To these superb works Firmin Didot, his brother, added ingenious discoveries. Struck with certain difficulties of printing as well as of correction, he imagined the welding together of the types of a forme, when once obtained without faults, so as to avoid the trouble of new composition. This process, useless for books of small number, had a capital importance in the case of reimpressions of popular and successful works. He named this method stereotype, and from 1799 he published a Racine in 18mo by this method; but the originality of the method, which he was the first to call stereotype, ended with its name, for the process had already been discovered by William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1725, the first book produced in this manner being an edition of Sallust, printed in 1744, 8vo, "non typis mobilibus ut vulgo fieri solet, sed tabellis seu laminis fusis, excudebat." This admirably directed house, we may indeed say this school of typography, formed with Renouard, Claye, Rignoux, and others, the greater number of the French publishers of the middle of the century. When the Czar Alexander went to Paris, he wished to do honour to the greatest French practitioners in the science of printing, in the persons of the brothers Pierre and Firmin Didot. But these were not the only ones. The sons of Pierre François, Henri and Pierre François II.--the latter specially applied himself to paper-making, under the name of Didot St. Leger--followed in the footsteps of their father and uncle. Pierre François made at Essones an excellent paper, which he brought to the perfection of making it in endless rolls, such as are made to-day for rotary machines. Bernardin de St. Pierre retired to Essones about the end of the last century, and there married the daughter of Pierre François II. It is a curious coincidence that the same village contained at once the man whose works at the beginning of the century had so extraordinary a success and the great family of printers who had given definitive impetus to typographical work. It was in this tranquil circle that the author of "Paul and Virginia," at the age of sixty, sought repose; that the publication of his book was resolved upon with all the luxury due to its success, with admirable type and with plates by Prud'hon and others. He added to it the _Chaumière Indienne_, written in 1790, on the eve of the Terror, which is one of the most delicate novels of the time.