At the beginning of the last century, when, as I have said, there was but a single house in all the present territory of Anzin, coal was not known to exist in this part of France. In the Low Countries, then Austrian, and just beyond the French frontier, coal was mined, and it came into the head of an energetic dweller in the little town of Conde that what was found in Hainault might be found also in French Flanders. His name was Desambois, and he was not a rich man. But he succeeded in getting from Louis XV. a concession in 1717 authorising him to seek for coal within a considerable range of territory till 1740. The Crown even gave him a small subsidy. But the Mississippi bubble burst while he was struggling with the difficulties which surrounded him when he first struck certain imperfect veins of coal; and in the stress of that great crash he found himself obliged to part with his rights for the sum of 2,400 florins to two gentlemen of the _noblesse_, though not of the great _noblesse_, the Vicomte Desandrouin de Noelles, and M. Taffin. There is a portrait in the Musee at Valenciennes of M. Desandrouin which shows the qualities one would expect to find in a man who so long ago and in such circumstances undertook such an enterprise with a limit of no more than eighteen years before him. These two connected with themselves a brother of Desandrouin, a 'gentleman glassworker' at Fresnes, and two brothers named Pierre and Christophe Mathieu. They worked on, undiscouraged but unsuccessful, for twelve years, until, finally, on June 24, 1734, Pierre Mathieu, who was a trained engineer, found at Anzin the long-sought vein of bituminous coal. This auspicious day is commemorated on the simple slab which marks the burial-place of Mathieu in the communal church of Anzin. When one considers what the discovery meant, and what its results now mean, to the welfare and the prosperity of France, one is tempted to regard the 24th of June as a date almost as well worth celebrating by Frenchmen as the 14th of July. Marshal Villars is celebrated by a very uncomely obelisk on his battle-field of Denain near by, and General de Dampierre by a column in the public square of Anzin itself. Why should not Anzin set up a statue of Pierre Mathieu?