Despite the success achieved by the _vin mousseux_, merchants, owing to the excessive breakage of the bottles--of the cause of which and of the means of stopping it they were equally ignorant--often saw their hopes of fortune fly away with the splintered fragments of the shattered glass.[194] The following passages from the /MS./ notes of the founder of one of the first houses of Reims, written in 1770, would imply some knowledge of the fact that a _liquoreux_ wine was likely to lead to a destructive _casse_, and also that the importance of the trade in sparkling Champagne was far greater during the first half of the eighteenth century than is usually supposed.[195] The /MS./ in question says: 'In 1746 I bottled 6000 bottles of a very _liquoreux_ wine; I had only 120 bottles of it left. In 1747 there was less _liqueur_; the breakage amounted to one-third of the whole. In 1748 it was more vinous and less _liquoreux_; the breakage was only a sixth. In 1759 it was more _rond_, and the breakage was only a tenth. In 1766 the wine of Jacquelet was very _rond_; the breakage was only a twentieth.'[196] The writer then proceeds to recommend, as a means of preventing breakage, that the wine should not be bottled till the _liqueur_ had almost disappeared, and that, if necessary, fermentation should be checked by well beating the wine. But as at that epoch there was really no means of effectually testing this disappearance, and as the beating theory was an utterly fallacious one, the followers of his precepts remained with the sad alternative of producing in too many instances either _mousses folles_ and their inevitable accompaniment of disastrous breakage, or wine so mature as to be incapable of continuing its fermentation in bottle, and producing _mousse_ at all.[197] It is therefore evident that much of the sparkling wine drunk at the commencement of the last century was what we should call _crémant_, or, as it was then styled, _sablant_,[198] as otherwise the breakage would have been something frightful. Bertin du Rocheret plainly indicates after 1730 a difference between the fiercely frothing kinds, to which the term _saute bouchon_ or pop-cork was applied, and wine that was merely _mousseux_.[199] The price of the former is the highest, ranging up to 3 livres 6 sols, whilst that of the _bon mousseux_ does not exceed 50 sols, the difference in the two being no doubt based to a certain extent on the loss by breakage.[200]