides the plate glass mirrors, glass is made for roofs, for floors,
for pavements, for optical instruments, including the finest lenses used
in the lighthouses of France. Here, as I have said, the lens was made
now used at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, from which, night
after night, a gigantic auroral ray of electric light leaps into space
and shoots for miles athwart the sky, to the inexpressible delight of
the gaping crowds below, and I hope to the edification of the world of
science.
Since 1870 the output of the company from its various manufactories has
more than doubled. It now amounts, in round numbers, to 800,000 square
mètres a year of polished plate glass; to 500,000 square mètres a year
of rough glass; to a million kilogrammes a year of blocks and castings
for floors and roofings, and to eighty thousand kilogrammes a year of
optical glasses of all sorts.
In the time of Louis XIV. and before Lucas de Nehou had made his
invention of plate glass, there was absolutely no public demand for what
in those days were called 'large mirrors' made in the Venetian fashion,
mirrors which to-day would not find a market in the most remote frontier
towns of America or Australia. Colbert then wrote to the Comte d'Avaux
apropos of the works of Lucas de Nehou in Normandy, that 'there was
absolutely no market for large mirrors in the kingdom, the king being
the only person who could possibly need them!'
This was in 1673.
In 1702, ten years after the invention of the process by which plate
glass is made, a mirror with a surface area of one mètre cost 165
francs. In 1889 such a mirror costs 30 f. 25 c. A mirror with four
mètres of surface area cost, in 1702, 2,750 francs. In 1889 it costs 136
francs.
When we come down to modern times and to the much larger mirrors
produced of late years, the fall in prices is extraordinary. In 1873 a
mirror with ten square mètres of surface cost 1,200 francs. To-day such
a mirror can be bought at St.-Gobain for 467 francs, showing a fall of
nearly two-thirds in price within sixteen years!
To-day the total production of polished plate glass in the world is
estimated as follows:--
square mètres
England (4 companies) 900,000
Belgium (6 companies) 600,000
Germany (4 companies) 150,000
United States (7 companies) 500,000
France (not including St.-Gobain) 130,000
St.-Gobain 800,000
---------
Total 3,080,000
From this it will be seen that nearly one quarter of the plate glass of
a world in which plate glass, like champagne, is rapidly ceasing to be a
luxury and becoming a necessity, is produced at this ancient
establishment. With a keen perception of the tendencies of this age
St.-Gobain, of late years, has been fitting its machinery to produce the
very largest plates of glass possible to be made. Go where you like,
from the Eden Theatre in Paris to the Casino of Monte Carlo, from the
new monster hotel at the Gare St.-Lazare to the enormous edifice which
an enterprising firm of tradesmen has planted in the centre of the Corso
at Rome, and the vast glittering sheets of silvered glass turned out
from the great forges everywhere confront you. At the French Exposition
of 1878 St.-Gobain enabled the 'fly gobblers' of two hemispheres to
admire themselves in the most gigantic mirror ever made down to that
date. It measured six mètres and a half in height, by four mètres and
eleven centimètres in width, which gave it a surface area of 26 mètres
12 centimètres. Naturally M. Henrivaux determined to surpass this
prodigy in 1889, and to match the Eiffel Tower with a mirror. The
Belgian rivals of St.-Gobain suspected this, it seems, and sent forth
subtle persons to spy out the plans of the great French manufactory.
These colossal plates of glass are cast upon immense 'tables' of metal,
and by ascertaining the dimensions of the tables ordered for St.-Gobain
the ingenious Belgians hoped to get the measure of the effort it would
be necessary for them to outdo. In anticipation of this subtlety the
director of St.-Gobain ordered two immense tables, and when these were
sent to the manufactory, had them skilfully thrown into one. Upon the
gigantic table thus prepared the grand mirror of the Exposition of 1889
was cast at the eleventh hour. This mirror was the special delight of
the Shah of Persia during his visit of this year to Paris; and as I
suppose the seven plate-glass manufactories which have grown up in my
own beloved country under the benediction of the Protective Tariff,
since a prohibitive duty was originally clapped on plate glass to
encourage the one solitary establishment of the sort then existing in
America, will give themselves up to producing something more stupendous
still for the New York Exposition of 1892, I here set down its
dimensions. It measures in height 7 mètres 63 centimètres, and in width
4 mètres 10 centimètres, giving it a superficial area of 34 mètres 24
centimètres. It is 12 millimètres thick, and weighs 940 kilogrammes.
