“When the celebrated engineer, Vauban, came to inspect these works, he was astonished, and exclaimed that one thing was wanting only, namely, a monument and statue to the founder. This has since been rectified, and a grand obelisk is visible at the source of the canal. The story of Pierre Paul Riquet is that of many, nay, of most, great patriots. He met with scant assistance from the Government, and strenuous opposition from his countrymen; he was treated as a madman, and died of a broken heart before the great work was finished. His career seems to have been very similar to that of an illustrious man of our own day—Lesseps—save and except that the latter, happily, has been spared to see the final achievement of his splendid work.[67] He had, however, one attribute which is not common among inventors—he knew how to strike a bargain; and his contract still enriches several families, his descendants, especially the Caramans. “On December 5th, we arrived at the summit of the canal, and it was interesting to observe the alimentation going both ways. Here the whole character and structure of the works change; instead of many miles of straight reaches of uniform width of about 100 feet, the canal becomes tortuous to a degree which is almost absurd, but which is accounted for by the fact that, in Riquet’s day there was no law ‘d’expropriation,’ and he had to make a bargain with every little landowner for permission to pass through his grounds, and being in many cases refused, he had to cut away in another, and often opposite direction. The locks here are also peculiar, being oval-shaped, to admit of two abreast; the effect of this is, that although on the map, Toulouse is at least two-thirds of the distance from Bordeaux to Cette, it is, by the canal, not quite half-way. “These sharp curves are inconvenient, as it is necessary to turn the comers very slowly, for fear of running into vessels coming in the opposite direction, and often they are so very acute as to necessitate stopping the engines and using poles, and sometimes ropes, to get round the comers. “Another peculiar feature of this part of the canal is the constant recurrence of multiple locks. On the first approach to double, treble, quadruple, and even quintuple locks, one feels somewhat like going over a precipice, but this soon wears off, and in reality, the ground is got over quicker than with single locks.