So complete was the civilisation of this region long before the Revolution of 1789, that the mayor, the magistrates, and the citizens of Chauny, early in the seventeenth century, succeeded in breaking down and ruining an Italian gentleman, Cesare de Rusticis, who, thanks to Concini, had secured a royal patent for canalising the Oise from La Fere to Chauny. They got a notable advocate, M. Louis Vrevin, to draw up a protest against the enterprise in the most florid and elaborate fashion of the _Plaideurs_ of Racine, and by dint of bombarding the King's Council with the names of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Xerxes, Sesostris, Cleopatra, Cicero, Tertullian, and others, got, in 1625, what we in America now call an 'injunction,' putting a stop to the works begun by this foreigner, who 'had come into France to fix the eye of curiosity upon the river Oyse and to disturb it.' And a century later I find an operation carried out here for converting a not very satisfactory private investment into cash at the expense of the State which really would not discredit the most ingenious American 'railway king' of our own times. This also concerned a canal, the canal which unites the Oise with the Somme. This waterway became the property in 1728 of a celebrated millionaire of that time, Antoine de Crozat, and after his death fell, in the division of his estates, to the share of his granddaughter, the Duchesse de Choiseul. It was not very profitable, and it represented a capital which ought to have yielded 2,200,000 livres a year. So a certain M. Laurent, who had built for the Duc de Choiseul his magnificent Chateau de Chanteloup, near Amboise (pulled down fifty years ago by Chaptal, the first great producer of beetroot sugar in France), undertook to get the canal turned into money. The plate-glass works of St.-Gobain were then under the direction of M. Deslandes, the clever nominee of Mme. Geoffrin. M. Laurent tried to persuade M. Deslandes to employ Picard coal (which could be brought by the canal) instead of wood in the furnaces at St.-Gobain. M. Deslandes made the experiment, but soon gave it up, as the coal smoke injured the plate-glass. He consented, however, to take four boatloads of the Picard coal and use it in the forges connected with the works. This was enough for M. Laurent, who went to Paris with an invoice of the four boatloads of coal, laid it before the Council with an elaborate paper setting forth the value to the canal of a traffic necessary to carry on the manufacture of the famous plate glass at St.-Gobain, and got the Council finally to purchase the Duchesse's canal on his own terms. I really do not see what M. Laurent had to learn either from the 'Contrat Social' of Rousseau or even from the American Declaration of Independence! If he had lived now he would have been a sharp competitor with a countryman of mine, of whom I am told in Chauny that he came here only a few years ago, inspected