This enormous glass was cast from a single crucible, containing 1,600
kilogrammes of vitreous matter. To have seen this operation would have
been worth a very much longer journey than that from New York to
St.-Gobain, for the colour and glow of such a mass of vitreous matter in
fusion can only be matched by the evanescent hues of a crimson aurora on
a fine night in the North, or by the intense lights which play over the
surface of a stream of molten lava.
At every stage in the operation the utmost skill and delicacy of
handling are required to convert what might easily pass for a heap of
rubbish swept together from a macadamised roadway into the smooth,
glittering, lustrous plate which the French so picturesquely call a
_glace_, and which indeed most nearly resembles the evenly frozen
surface of a crystal lakelet. These sands, silicates, chalks, and
carbonates--rough contributions from Oken's 'silent realm of the
minerals'--are first crushed and mingled together by machines--one of
the best of them, I was glad to hear, of American invention--then passed
on into the great rectangular hall, in which they are shot into the
crucibles of the melting furnaces and fused, mainly by gas, on a system
invented and perfected by the late Dr. Siemens, I believe, who made such
a stir a decade ago at Glasgow by his discourse on the storage of force
before the British Association. The furnaces which, according to their
varying capacity, now require from eight to ten tons of coal a day,
consumed, before the development of the Siemens system, from sixteen to
twenty tons. Twenty-four hours now suffice for the fusion and the
casting of the glass, and if the casting were now to be conducted as
ceremoniously as in the time of that fine old martinet M. Deslandes, M.
Henrivaux would pass his life in a cocked hat, knee-breeches, peruke,
embroidered coat, and sword, for the casting now takes place every day
and at a fixed hour. None the less, rather the more, it is a work still
of extreme nicety, one to be done by experts, who must be as cool as
soldiers under fire. In a certain way and measure it is like ladling out
the molten lava of Vesuvius and pressing it into slabs for a lady's
toilette-table. The plates, once cast, must be smoothed and made even.
This is a very pretty process, and used to be performed by machines
which bore the very pretty names of _valseuses_. That paviour's rammers
should be called _demoiselles_ has always seemed to me an outrage and an
impertinence, though I may suppose it finds its excuse in the
short-waisted costumes of our grandmothers. But the movement of the
glass-smoothing _valseuses_ was really a sort of waltz movement. The
plates of glass were fixed with plaster on a solid rectangular table.
Granite-dust was scattered upon the plates, and then a wooden plateau,
armed on the under side with bands of cast iron or steel, was set to
waltzing over it backwards and forwards with a semi-rotatory motion, the
granite-dust supplied becoming finer and finer as the waltzing went on.
Instead of these _valseuses_ two great plates of glass are now fixed
side by side with plaster on huge tables, and two large ashlars are set
turning by steam on their own axes while they describe a great orbit
over the plates of glass. A stream of water constantly plays upon the
plates, which are also constantly powdered with fine sand. The ashlars
turn on their axes thirty or forty times a minute, and the plates of
glass are usually smoothed and 'evened' on both faces now by these
machines in from eight to nine hours, including the time spent in taking
them out of the plaster after one face has been smoothed, and fixing
them anew in the plaster, that the other face may fare as well. Here
again a considerable economy of time has been made. And, after all, when
one looks into the practical production of any of these great marvels of
human industry, it is in this economy of time that the real advance of
modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist.
With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising,
self-admiring,' where should we be if certain--for the most part,
uncertain and forgotten--men of genius had not invented the primordial
processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came
first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To
talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an
absurdity. The 'invention' was the engine, an invention as old as Egypt
or China. The discovery that steam could be made to work the engine is
the more modest modern achievement. In this industry of glass-making the
amazing thing is that it should have come into the mind of a man so to
apply the heat of burning wood to sands and silicates enclosed in an
earthen vessel as to convert them into an entirely new substance
possessing qualities not perceivable by any human sense in the sands,
the silicates, or the earth.
