Tuesday, July 31, 2001

Yesterday I promised the story of the Mirror spies. This comes from The Mirror, a history by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. She found it in a nineteenth century historian, Elphege Fremy.
The seventeenth century Venitian Republic was, as is well known, wealthy due, in part, to its monopoly on fine glasswork, and in particular its fine mirrors. The craftsmen who produced those mirrors were recipients of the hundred techniques handed down through two centuries that made Venice's mirrors the clearest, largest, and most expensive in Europe. The French, under Louis XIV, were jealous - especially Louis' financial minister, Colbert. Colbert decided to have the French ambassador to Venice entice a certain number of mirror masters to Paris, where the government could sponsor a factory. Being an early mercantilist, Colbert was firmly persuaded that the flow of wealth out of France for these mirrors was depleting the national economy.
But there was a problem. The Venitians kept a close watch on their mirror makers. They had laws forbidding them from emigrating, and when these laws were violated the Venitians had a very efficient spy-system to enforce the wrath of the Republic on its erring workmen. Well, somehow the French ambassador was able to round up and dispatch to Colbert in Paris a number of mirrormakers, and so a factory was set up - the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors, the ancestor of the famous St. Gobain works. But then the Venitians struck. Two mirrormasters died mysteriously, in 1667; the whole set of the mirrormakers were continuously provoked in the streets, and kept getting into brawls; and worst of all, they were lonely. Colbert promised to get their wives out of Venice, but the Venitian spy service actually substituted letters, purportedly from the wives, in response to Colbert's request, the upshot of which was the wives wanted their husbands back home. Meanwhile, the mirror works kept losing money, and mirror smugglers started operating on the South coast of France, bringing in the more expensive Venitian mirrors to undercut the native product.

Somehow, this history naturally lends itself to metaphor. Angleton, the crazy head of CounterIntelligence I wrote about yesterday, once called Counterintelligence a "wilderness of mirrors." Someday I think I will write a story about these mirrormakers and their dark shadows, the spies. It would make a nice little historical mystery, don't you think?
Whatever you think, send me an e-mail. The Editor

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