186 
AN INSECT MANUFACTURER. 
does it matter ? The brilliant black contains and promises the flame; 
the blonde displays it with the splendours of the Golden Fleece. The 
sunny brown appropriates the very sun, makes use of it, blends it 
with its mirages, floats, and undulates, and incessantly varies in its 
streaming reflexes, now smiles with light, now deepens into gloom, 
always deceives, and, whatever we may say, deceives us most delight- 
fully. 
“ The principal, the infinite effort of human industry, has combined 
all possible means for the improvement of cotton. Between the Vosges 
and the Rhine, the rare agreement of capital, machinery, the arts of 
design, and the chemical sciences, has produced those splendid Indian 
products of Alsace, to which England herself does honour by purchasing 
them. Alas! all this cannot disguise the original poverty of the 
ungrateful tissue which men have so richly embellished. If the woman 
who in her vanity clothes her form in these materials, and thinks her 
beauty heightened by them, would loosen her tresses about her, and 
unroll their waves over the indigent richness of our most sheeny 
cottons, what would occur ? How they would be humiliated ! 
“ Sir, we must own the truth; there is only one thing worthy of 
being placed side by side with woman’s hair. Only one manufacturer 
can contend against it. That manufacturer is an insect,—the modest 
silkworm.” 
A peculiar charm attends the labours of the silkworm; it ennobles 
everything which surrounds it. In traversing our rudest provinces, 
the valleys of the Ardeche, where all is rocky,—where the mulberry 
and the chestnut seem to dispense with earth, to live upon air and 
pebbles,—where low stone houses sadden the eyes by their gray tints, 
—everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or three 
charming brunettes, with ivory teeth, who smiled on the wayfarer, and 
continued spinning their silken gold. The wayfarer said to them in a 
low voice, as the carriage bore him away:—“ What a pity, innocent 
fairies, that the gold may not be for you! That instead of being dis¬ 
guised with a useless colour, and disfigured by art, it does not retain its 
natural hue, and shine on the person of its beautiful spinners! How 
