"Anyhow, he said they had the recipe, the first recipe for that cold cream in his great-grandfather's handwriting. He said there'd been some talk always in the family about its having come from his great-grandfather's father, who had sold toilet specialties to Marie Antoinette, the queen, you know. He said he himself didn't take much stock in that story because everybody in France, more or less, claimed to have a great-grandfather who'd had dealings with Marie Antoinette, but I just thought to myself what a good smart advertisement agency could do with that item ... you could see it on every billboard between New York and San Francisco ... 'Marie Antoinette's own cold cream, rediscovered recipe.' If you've been in America, you can imagine."
"Yes," said the Frenchman, "I can imagine."
"He said, of course, they had not stuck absolutely to that recipe just as it stood. His grandfather had made some changes, experimented with it all his life, and his father had changed the proportions, just little shadings, with years in between, to think them over and to be sure they were right. But he himself had changed it the most, because modern chemistry had let him substitute for one ingredient that had never been just right, something else that exactly filled the bill. Do you know, Monsieur Portier, as he stood there telling me how, for a hundred years, three generations of his folks had concentrated on that, I said to myself: 'By George, there's a _reason_! No wonder it's better than any of our get-there-quick products. They've certainly got us beat.'"
To this handsome tribute the Frenchman replied dubiously: "It is very generous, Mr. Hale, to say such a thing. But since taking over the work on this committee I have had periods of great depression when it has seemed to me that no power on earth, not even American energy from which I hope a great deal, could ever move our trades-people from their century-old habits of business inertia and lack of enterprise."
"Well, I understand that, too," agreed the American sympathetically; "I certainly do, because that's just what I've come to see you about. We went on with our confab, my old friend and I, and he showed me his books to show how the sale of the cold cream had grown since they began on it. It seems they've had quite a lot of their customers for sixty or seventy years. Not Versailles people at all, you know, people from all over, people who had tried it once and never would have another, and I don't blame them. He's got quite a lot of aristocrats on his list. He showed me names on his account book that made it look like a history of France. Well, the sum-total of it came to this. His grandfather sold on an average three hundred pots a year, which was good for those days; in his father's time it went up, so he said, astonishingly, to fifteen hundred pots a year; but he had done even better, and in his little factory-laboratory that he'd had to enlarge, he made four thousand pots a year and sold them all. 'More than _ten times_ what his grandfather had done.'"