What our modern progress in chemistry and in mechanics has enabled the
makers of glass to do, is greatly to reduce the trouble and cost of
producing this entirely new substance, greatly to improve the quality of
the substance produced, and to extend the range of the uses to which it
can be applied.
What would the Egyptians, who paid their tribute in glass to Rome, have
thought of a serious order to pave the Via Sacra with blocks of purple
glass? Yet such an order could be executed now at St.-Gobain, and when
one sees the great flags weighing nine kilogrammes made here and used to
let light into the cellarage below the carriage-ways, for example, of
the huge Hôtel Continental, at Paris, it comes easily within the
probabilities that the whole underworld of our great cities in time may
thus come to be made available for divers uses, as so much of the
underworld of Broadway now is in New York.
The great 'pavement question' is an open question still, in spite of
asphalte and of wood, and there would seem to be nothing in the nature
of things to prevent its being eventually solved by the glassworkers.
The roofing question clearly belongs to them. The casting of glass for
roofs began, I believe, with England, in the time of Sir Joseph Paxton,
but it has been immensely developed at St.-Gobain. Over a hundred
thousand square mètres of glass roofing made here were required for the
building of the Exposition of this year at Paris. All the most important
railway stations in France, from Nantes to Strasburg (unless the Germans
have changed this), and from Calais to Marseilles, are thus roofed. In
great warehouses, markets, public museums, street galleries--like those
of Victor Emmanuel at Milan--factories, workshops all over France and
the Continent, this conversion of the roof into a colossal window has
revolutionised matters within the last twenty years. The light is making
its way even into Turkey, where the great bazaar at Salonica has been
roofed in glass by St.-Gobain, and as the Chinese, who, despite their
early invention of glass, never got beyond using it for beads and little
bottles, have condescended to admit great French mirrors into the
Imperial Palace at Pekin, the glass roof may, ere long, make its way
even into China.
In the form of tiles, such as are now made here, glass must inevitably,
sooner or later, displace slates and shingles and terra-cotta for the
roofs, even of private houses, it being quite certain that these glass
tiles can be so used as to give a much better light in the garrets of
private houses than can possibly be got through the windows. When that
comes to pass the burglar's occupation of clambering stealthily from
roof to roof will be seriously interfered with. What with glass roofs
and glass floors and electricity, indeed, the city of the future is
likely to be much more easily 'policed' and patrolled, as well as
incomparably more cheery and habitable, than the city of to-day.
Perhaps, too, when we all come to living in glass houses, the cause of
peace and good neighbourhood may gain, and even Mrs. Grundy may grow
more careful about looking into the affairs of her friends and
acquaintances.
If that much maligned potentate the Emperor Nero had any real notion of
the capabilities of glass when he established the first glassworks at
Rome, the lamentation with which he took farewell of the world, '_qualis
artifex pereo_,' may have been inspired by regret at his not being
allowed time enough to develop them. Certainly such gigantic mirrors as
those which St.-Gobain has this year sent to the Exposition would have
shown to better advantage in his colossal 'Golden House' than in any of
our petty modern palaces. In what palace in England or in France to-day
could a mirror measuring 7 mètres x 63 centimètres in height by 4 mètres
x 12 centimètres in width, and thus displaying a surface of more than 30
square mètres, be placed, without dwarfing everything about it? These
immense and magnificent mirrors must go hereafter to decorate palaces of
public resort--'palaces of the people,' not palaces of princes. What was
a royal luxury when Colbert wrote to D'Avaux in 1673 has become a
popular attraction. The smallest restaurant in Paris would think itself
discredited to-day were it decorated with one of the _grandes glaces_
for which Colbert in 1693 thought St.-Gobain would find no purchaser
save the king; but the Grand Café and the Hôtel Terminus of the Gare
St.-Lazare order mirrors in 1889 which no king of our times would very
well know what to do with.
