In the market-place of Beziers stands the statue of a thoughtful and handsome man, dressed in the costume of the early period of Louis Quatorze, with flowing love-locks and peaked beard. His cloak has fallen unheeded from his shoulders, as he eagerly gazes on the ground--one hand holding a compass, the other a pencil. This is the statue of Pierre Paul Riquet, feudal seigneur of Bonrepos, and the cavalier who discovered the fountain of the Greve. That fountain solved a mighty problem--the possibility of connecting, by means of water communication, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean--the Garonne flowing into the one, with the Aude flowing into the other; and the formation of the Canal du Midi, doubled at a stroke the value of the Mediterranean provinces of France. Francis I., although our James called him a "mere fechting fule," dreamt of this. Henri and Sully projected the scheme; but it was only under Louis and Colbert that it was executed; and the bold and resolute engineer--he lived three quarters of a century before Brindley--was Pierre Paul Riquet. This man was one of those chivalric enthusiasts for a scheme--one of those gallant soldiers of an idea--who give up their lives to the task of making a thought a fact. He had laboured at least a dozen of weary years ere the court took up the plan. He had demonstrated the thing again and again to commissioners of notabilities, ere the first stone of the first loch was laid. The work went on; twelve thousand "navvies" laboured at the task; Riquet had sunk his entire fortune in it. In thirteen years, the toil was all but accomplished. In the coming summer the Canal du Midi would be opened--when Riquet died--the great cup of his life's ambition brimming untasted at his lips. Six months thereafter, a gay company of king's commissioners, gracefully headed by Riquet's two sons, rode through the channel of the water-courses from Beziers to Toulouse, and returned the next week by water, leading a jubilant procession of twenty-three great barges, proceeding from the west with cargoes for the annual fair held on the Rhone, at Beaucaire. Since Riquet's days, all his plans have been, one by one, carried out. His canal now runs to Agen, where it joins the Garonne; while at the other end, it is led through the chain of marshes and lagoons which extend along the Mediterranean, from Perpignan to the delta of the Rhone, joining the "swift and arrowy" river at Beaucaire.