Antoine Courtois fils (active 1844–80) was one of the leading Paris manufacturers of cornets à pistons and orchestral trumpets. After 1880, when Auguste Mille (1838–1898) took over the workshop of about twenty-five employees, the company maintained its high reputation. This so-called low trumpet, pitched in F with exchangeable terminal crooks for the keys E, E-flat, D, C, and B-flat (A), is equipped with Périnet valves. It is a fine, typical example of a French trumpet of the period 1860 to 1920. This instrument is the type on which students were taught at the Paris conservatory and that was played in French orchestras of the era between Bizet (d. 1875) and Debussy (d. 1918). About 1920 the high B-flat trumpet, already in use in other countries, replaced this type in France. As the engraving on the bell indicates, the trumpet came to the United States through the company's American agent, John Howard Foote, in New York. It was not used very much, probably because in the United States the B-flat trumpet had already replaced the low trumpet by about 1900.