The old nobles would not give up their schemes

As the ships loaded with potatoes collected from Metz, Lorraine, and elsewhere began heading south, Joseph was leafing through a thick stack of reports in the Director's Office of the Industrial Planning Bureau in Paris.

An official in his fifties, wearing glasses and with numerous smallpox scars on his face, stood respectfully to one side.

He was the Agricultural Finance Commissioner, attached to the Office of the Minister of Finance, and he had just delivered these documents.

The documents contained the figures the provinces had just compiled on the number of manor owners and farmers willing to grow potatoes, along with the acreage they proposed planting.

Since Brienne, the Minister of Finance, was currently in Caen conducting trade negotiations with the British, the documents had been sent to Joseph, the second-in-command of financial affairs. Such matters were usually handled by the Minister of the Interior, but Brienne and Joseph had previously agreed that promoting potatoes was too important to let that slippery old hand Monod meddle too much.

Before Joseph had read even half of them, his brows began drawing together.

During this period, he had launched an intensive nationwide publicity campaign to promote potatoes, spending forty to fifty thousand livres on printing pamphlets alone. The Church had also been fairly cooperative. Churches everywhere had begun sending people out with the new version of The Last Supper to preach to their parishioners that potatoes were not "devils beneath the earth," but "the Lord's gift."

Yet judging by the willingness to plant them in various regions, the results of the campaign were far from encouraging.

Apart from the areas around Lille and Valenciennes in Northern France, and the provinces near the Rhine River, where acceptance of potatoes was relatively high, the land people were willing to switch to potatoes elsewhere amounted