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collectors and producers suddenly had their heads completely turned. We 

 on our part naturally refused to take part in such an unjustifiable upward 

 rush of prices and immediately suspended all our purchases of flowers. 

 This action proved immediately successful; the producers adopted a more 

 reasonable attitude, and we were able to secure the bulk of our raw 

 material at prices of which the average at least compared favourably with 

 those paid by our competitors. Our factory at Barreme, which had been 

 enlarged in the course of the year by the installation of a new boiler 

 and the doubling of the distilling plant 1 ), was working at full pressure 

 night and day during the distilling season; the total quantity of lavender 

 flowers worked-up there amounting to 510000 kilos. In addition to these 

 we distilled 180000 kilos in the works leased by us at Sault (Dep.Vaucluse); 

 190000 kilos in our itinerant stills at Castellane, Vergons, Thoard and 

 Clamensane, and about 45000 kilos in small stills in various other localities. 

 The total quantity distilled by us therefore reached in the present year 

 the important figure of about 900000 kilos of lavender flowers. It is hardly 

 necessary to say that no other firm engaged in the distillation of lavender 

 oil reaches figures like these. 



It may be imagined that such a result has not been attained without 

 exciting envy, as is shown by an anonymous article signed r 'Un Montagnard" 

 ("A Dweller in the Hills") which appeared in the Revue de Grasse of June 23 rd . 

 The author reproaches us with paying enormously high rents for lavender 

 fields which are the property of the State or the Communes, and he ad- 

 vises the authorities who control these properties to let them to us on 

 the longest possible leases, so that the department of Forests and the 

 Communes may profit as much as possible from the fancy prices which 

 we are alleged to pay, and which, he says, could not otherwise be main- 

 tained in the long run. We should like in the first place to point out to 

 the author that he is ill-informed, for we assume as a matter of course 

 that he does not deliberately distort the facts. For instance, in Annot 

 not two lettings took place, as stated by him, but only one, and this was 

 knocked down to one of our confidential agents for 1000 fcs. In previous 

 years it had realised 725 fcs., not 250 fcs. as asserted by him. The in- 

 creased price paid by us for the present year has been justified at once 

 by the increased yield of the crop, estimated at between 30 and 40 p. c , 

 but we may further point out that a firm in Grasse, through its confidential 

 agent, paid for a lease at Le Fugeret 400 fcs., and for one at Meailles 

 710 fcs., the rent paid in 1911 for the first of these leases having been 

 only 70 fcs., and for the second only 155 fcs. In other words, the in- 

 creased rent amounted in the one case to 471 p. c. and in the other to 

 358 p. c, while for the land leased by us in the Commune of Annot we 

 paid barely 38 p. c. more than it fetched in 1911. The land at Sault, 



*) An illustration will be found in this Report 



