Fourier and Pierre Leroux are Lachevardiere’s readers at this moment; and the Comte de Saint-Simon, who happened to be correcting proofs for us, came in in the middle of the discussion.  He told us at once that, according to Kempfer and du Halde, the Broussonetia furnishes the substance of the Chinese paper; it is a vegetable substance (like linen or cotton for that matter).  Another reader maintained that Chinese paper was principally made of an animal substance, to wit, the silk that is abundant there.  They made a bet about it in my presence.  The Messieurs Didot are printers to the Institute, so naturally they referred the question to that learned body.  M. Marcel, who used to be superintendent of the Royal Printing Establishment, was umpire, and he sent the two readers to M. l’Abbe Grozier, Librarian at the Arsenal.  By the Abbe’s decision they both lost their wages.  The paper was not made of silk nor yet from the Broussonetia; the pulp proved to be the triturated fibre of some kind of bamboo.  The Abbe Grozier had a Chinese book, an iconographical and technological work, with a great many pictures in it, illustrating all the different processes of paper-making, and he showed us a picture of the workshop with the bamboo stalks lying in a heap in the corner; it was extremely well drawn.

“Lucien told me that your father, with the intuition of a man of talent, had a glimmering of a notion of some way of replacing linen rags with an exceedingly common vegetable product, not previously manufactured, but taken direct from the soil, as the Chinese use vegetable fibre at first hand.  I have classified the guesses made by those who came before me, and have begun to study the question.  The bamboo is a kind of reed; naturally I began to think of the reeds that grow here in France.

“Labor is very cheap in China, where a workman earns three halfpence a day, and this cheapness of labor enables the Chinese to manipulate each sheet of paper separately.  They take it out of the mould, and press it between heated tablets of white porcelain, that is the secret of the surface and consistence, the lightness and satin smoothness of the best paper in the world.  Well, here in Europe the work must be done by machinery; machinery must take the place of cheap Chinese labor.  If we could but succeed in making a cheap paper of as good a quality, the weight and thickness of printed books would be reduced by more than one-half.  A set of Voltaire, printed on our woven paper and bound, weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds; it would only weigh fifty if we used Chinese paper.  That surely would be a triumph, for the housing of many books has come to be a difficulty; everything has grown smaller of late; this is not an age of giants; men have shrunk, everything about them shrinks, and house-room into the bargain.  Great mansions and great suites of rooms will be abolished sooner or later in Paris, for no one will afford to live in the great houses built by our forefathers.  What a disgrace for our age if none of its books should last!  Dutch paper—­that is, paper made from flax—­will be quite unobtainable in ten years’ time.  Well, your brother told me of this idea of your father’s, this plan for using vegetable fibre in paper-making, so you see that if I succeed, you have a right to——­”