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By Root 1595 0

of the day it was the Baron Desrumaux who was most remembered for his shrewdness and courage. He had persevered for forty years, never faltering, overcoming obstacle after obstacle: an initial lack of success during his early prospecting, the new mines that had to be abandoned after long months of toil, mine-shafts blocked by rock-falls, miners drowned by sudden floods, hundreds of thousands of francs draining away down a few holes in the ground; and then later the problems of managing the business, the panicking shareholders, the tussles with the hereditary landowners of ancient estates who were determined not to recognize royal concessions unless people came and negotiated with them first. Finally he had established Desrumaux, Fauquenoix and Company to exploit the Montsou concession, and the pits were just beginning to yield meagre returns when the two neighbouring concessions, the one at Cougny, which belonged to the Comte de Cougny, and the one at Joiselle, belonging to the Company of Cornille and Jenard, had almost ruined him with the ferocity of their competition. Fortunately, on 25 August 1760, a settlement had been reached between the three concessions and they were amalgamated. The Montsou Mining Company thus came into being in its present form. To effect a distribution of shares, the total assets had been divided into twenty-four sous, the standard currency unit of the day;2 and each sou was subdivided into twelve deniers, giving two hundred and eighty-eight deniers; and since each denier was worth ten thousand francs, the total capital value represented a sum of nearly three million francs. Desrumaux, near to death but none the less victorious, had received six sous and three deniers as his share.

At that time the Baron owned La Piolaine, together with three hundred hectares of land, and he employed as his steward one Honoré Grégoire, a lad from Picardy, who was the great-grandfather of Léon Grégoire, father of Cécile. At the time of the Montsou settlement, Honoré, who had been hoarding his savings of fifty thousand francs in a stocking, nervously yielded to his master’s unswerving conviction. He took out ten thousand francs’ worth of beautiful écus and bought a denier, terrified that he was thereby robbing his children of this part of their inheritance. Indeed his son Eugéne received extremely small dividends; and since he had set himself up as a bourgeois and been foolish enough to squander the remaining forty thousand francs of his paternal legacy in a disastrous business partnership, he lived in rather reduced circumstances. But the income from the denier was gradually rising, and the family fortune dated from the time of Félicien, who realized the dream that his grandfather, the former steward, had instilled in him as a child: the purchase of La Piolaine, now shorn of its land, which he bought from the State for a derisory sum.3 Nevertheless, the years that followed were bad ones, and they had to wait for the catastrophic events of the Revolution to run their course and for the rule of Napoleon to meet its bloody end. And so it was Léon Grégoire who benefited, after an astonishing rise in values, from the investment that his great-grandfather had so nervously and tentatively made. Those paltry ten thousand francs grew and grew with the prosperity of the Company. By 1820 they were yielding a hundred per cent, ten thousand francs. In 1844 they were earning twenty thousand; in 1850, forty thousand. Finally, just two years previously, the dividend had grown to the prodigious figure of fifty thousand francs: the value of a denier was quoted on the Lille stock exchange at one million francs, a hundredfold increase in the course of a century.

M. Grégoire had been advised to sell when the share price reached one million, but he had refused with a benign and tolerant smile. Six months later, when the industrial crisis began, the value of a denier fell back to six hundred thousand francs. But he kept smiling and had no regrets, for the Grégoires now believed steadfastly in their mine. The value would rise again;