58 Travels in France 



chronicle speaks of merchants keeping the dancing and singing 

 girls of the theatre at salaries which ought to import no good 

 to their credit. This theatre, which does so much honour to 

 the pleasures of Bourdeaux, was raised at the expense of the 

 town and cost £270,000. The new tide corn-mill, erected by a 

 company, is very well worth viewing. A large canal is dug and 

 formed in masonry of hewn stone, the walls four feet thick, lead- 

 ing under the building for the tide coming in to turn the water 

 wheels. It is then conducted in other equally well-formed 

 canals to a reservoir, and when the tide returns it gives motion 

 to the wheels again. Three of these canals pass under the 

 building for containing twenty- four pairs of stones. Every 

 part of the work is on a scale of solidity and duration, admirably 

 executed. The estimate of the expense is 8,000,000 livres 

 (£350,000), but I know not how to credit such a sum. How far 

 the erection of steam engines to do the same business would 

 have been found a cheaper method I shall not inquire, but I 

 should apprehend that the common water-mills on the Garonne, 

 which start without such enormous expenses for their power, 

 must in the common course of common events ruin this com- 

 pany. The new houses that are building in all quarters of the 

 town mark, too clearly to be misunderstood, the prosperity of 

 the place. The skirts are everywhere composed of new streets, 

 with still newer ones marked out and partly built. These houses 

 are in general small, or on a middling scale, for inferior trades- 

 men. They are all of white stone, and add, as they are finished, 

 much to the beauty of the city. I inquired into the date of 

 these new streets and found that four or five years were in 

 general the period, that is to say, since the peace; and from 

 the colour of the stone of those streets next in age, it is plain 

 that the spirit of building was at a stop during the war. Since 

 the peace they have gone on with great activity. What a 

 satire on the government of the two kingdoms, to permit in one 

 the prejudices of manufacturers and merchants, and in the 

 other the insidious policy of an ambitious court, to hurrv'- the 

 two nations for ever into wars that check all beneficial works, 

 and spread ruin where private exertion was busied in deeds of 

 prosperity. The rent of houses and lodgings rises every day, as 

 it has done since the peace considerably, at the same time that 

 so many new houses have been and are erecting, unites with the 

 advance in the prices of everything; they complain that the 

 expenses of living have risen in ten years full 30 per cent. — There 

 can hardly be a clearer proof of an advance in prosperity. 