Yet, once more, how the cost of these mirrors has fallen! In 1702 a
plate-glass mirror showing two square mètres only by surface, cost, at
St.-Gobain, 540 francs. In 1889 such a mirror, showing four square
mètres of surface, costs, at St.-Gobain, 136 francs. A mirror showing
ten square mètres of surface, which could not have been made in 1702 at
any price, can now be had for 467 francs!
In 1802, under Napoleon, a mirror showing four square mètres of surface
cost 3,644 francs, or very nearly three times the present cost of a
mirror, not tinned like the mirrors of 1802, but silvered, of twice and
a half that size. While new markets are constantly opening to this great
industry all over the world, the progress of chemical science and of
mechanics is as constantly suggesting new economies and new improvements
in the manufacture of glass, and St.-Gobain, though one of the most
thoroughly French of all French 'institutions,' shows no Chauvinism in
its incessant study and prompt appropriation of these economies and
these improvements. During the invasion of 1814 the workmen of
St.-Gobain marched off to Chauny to resist the advance of the Prussians,
and the manufactory had to pay a heavy fine for its patriotism. But it
avails itself as readily of German as of French science to-day, and I
found M. Henrivaux entirely and minutely familiar with the very latest
phenomena of the great change which is coming over the glassworks, as
well as all the other industries, of Pittsburg, through the use there of
natural gas instead of coal gas and coal. All the most recently invented
furnaces--English, German, American--have been tried and tested here as
soon as they were made; and the latest American 'crushers' and
'regulators' get to St.-Gobain as soon as they do to Pittsburg. The
materials which go to the making of a plate-glass mirror pass through
seven processes before the original heap of pebbles, dust, and ashes is
transformed into a sheet of splendour and light.
A hundred years ago more than ten days were required to complete these
seven processes, from the crushing and mixing and putting into the
furnace of the soda and the silicious sand and the charcoal and the lime
and the broken glass, called here _calcin_, through the fusion, and the
moulding, and the squaring, and the smoothing, and the washing, and the
polishing. Now this is all done in half the time--127 hours instead of
246.
With all this the condition of the workmen employed at St.-Gobain has
also steadily improved. It seems always to have been good, relatively to
the general conditions of workmen in other industries and other
establishments in France. Under the original statutes, and in the time
of the excellent M. Deslandes, the nominee of Madame Geoffrin, who ruled
St.-Gobain with great success from 1759 down to the Revolution, the
workmen of St.-Gobain, as I have shown, were looked after, as well as
kept to their duty, on strictly patriarchal principles, not likely to
find favour in modern eyes. That they did not themselves dislike the
system may be inferred from the fact that no such thing as a strike has
ever been known at St.-Gobain, and that a considerable proportion of the
workmen employed here now are the direct descendants of workmen employed
here in the last century. There are even workers by inheritance, as men
may be soldiers and sailors or magistrates by inheritance. Of course
with the great extension in our own time of the operation of the
company, great numbers of workmen other than glassworkers have come into
its employment. But in the glass manufactures alone there are now
employed: at St.-Gobain 375 workmen, at Chauny 583, at Cirey-sur-Vezouze
628, at Montluçon 473, at Stolberg, in Rhenish Prussia, 842, at Waldhof,
in Baden-Baden, 518; making, in all, 3,419.
The wages of the workmen are paid by the day, by the month, or by the
piece, according to the special work which they do, but in all cases
(and this, I believe, has been the rule here from the beginning) the
workman is interested in his work by one premium on the amount, and by
another on the quality of the work done. Furthermore (and this also
dates from the beginning) the company look after the primary education
of the children of the workmen. At St.-Gobain, at Chauny, at Cirey, at
Montluçon, and I believe, also, at Waldhof, it maintains schools for
both sexes at its own expense, together with asylums and training
schools for the children. In these there are now more than 1,400
children. When the company owns no such school it pays a subvention to
the nearest school for the benefit of the children of its workmen.
