The ounce was divided into 8 gros, groats or drachms, of 3 deniers or dwt., each of 24 grains. So the livre was 16 × 24 × 24 = 9216 French grains. These were light grains, not the heavy grains, 20 × 24 to the ounce, of English and other mint-weights. There was a Quintal of 100 livres = 107·7 lb. The Tonne or tonneau was 2000 livres = 2154 lb. _Value_ The French coinage-system, probably instituted by Charlemagne, was the same as ours. The original unit was the silver penny, _estelin_ (sterling) or denier (L. _denarius_) of 24 French grains; 12 deniers made a sol or sou (L. _solidus_, shilling) and 20 sols made the livre or pound, originally a livre d’estelins, a 12-ounce pound of sterlings. But the silver coinage shrank and was debased, until, by the eighteenth century, the pound, livre or franc was a silver coin worth tenpence, the sol a copper halfpenny, and the denier had shrunk, even as copper, to so minute a size that its place was taken by the _liard_, a small copper coin of 3 deniers, a quarter-sou; even the _double_ of 2 deniers had disappeared. Accounts were kept in livres and sols and deniers, our £ _s._ _d._, but at 1/25 the present value of our coin. The _écu_ of 3 livres, that is of 60 sous, was largely used; wages of farm-servants are often at the present day reckoned in écus. This was properly a _petit-écu_ or half-crown, but the real écu of 6 livres was so little used that the smaller coin took its name. And, as our half-crown has the great convenience of being one-eighth of a sovereign, so the écu had that of being one-eighth of a louis, the gold piece of 24 livres. This was the value of the louis at par, for it varied as did that of the guinea when England was a silver-standard country. _Measures of Capacity_ These measures, both the wine-series and the corn-series, were quite discordant and had no relation to the measures of length. That this was caused by an incoherent system of factors is shown by there being in each series a unit derived from the perfectly concordant measures of the South: The wine-velte = 1·76 gallon, half of the Escandau. The corn-setier = 34·32 gallons, the Marseilles Cargo. The former, when increased in water-wheat ratio, is almost exactly 1/16 of the latter. So, had the former, increased in this ratio, been multiplied sexdecimally, concordance would have been preserved. But there was a customary Muid = 63-1/2 gallons, our hogshead, with its quarter, our kilderkin, the Quartaut = 15·8 gallons, and not to derange these measures the velte was made one-ninth of the Quartaut. And in the corn-series the Setier was divided and multiplied duodecimally. So the concordance was entirely deranged.