“The tedious enterprise called for a great deal of patience on my part.  Some who were ignorant of the law would refuse at times to give their contribution of labor; others again, who had not bread to eat, really could not afford to lose a day.  Corn had to be distributed among these last, and the others must be soothed with friendly words.  Yet by the time we had finished two-thirds of the road, which in all is about two leagues in length, the people had so thoroughly recognized its advantages that the remaining third was accomplished with a spirit that surprised me.  I added to the future wealth of the Commune by planting a double row of poplars along the ditch on either side of the way.  The trees are already almost worth a fortune, and they make our road look like a king’s highway.  It is almost always dry, by reason of its position, and it was so well made that the annual cost of maintaining it is a bare two hundred francs.  I must show it to you, for you cannot have seen it; you must have come by the picturesque way along the valley bottom, a road which the people decided to make for themselves three years later, so as to connect the various farms that were made there at that time.  In three years ideas had rooted themselves in the common sense of this township, hitherto so lacking in intelligence that a passing traveler would perhaps have thought it hopeless to attempt to instil them.  But to continue.

“The establishment of the basket-maker was an example set before these poverty-stricken folk that they might profit by it.  And if the road was to be a direct cause of the future wealth of the canton, all the primary forms of industry must be stimulated, or these two germs of a better state of things would come to nothing.  My own work went forward by slow degrees, as I helped my osier farmer and wicker-worker and saw to the making of the road.

“I had two horses, and the timber merchant, the deputy-mayor, had three.  He could only have them shod whenever he went over to Grenoble, so I induced a farrier to take up his abode here, and undertook to find him plenty of work.  On the same day I met with a discharged soldier, who had nothing but his pension of a hundred francs, and was sufficiently perplexed about his future.  He could read and write, so I engaged him as secretary to the mayor; as it happened, I was lucky enough to find a wife for him, and his dreams of happiness were fulfilled.

“Both of these new families needed houses, as well as the basket-maker and twenty-two others from the cretin village, soon afterwards twelve more households were established in the place.  The workers in each of these families were at once producers and consumers.  They were masons, carpenters, joiners, slaters, blacksmiths, and glaziers; and there was work enough to last them for a long time, for had they not their own houses to build when they had finished those for other people?  Seventy, in fact, were build in the Commune during my second year of office.  One form of production demands another.  The additions to the population of the township had created fresh wants, hitherto unknown among these dwellers in poverty.  The wants gave rise to industries, and industries to trade, and the gains of trade raised the standard of comfort, which in its turn gave them practical ideas.