His ever-active brain had now evolved a plan for transporting sixty thousand oaks to France, from a territory on the Russian frontier belonging to Count Georges Mniszech and his father. He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations--which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes--he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that of course the engineer who arranged the transport would reap some of the benefit. The blocks of wood would be fifteen inches in diameter at the base, and ten at the top. They would first be conveyed to Brody, from there by high road to Cracow, and thence they would travel to France by the railway, which would be finished in a few days. Unfortunately, there were no bridges at Cologne over the Rhine, or at Magdeburg over the Elbe; but Balzac was not discouraged by the question of the transshipment of sixty thousand oaks, any more than in his old days in the Rue Lesdiguieres, he had been deterred from the idea of having a piano, by the attic being too small for it. M. Surville was to answer categorically, giving a detailed schedule of the costs of carriage and of duty from Cracow to France; and to this, Balzac would add the price of transport from Brody to Cracow. He discounted any natural astonishment his correspondent would feel, at the neglect hitherto of this certain plan for making a fortune, by remarking that the proprietors were Creoles, who worked their settlements by means of moujiks, so that the spirit of enterprise was entirely absent.[*] M. Surville, however, received this brilliant proposition without enthusiasm, and did not even trouble to write himself about the matter, but sent back an answer by his wife, that the price of transporting the freight from one railway to another at Breslau, Berlin, Magdeburg, and Cologne, would render the scheme impossible. Balzac showed unusual docility at this juncture; he was evidently already half-hearted about the enterprise, and remarked that since his first letter he had himself thought of the objections pointed out by M. Surville, and had remembered hearing that a forest purchased in Auvergne, had ruined the buyer, owing to the difficulty of transport. [*] "Correspondance," vol. ii. p. 321.