Here at St.-Gobain the company owns a number of houses, each house
having a garden and dependencies, which it lets to the workmen at an
average rental of eight francs a month. I saw not long ago, at one of
the stations on a line newly opened by the Great Eastern Railway Company
of England, very neat and even handsome cottages well built of brick and
thoroughly comfortable, which are leased to servants of the company at
2s. 6_d_. a week, or ten shillings a month. The houses I saw at
St.-Gobain let at less than seven shillings a month, were quite as large
as those of the Great Eastern Company, and the gardens were much larger.
I gathered from the remarks made to me at St.-Gobain by people who
seemed to be both well-informed and well-disposed, that of late years
the liberality of the company in regard to these houses has, in not a
few cases, worked mischief rather than good. They are not confined to
St.-Gobain, and the company owns and leases no fewer than 1,256 of
them. A good many allotments of land around the factories are also made
at nominal rates to the workmen, who cultivate them assiduously. The
glass-founders are particularly favoured in making these leases and
allotments. Besides these houses meant for families, the company
provides lodgings near the factories for unmarried workmen, or for
workmen whose homes are at a considerable distance from their work.
Within the buildings of the manufactory itself at St.-Gobain, M.
Henrivaux showed me some such lodgings, as well as several bath-rooms
which the workmen are allowed to use on the payment of a very slight
fee. It is his experience that the workmen prefer to consider the bath
as a luxury, and to pay for it.
All the relations between the company and its workmen, indeed, seem to
me to be governed by a sensible avoidance on the part of the company of
everything like fussy paternalism; and to this, in some measure, I have
no doubt, must be attributed the remarkably smooth and easy working of
these relations through so long a course of years. The workmen are
treated, not like children, but like reasonable beings, who may be
expected to avail themselves of advantages which are offered them with
an eye at once to their own interests and to the interests of the
company.
The co-operative societies at St.-Gobain and at Chauny, for example,
were founded in 1866, not by the company, but by the employees of the
company under statutes carefully drawn up by M. Cochin, and the company
simply undertook to assist them; in the first place by leasing them, at
a low rent, the buildings necessary for the business, and in the next
place by taking charge gratuitously of their financial operations. The
goods supplied are sold only to members of the societies, as in the
co-operative stores in England. The transactions amount to about
1,500,000 francs a year, the goods are sold at prices below those
charged in the local shops, and the members divide an average annual
profit of from eight to ten per cent. The management is entirely in the
hands of the members.
The company has founded at St.-Gobain a kind of savings-bank in which
the workman may make deposits of from one franc to 400 francs, drawing
interest at the rate of 4 per cent. per annum, until the maximum is
reached, when the money is either paid back to the depositor or, if he
prefers, invested for him, without charge by the company, in the public
funds or in railway securities. In this way many of the workmen are
coming to be small capitalists. If they wish also to become house-owners
the company advances, at the lowest possible rate of interest, the
necessary funds for the purchase, and workmen in good standing with the
company find no difficulty in getting gratuitous advances of money
repayable in small fixed amounts, upon showing good reasons for the
advance. And in all the establishments of the company, except at
Montluçon, where there is a special fund to give assistance in cases of
accident or disease, the workmen and their families are entitled to
medical advice and medicines at the expense of the company.
In addition to all these arrangements for promoting a real community of
interests between the company and its employees, there is a pension fund
out of which retiring pensions, varying from one-fifth to one-fourth of
the wages earned by the pensioner, are granted to employees who have
served the company for a certain number of years, or who find themselves
disabled from further service by age or by disease. A certain
proportion, determinable by the circumstances of each case, of these
pensions is settled upon the widows and young children of the
pensioners; and in order to encourage habits of thrift and forecast
among the workmen, the company undertakes to manage without charge the
investment of a certain proportion of his wages by any workman in the
'pension fund' of the national government.
