“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 last, that is all; it is the same on all sides, solidity is drying out.  So this problem is one of the first importance for literature, science, and politics.

“One day, in my office, there was a hot discussion going on about the material that the Chinese use for making paper.  Their paper is far better than ours, because the raw material is better; and a good deal was said about this thin, light Chinese paper, for if it is light and thin, the texture is close, there are no transparent spots in it.  In Paris there are learned men among the printers’ readers;