While milk prices are falling, butter prices are rising alarmingly.

A truly astonishing phenomenon has just occurred. While these days, as every year at this time, the price of milk has been falling, butter prices have suddenly risen. It's as if bread becomes more expensive when flour prices are falling. Above all, don't blame your dairy or your cheesemonger. A quarter of butter only reflects wholesale prices. At Les Halles, two or three days ago, the average price of butter reached 1,330 francs per hundred kilos, compared to 1,045 francs at the same time a year ago.
Readers have written to me that the increase must be caused by exports. I checked. This is incorrect. We know that butter exports are not free; It is carefully "quotased," as the specialists say, and has been set for 1925 at 15,500 quintals, a quantity of which two-thirds have so far left France. This quantity represents barely one-hundredth of our annual production, which amounts to one million five hundred thousand quintals.
While I'm busy with statistics, I might as well add that this production represents thirty-eight million hectoliters of milk. What a river!

But let's get back to the increase. The tension in the exchange rate has a lot to do with it. Foreign butters can no longer compete effectively with ours. And then it must be said that, despite the enormous price of existence, the public mainly buys top-quality butters. They refuse to understand that one can and should use butter for cooking that is less fine and therefore less expensive than the one that appears on the dining room table. There may have been, on top of that, mercantile maneuvers to provoke the rise. I beg our sympathetic police prefect not to be alarmed by their actions and not to ask his intelligent and active director of the fraud prevention service, Mr. Lavayssé, to conduct a completely pointless investigation. Mr. Morain knows better than anyone, alas!, that he lacks the means of repression. Perhaps they will be given to him when the ever-increasing cost of living forces the middle class of this country to go singing in their courtyards on Sundays and holidays. We don't have much longer to wait.

What's worrying about this rise in butter prices is its impact on the price of milk. With the prices butter will inevitably reach this winter, given current prices, farmers will no longer send us their milk. It will be in their best interest—and they already do—to make butter and cheese from it. Put yourself in their shoes. He's been declaring forcefully for a long time that milk isn't paid at its price. He won't send it to us anymore... The rise in butter prices inevitably sets the stage for either a milk crisis next winter or a price hike. We'll have to choose between these two alternatives. At that point, moreover, we'll talk again about the rise in all products, all commodities. Incidentally, here's meat prices brought to 1920 prices, the highest ever recorded.

HENRI GÉROULE.

Potatoes

Towards Saint-Servan, towards Saint-Malo, an endless procession follows the roads, all the roads. The cars look like sisters, pulled by a brave little horse, driven by a man or woman dozing in the sun. Baskets of potatoes are in the carts.
I stupidly asked:
"Do they eat so many potatoes in Surcouf's country?" - No, it's for shipping!
- Oh yes! To Les Halles!
But the sly Saint-Malo native looked at me with a smile.
- To England!
And, indeed, I saw entire boats of new potatoes heading for the ports of the hereditary enemy. It's a fine revenge the guys from Saint-Malo are taking, not to mention the butter, artichokes, cauliflowers, and peas.
- How much do your compatriots sell their potatoes for?
- About seventy francs for fifty kilos. They can, at the exchange rate!
- But they pay three francs for them in Paris?
- That's because the commodity is scarce, since almost everything they pull up around here goes there. "They pay ten francs a kilo for butter in Normandy, and it seems they're also hoarding it to ship it to the English."
But the Breton emptied his pipe, tapping it on his fingernail:
"Well, yes! They paid 40 sous for it before the war."
He added, looking at me with his liquid blue eyes.
"Is it my fault?"

D.