The soap in the great earthenware washbasin can do nothing about it. This coal dust, fine and clinging as chimney soot, stays lodged beneath my nails and in the creases of my palms. However hard I scrub, it wins out: it settles into the grain of the writing paper on which I set down these lines, in small black traces I no longer dare wipe away.
Looking at them, I measure the distance that separates the plush carpets of the Rue de Rivoli from the bottom of Pit 11.
Raymond Poincaré has sent me to the North with a fixed idea in mind: to determine whether our coal basins can bear the strain of the monetary war effort without tipping the country into a general strike. Tonight, in the silence of this room at the Hôtel de la Gare in Lens, where one can still almost hear, far off, the panting of a coal convoy, I have my answer.

This Morning’s Descent
Nothing prepares you for the cage as it drops. We say “go down” — the word is far too gentle. It is a controlled fall, four hundred metres down a black shaft, the stomach lurching upward, and then, all at once, the stop, the silence, and that damp heat seizing you by the throat like a hand. The air is thick with dust and sweat; the lamp at the belt pierces no more than a metre ahead of one’s feet.
Walking before me is Henri de Peyerimhoff, president of the Comité Central des Houillères — that great jurist out of the Conseil d’État who has become the true spokesman of the mining employers. He advances without a moment’s hesitation into the darkness, as though he knew every gallery by heart. Peyerimhoff wished to show me “his place of work” before any discussion took place, “so that I might see for myself,” as he put it.
Rounding a coalface, we come upon three men, bare-chested, their skin gleaming, black with coal down into the very creases of their wrinkles. Two young Poles, arrived on recent convoys of the Société Générale d’Immigration, and a strapping local lad, native to Lens or Hénin. Together, muscles straining to breaking point, they heave forward a tram wagon of at least five hundred kilos, on makeshift rails, in a grinding of iron that all but drowns out their breathing.
It is this force — raw, silent — that drives the entire economy of the country, and that one so easily forgets from behind a desk in Paris.

The Tram Wagon
Then, with a metallic crash that echoes down the whole gallery, the wagon jumps its rails. The mass of iron tips dangerously, threatening to fall upon the legs of one of the Poles, who struggles to hold it back. The shift foreman comes running and shouts an order — which the man, not understanding a word of French, cannot carry out. I see the miners’ eyes harden around us; something, in the already unbreathable air, grows taut.
It is here that Peyerimhoff shows his true face. He does not lose his temper. The former magistrate lays a firm hand on the foreman’s shoulder and says, without raising his voice, with a cold authority sufficient to cut the panic short:
“Calm yourselves. The language barrier calls for method, not shouting. If this wagon overturns, or a man is hurt, we lose two hours of output, and we sow resentment for months to come.”
With a gesture, he sends for a bilingual worker. Within barely two minutes, the order is translated, the wagon righted and set back on its rails, and work resumes — quietly, almost as though nothing had happened. Only the men’s eyes, still a shade too fixed, say otherwise.

Black Coffee
Back at the surface, in the management office, over a black and bitter coffee that strikes me as the best I have tasted in weeks, the exchange remains grave. Peyerimhoff pushes the production ledgers toward me, then fixes me with that lucid, almost weary gaze worn by men accustomed to carrying heavy decisions alone:
“You see it for yourself, Monsieur le Conseiller. Discipline is not maintained through threats. If we want the mines to supply the coal needed to stabilise the Franc, these men must be treated with method and with justice. Safety in the coalfaces, decent wages, respect for the contracts of our immigrants: these are not concessions. They are the very conditions of productivity.”
“That is precisely the analysis of the cabinet in Paris, Monsieur de Peyerimhoff,” I reply. “The State will lend its support for transport and equipment. But we shall be inflexible on the protection of the miners and the enforcement of the rules. We shall not save the currency on the backs of the men from the pit.”
He nods, satisfied, it seems, to find that the government yields neither to demagogy nor to old-style employer brutality.

Night Over the Slag Heaps
It is late now. Through my window, the slag heaps cast enormous shadows into the northern night, like black hills set down there by mistake. I return to Paris tomorrow, still a little dust beneath my nails, with a certainty that will not leave me: with men of Peyerimhoff’s calibre, a pact of reason between the State and heavy industry is possible.
Whether it will hold, once I am gone, remains to be seen.