At the present time, the factories must have made further progress; but we still see from the excellent descriptions of M. Ardouin Dumazet, whose work will have in the future almost the same value as Arthur Young’s _Travels_,[143] that a considerable portion of the rural weavers has still survived; while at the same time one invariably meets, even nowadays, with the remark that relative well-being is prominent in the villages in which weaving is connected with agriculture. Up to the present time, M. Ardouin Dumazet writes, “there is an industry which gives work to many hand-looms in the villages; it is the weaving of various stuffs for umbrellas and ladies’ boots.” Amiens is the chief centre for this weaving.[144] In other places they are making dresses out of Amiens velvet and various stuffs woven at Roubaix. It is a new industry; it has taken the place of the old one, which was making of Amiens a second Lyons. In the district of Le Thelle, to the south of Beauvais, there is “a multitude of petty trades, of which one hardly imagines the importance. I have seen,” M. Dumazet says, “small factories of buttons made from bone, ivory, or mother-of-pearl, brushes, shoe-horns, keys for pianos, dominoes, counters and dice, spectacle-cases, small articles for the writing-table, handles for tools, measures, billiard keys--what not!... There is not one single village, however small, the population of which should not have its own industry.”[145] At the same time it must not be forgotten that thousands of small articles for the writing-table and for draughtsmen are fabricated on a large scale in the small factories in the same region. Some of the workshops are situated in private houses, and in some of them artistic work is made; but most of them are located in special houses, where the necessary power is hired by the owner of the workshop. You see here “a fantastic activity”--the word is M. Dumazet’s; the division of labour is very great, and everywhere they invent new machine-tools. Finally, in the villages of the Vermandois district (department of the Aisne), we find a considerable number of hand-looms (more than 3,000) upon which mixed stuffs made of cotton, wool and silk are woven.[146] Of course, it must be recognised that, as a rule, in northern France, where cottons are fabricated on a large scale in factory towns, hand-weaving in the villages is nearly gone. But, as is seen already from the preceding, new small industries have grown up instead, and this is also the case in many other parts of France. Taking the region situated between Rouen in the north-east, Orléans in the south-east, Rennes in the north-west, and Nantes in the south-west--that is, the old provinces of Normandy, Perche and Maine, and partly Touraine and Anjou, as they were seen by Ardouin Dumazet in 1895--we find there quite a variety of domestic and petty industries, both in the villages and in the towns.