money income of from £29 to £48 per acre every year; and yet, pears, plums and cherries are sold at Paris, fresh and juicy, at such a price that the poor, too, can eat fresh home-grown fruit.
In the province of Anjou one may see how a heavy clay, improved with sand taken from the Loire and with manure, has been turned, in the neighbourhoods of Angers, and especially at Saint Laud, into a soil which is rented at from £2, 10s. to £5 the acre, and upon that soil fruit is grown which a few years ago was exported to America. 103 At Bennecour, a quite small village of 850 inhabitants, near Paris, one sees what man can make out of the most unproductive soil. Quite recently the steep slopes of its hills were only mergers from which stone was extracted for the pavements of Paris. Now these slopes are entirely covered with apricot and cherry trees, black-currant shrubs, and plantations of asparagus, green peas and the like. In 1881, £5,600 worth of apricots alone was sold out of this village, and it must be borne in mind that competition is so acute in the neighbourhoods of Paris that a delay of twenty-four hours in the sending of apricots to the market will often mean a loss of 8s. — one-seventh of the sale price on each hundredweight. 104
At Perpignan, green artichokes — a favourite vegetable in France — are grown, from October till June, on an area covering 2,500 acres, and the net revenue is estimated at £32 per acre. In Central France, artichokes are even cultivated in the open fields, and nevertheless the crops are valued (by Baltet) at from £48 to £100 per acre. In the Loiret, 1,500 gardeners, who occasionally employ 5,000 workmen, obtain from £400,000 to £480,000 worth of vegetables, and their yearly expenditure for manure is £60,000. This figure alone is the best answer to those who are fond of talking about the extraordinary fertility of the soil, each time they are told of some success in agriculture. At Lyons, a population of 430,000 inhabitants is entirely supplied with vegetables by the