trade has suffered from a plague of ‘greased silks,’ which might have ruined Lyons and a whole branch of French commerce.  The masters and the government, instead of removing the causes of the evil, simply drove it in with a violent external application.  They ought to have sent a clever man to Lyons, one of those men that are said to have no principle, an Abbe Terray; but they looked at the affair from a military point of view.  The result of the troubles is a gros de Naples at forty sous per yard; the silk is sold at this day, I dare say, and the masters no doubt have hit upon some new check upon the men.  This method of manufacturing without looking ahead ought never to have existed in the country where one of the greatest citizens that France has ever known ruined himself to keep six thousand weavers in work without orders.  Richard Lenoir fed them, and the government was thickheaded enough to allow him to suffer from the fall of the prices of textile fabrics brought about by the Revolution of 1814.  Richard Lenoir is the one case of a merchant that deserves a statue.  And yet the subscription set on foot for him has no subscribers, while the fund for General Foy’s children reached a million francs.  Lyons has drawn her own conclusions; she knows France, she knows that there is no religion left.  The story of Richard Lenoir is one of those blunders which Fouche condemned as worse than a crime.”

“Suppose that there is a tinge of charlatanism in the way in which concerns are put before the public,” began Couture, returning to the charge, “that word charlatanism has come to be a damaging expression, a middle term, as it were, between right and wrong; for where, I ask you, does charlatanism begin? where does it end? what is charlatanism? do me the kindness of telling me what it is not.  Now for a little plain speaking, the rarest social ingredient.  A business which should consist in going out at night to look for goods to sell in the day would obviously be impossible.  You find the instinct of forestalling the market in the very match-seller.  How to forestall the market—­that is the one idea of the so-called honest tradesman of the Rue Saint-Denis, as of the most brazen-fronted speculator.  If stocks are heavy, sell you must.  If sales are slow, you must tickle your customer; hence the signs of the Middle Ages, hence the modern prospectus.  I do not see a hair’s-breadth of difference between attracting custom and forcing your goods upon the consumer.  It may happen, it is sure to happen, it often happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged goods, for the seller always cheats the buyer.  Go and ask the most upright folk in Paris—­the best known men in business, that is—­and they will all triumphantly tell you of dodges by which they passed off stock which they knew to be bad upon the public.  The well-known firm of Minard began by sales of this kind.  In the Rue Saint-Denis they sell nothing but ‘greased silk’;