The total outlay of the company upon these various methods of promoting
a community of interests between itself and its employees amounted in
1888 to 438,033 francs, thus divided:--
francs
Pensions 241,657
Medical Service 100,055
Schools and Religious Services 57,788
Recreations 17,667
Gifts and Assistance 19,758
The outlay upon 'recreation' is made in the form of subventions and
prizes granted to associations of the workmen, such as shooting and
gymnastic clubs and musical societies. The manufactory, for example,
boasts a philharmonic society of its own, and there is a Choral Society
of St.-Gobain. Both of these have scored successes in various public
exhibitions. There is a rifle club, founded in 1861, and reconstituted
in 1874, with an eye to the possible military necessities of the
country.
The relations between the company and its employees under this system,
the germs of which were planted here two centuries ago, have assumed
such a character that the workmen habitually speak not of the
manufactory but of the 'maison.' They are and feel themselves to be
members of a great economic family. Of 2,650 persons now actively
employed in St.-Gobain, Chauny, and Cirey, 432, or 16.3 per cent., have
been employed for more than thirty years; 411, or 15.5 per cent., for
more than twenty and less than thirty years; 553, or 20.9 per cent., for
more than ten and less than twenty years; and only 1,254, or 47.3 per
cent., for less than ten years.
It would be instructive to compare this record with the records of the
most important industrial establishments in England and America during
the past thirty years, and I should be glad to see this done by some of
the people who talk so glibly in England and America of the inherent
fickleness and instability of the French character, as offering an
adequate explanation of the political catastrophes which have so often
recurred in France during the past century.
One of the most curious features of the establishment at St.-Gobain is a
subterranean lake. The fine forests around St.-Gobain and La
Fère--forests of oak, beech, elm, ash, birch, maple, yoke-elm, aspen,
wild cherry, linden, elder, and willow--flourish upon a tertiary
formation. The surface of clay keeps the soil marshy and damp, but this
checks the infiltration of the rainwater and therefore favours the
growth of the trees. In the calcareous rock the early inhabitants
hollowed out for themselves caverns, in which they took refuge from
their enemies and from the beasts of the forest; and these caverns,
called by the people _creuttes_--an obvious corruption of the name of
_crypts_, given them by the Roman conquerors of Gaul, just as the early
French trappers gave the name of 'caches' to the Indian hiding-places of
the Far West--are to be found all about Soissons and Laon. The more
modern lords of St.-Gobain, its monks and its barons, dug out of the
calcareous rock the stones which they used to build their châteaux and
their churches, and they created great _creuttes_ beneath St.-Gobain. It
seems to have occurred to M. Deslandes, during his long and skilful
supervision of the works here, that these caverns might be put to the
very practical use of securing an adequate water-supply. The idea has
been thoroughly carried out, and the subterranean reservoir of
St.-Gobain is much more impressive as a spectacle than the crypts of the
Cisterns at Constantinople. It is kept filled to an average depth of one
mètre by the infiltration of the surface waters and by the overflow of a
pond, La Marette, on the plateau of St.-Gobain, and it covers an area of
some 1,200 square mètres.
After two or three hours spent in visiting the various departments of
the glassworks overhead, M. Henrivaux led me through winding passages,
which reminded me of the dismal vomitories at Baiæ, down into this
strange underworld. Walls and pillars, partly of the natural rock, left
in the working of the quarries, partly of masonry built up to strengthen
the reservoir, give this weird water, when you reach it, the aspect
rather of a stream than of a lake. A workman, who had preceded and
guided us with a swinging lantern, put out a long boathook, and drew
slowly around to the landing-place a long, shallow boat, into which he
invited us to step. M. Henrivaux had kindly sent orders in the morning
to have the reservoir illuminated with Venetian and Chinese lanterns of
various colours. These had been hung from hooks in the rocks and pillars
with infinite good taste at long intervals, so as to illuminate not too
brilliantly the mystical darkness of the scene. Looking upon the vague,
indefinite vista, as it glimmered away into an indefinable distance, one
seemed really to stand
Where Alp, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless by man,
Down to a shoreless sea.
Seating ourselves carefully in the boat, our silent boatman, like a
spectral gondolier, rowed us silently along the labyrinthine canals of
this dim and ghostly Venice. Vathek Beckford would have made them
waterways to the Hall of Eblis.