Well, in comparison with this aristocratie pyramid, crowned by _those two halves of God, the Pope and the Emperor_, resplendent with gold and diamonds on everyone of its stages, put the popular pyramid, by the aid of which we are going to try to make you understand what Lyons is like, and you will have, not an exact pendant to it but, on the contrary, a terrible contrast. So, imagine a spiral composed of three stages: at the top, eight hundred manufacturers; in the middle, ten thousand foremen; at the base, supporting this immense weight which rests entirely on them, forty thousand workmen. Then, buzzing, gleaning, picking about this spiral like hornets round a hive, are the commissionaires, the parasites of the manufacturers, and those who supply raw materials to the trade. Now, the commercial mechanism of this immense machine is easy to understand. These commissionaires live on the manufacturers; the manufacturers live on the foremen; the foremen live on the workpeople. Add to this the Lyonnais industry, the only one by which these fifty to sixty thousand souls live, attacked at all points by competition--England producing and striking a double blow at Lyons, first because she has ceased to supply herself from there, and, secondly, because she is producing on her own account--Zurich, Bâle, Cologne and Berne, all setting up looms, and becoming rivals of the second town of France. Forty years ago, when the continental system of 1810 compelled the whole of France to supply itself from Lyons, the workman earned from four to six francs a day. Then he could easily provide for his wife and the numerous family which nearly always results from the improvidence of the working-man. But, since the fall of the Empire, for the past seventeen years wages have been on the decline, from four francs to forty sous, then to thirty-five, then to thirty, then to twenty-five. Finally, at the time we have now reached, the ordinary weaving operative only earns eighteen sous per day for eighteen hours work. One son per hour!... It is a starvation wage.