FRANCE: Saint-Sylvestre's Forty-NIners

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The villagers of Saint-Sylvestre (pop. 1,200), in the heart of France, had been as close-mouthed as though they were guarding a hidden sockful of gold louis. Their secret leaked out not because they talked too much but because of their potatoes.

Having plenty of the vegetable but lacking cash (so they cannily said), the villagers threatened to pay their taxes in potatoes. Indignantly the local government posted notices that it would not receive potatoes. Sniffing a story, a newspaperman nosed in from nearby Limoges. As he stopped to photograph the potato notices he saw another poster: "Workers Wanted for the Uranium Fields."

Bomb for Grandeur? Thus began the Saint-Sylvestre rush. Paris headlines blared: WORLD'S GREATEST DISCOVERY. Down the highroad from the capital poured reporters and would-be Forty-Niners of the Atomic Age. In a Saint-Sylvestre pub simple peasants talked grandly: "Our village will make France powerful again. We, too, will have the bomb. They say you can run trains with this uranium. Cure the sick, too . . ."

Anyone who claimed a strike became a celebrity. Buxom Edith Lacombe, prettiest demoiselle around, said she had six radioactive hectares. The press crowned her "Miss Uranium." She promised to write a novel about Saint-Sylvestre and uranium.

Shaggy-browed Mayor Jean Bouyer, a stonecutter turned Communist during the Nazi occupation, had a reconversion to private enterprise. "Our fields," he announced, "yield 20% uranium. They are the world's richest. Now is the time to get in on the ground floor. There's plenty of good uranium land available here. Since uranium is selling for $278 the kilo in Belgium, it's a fine commercial proposition . . ." In similar booster style, Land Dealer Jean Michelet took aside a visiting TIME correspondent, confided: "Come, now, I am too experienced to believe that you are a journalist. You represent American financial interests anxious to buy in on this. Let's get down to business . . ."

Security for Zoé? At this heady point a sobering word came from famed Physicist Dr. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who tends France's atomic pile, known as "Zoe," at Fort de Châtillon. It was "nonsense," he said, to claim Saint-Sylvestre's uranium strike as the world's richest. The Belgian Congo fields were yielding a 50% ore. However, Saint-Sylvestre's pitchblende deposits, though not yet fully explored, were of major importance. They might keep Zoé going without imports.

Disillusion dogged the trail of Saint-Sylvestre's Forty-Niners. Farmer Lucien Cantiant's cows had lost their pasture to government prospectors; they were thin with hunger. Lucien himself had not yet received a sou of the 16,000 francs yearly indemnitv promised him. Without compensation how could he buy a new pasture? His tiny wife Marguerite railed that it was all his fault in the first place. When the strangers came from Paris he had let them dig holes in the fields. She had seen Lucien also with a pick in hand. "What are you doing," she had called shrewishly, "looking for your fortune?" "Maybe," grinned Lucien. But the strangers never refilled the holes as promised. Instead, they dug more, installed pumps, built little railways, chased off the cows.