y developed in the
same groping way as typography and paper-making.

"Rag-pickers collect all the rags and old linen of Europe," the
printer concluded, "and buy any kind of tissue. The rags are sorted and
warehoused by the wholesale rag merchants, who supply the paper-mills.
To give you some idea of the extent of the trade, you must know,
mademoiselle, that in 1814 Cardon the banker, owner of the pulping
troughs of Bruges and Langlee (where Leorier de l'Isle endeavored
in 1776 to solve the very problem that occupied your father), Cardon
brought an action against one Proust for an error in weights of two
millions in a total of ten million pounds' weight of rags, worth about
four million francs! The manufacturer washes the rags and reduces them
to a thin pulp, which is strained, exactly as a cook strains sauce
through a tamis, through an iron frame with a fine wire bottom where the
mark which give its name to the size of the paper is woven. The size of
this _mould_, as it is called, regulates the size of the sheet.

"When I was with the Messieurs Didot," David continued, "they were very
much interested in this question, and they are still interested; for the
improvement which your father endeavored to make is a great commercial
requirement, and one of the crying needs of the time. And for this
reason: although linen lasts so much longer than cotton, that it is
in reality cheaper in the end, the poor would rather make the smaller
outlay in the first instance, and, by virtue of the law of _Vae victis!_
pay enormously more before they have done. The middle classes do the
same. So there is a scarcity of linen. In England, where four-fifths of
the population use cotton to the exclusion of linen, they make nothing
but cotton paper. The cotton paper is very soft and easily creased to
begin with, and it has a further defect: it is so soluble that if you
seep a book made of cotton paper in water for fifteen minutes, it turns
to a pulp, while an old book left in water for a couple of hours is not
spoilt. You could dry the old book, and the pages, though yellow and
faded, would still be legible, the work would not be destroyed.

"There is a time coming when legislation will equalize our fortunes, and
we shall all be poor together; we shall want our linen and our books to
be cheap, just as people are beginning to prefer small pictures because
they have not wall space enough for large ones. Well, the shirts and the
books will not la