A Small Town
Put thousands together Less bad, But the cage less gay.
HOBBES
The small town of Verrieres
fake oakleys may be regarded as one of the most at-
tractive in the Franche-Comte. Its white houses with their high pitched
roofs of red tiles are spread over the slope of a hill, the slightest contours
of which are indicated by clumps of sturdy chestnuts. The Doubs runs
some hundreds of feet below its fortifications, built in times past by the
Spaniards, and now in ruins.
Verrieres is sheltered on the north by a high mountain, a spur of the
Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra put on a mantle of snow in the first
cold days of October. A torrent which comes tearing down from the
mountain passes through Verrieres before emptying its waters into the
Doubs, and supplies power
fake ray bans to a great number of sawmills; this is an ex-
tremely simple industry, and procures a certain degree of comfort for the
majority of the inhabitants, who are of the peasant rather than of the bur-
gess class. It is not, however, the sawmills that have made this little town
rich. It is to the manufacture of printed calicoes, known as Mulhouse
stuffs, that it owes the general prosperity which, since the fall of Napo-
leon, has led to the refacing of almost all the houses in Verrieres.
No sooner has one entered the town than one is startled by the din of a
noisy machine of terrifying aspect. A score of weighty hammers, falling
with a clang which makes the pavement tremble, are raised aloft by a
wheel which the water of the torrent sets in motion. Each of these ham-
mers turns out, daily, I cannot say how many thousands of nails. A bevy
of fresh, pretty girls subject to the blows of these enormous hammers, the
little scraps of iron which are rapidly transformed into nails. This work,
so rough to the outward eye, is one of the industries that most astonish
the traveller who ventures for the first time among the mountains that
divide France from Switzerland. If, on entering Verrieres, the traveller
5inquires to whom belongs that fine nail factory which deafens everybody
who passes up the main street, he will be told in a drawling accent: 'Eh!
It belongs to the Mayor.'
Provided the traveller halts for a few moments in this main street of
Verrieres, which runs from the bank of the Doubs nearly to the summit
of the hill, it is a hundred to one that he will see a tall man appear, with a
busy, important air.
