Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (4 page)

Séchard had been one of those journeymen pressmen who, in the typographical jargon used by the workmen occupied in putting type together, are known as ‘bears’. No doubt this nickname is due to the to-and-fro motion, resembling that of a caged bear, which carried the pressmen backwards and forwards between the ink-block and the press. In retaliation, the ‘bears’ call compositors ‘monkeys’ because of the antics these persons continuously perform in snatching up the letters from the hundred and fifty-two boxes which contain them. In the calamitous period of 1793, Séchard was about fifty, and a married man. His age and marital status saved him from the great call-up which bore off almost all working-men to the armed forces. The old pressman was the only hand left in the printing-office whose owner, known as ‘the gaffer’, had just died, leaving a childless widow. It looked as if the business was doomed to immediate extinction: the solitary ‘bear’ could not change into a ‘monkey’ because, being a mere
pressman, he could neither read nor write. Taking no account of his incompetence, a ‘Representative of the People’, in a hurry to promulgate the eloquent decrees issued by the National Convention, invested the pressman with a licence as master printer and requisitioned the printing-press. After accepting this dangerous licence, Citizen Séchard indemnified his master’s widow by paying over his own wife’s savings, with which he bought the whole plant at half its value. So far so good, but the Republican decrees had to be accurately and punctually printed. Faced with this difficult problem, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was lucky enough to come upon a nobleman from Marseilles who did not relish the idea of losing his estates by emigrating or of risking his head by showing himself in public, and could only earn his daily bread by taking on some sort of employment. And so Monsieur le Comte de Maucombe donned the humble overalls of a foreman in a provincial printing-office. He set up, read and himself corrected the decrees which imposed the death penalty on citizens who gave concealment to noblemen; the ‘bear’, who had now become the ‘gaffer’, struck them off and posted them up; and both of them came through safe and sound. By 1795 the squall of the Terror was over, and Nicolas Séchard had to find another factotum as compositor, proof-reader and foreman. An Abbé, who was destined to become a bishop under the Restoration for having refused to conform to the Civil Constitutions, replaced the Comte de Maucombe until the day when the First Consul re-established the Catholic religion. Later the Count and the bishop were to find themselves both sitting on the same bench in the House of Peers. Although in 1802 Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was no better at reading and writing than in 1793, his ‘makings’ were enough for him to be able to engage a foreman. The journeyman once so unconcerned about his future had become quite a martinet to his ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. Avarice begins where poverty ends. No sooner had the printer espied the possibility of making a fortune than self-interest developed in him a material understanding of his craft, but he became greedy, wary and sharp-sighted. With him practice made a long nose at theory. In the
end he was able to appraise at a glance the cost of a page or folio according to the kind of character required. He proved to his ignorant customers that heavy type cost more to set than light; and when it came to the smaller type he averred that this was more difficult to handle. Composing being that part of printing of which he understood nothing, he was so afraid of undercharging that he never made anything but excessive estimates. If his compositors worked on a time-contract he never took his eyes off them. If he knew that a paper-manufacturer was in difficulties, he bought his stock for next to nothing and put it in store. And so by now he was already owner of the building which had housed the printing-office from time immemorial. He had every sort of good luck: he lost his wife, and had only one son, whom he sent to the town
lycée,
not so much in order to have him educated as to prepare the way for a successor: he treated him harshly in order to prolong the duration of his paternal authority; thus, during holidays, he made him work at the type-case, telling him that he must earn his living so that one day he might repay his poor father who was bleeding himself white in order to educate him. When the Abbé departed, Séchard chose a new foreman from among his four compositors, one whom the future bishop had singled out as being as honest as he was intelligent. He was thus in a position to look forward to the time when his son would be able to run the business so that it might expand in young and able hands. David Séchard was a brilliant pupil at the
lycée
of Angoulême. Although the elder Séchard was only a ‘bear’ who had made good without knowledge or education and had a healthy contempt for learning, he sent his son to Paris to study more advanced typography; but he so vehemently recommended him to amass a fair sum of money in the capital, which he called the ‘working-man’s paradise’, and so often warned him not to count on dipping into his father’s purse, that it was obvious that he looked on his son’s sojourn in that ‘home of sapience’ as a means for gaining his own ends. While learning his trade in Paris, David completed his education: the foreman of the Didot works became a scholar. Towards the end of 1819
he left Paris without having cost his father a penny. The latter was now recalling him in order to hand over the management to him. At that time the Séchard press owned the only journal for legal notices that existed in the
département.
It also did all the printing for the prefectoral and episcopal administrations: these three clients were enough to give great prosperity to an energetic young man.

At that period precisely, a firm of paper-manufacturers, the brothers Cointet, purchased the second printer’s licence in the Angoulême district. Up to then Séchard senior had managed to keep it completely inoperative by taking advantage of the military crisis which, during the Empire, damped down all industrial enterprise. For this reason he had not bothered to buy it himself and his parsimony was destined to bring ruin in the end to his ancient printing-press. When he learnt of this acquisition, old Séchard thanked his stars that the conflict likely to ensue between his own establishment and that of the Cointets would be sustained by his son, and not himself. ‘I should have had the worst of it’, he told himself. ‘But a young man trained by the Didots will come out all right.’ The septuagenarian was sighing for the moment when he could take his ease. His knowledge of high-class typography was scanty, but, to compensate for this, he was known as a past master in an art which workmen printers have jestingly dubbed
tipsiography:
an art held in great esteem by the divine author of
Pantagruel,
but one whose cultivation, persecuted as it is by so-called Temperance Societies, has fallen more and more into disrepute. Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, true to the destiny which his patronymic marked out for him,
¹
was endowed with an unquenchable thirst. This passion for the crushed grape – a taste so natural with ‘bears’ that Monsieur de Chateaubriand has discovered its effects in the genuine bears of North America – had for long been kept within just bounds by his wife; but philosophers have observed that habits contracted in early life attack old age with renewed vigour. Séchard’s case confirmed this moral law: the older he
grew, the more he loved imbibing. This passion left such marks on his ursine countenance as to make it truly unique: his nose had assumed the shape and contours of a capital A of triple canon size, while both of his veinous cheeks resembled the kind of vine-leaf which is swollen with violet, purple and often multi-coloured gibbosities: it made one think of a monstrous truffle wrapped round with autumn shoots. Lurking behind tufty eyebrows which were like two snow-laden bushes, his small grey eyes, sparkling with the cunning of avarice that was killing all other emotions, even fatherly affection, in him, showed that he kept his wits about him even when he was drunk. His cranium, completely bald on top, though it was still fringed with greying curls, called to mind the Franciscan friars in La Fontaine’s
Tales.
He was short and pot-bellied like many of those old-fashioned lampions which consume more oil than wick – for excesses of every sort urge the body along its appointed path. Drunkenness, like addiction to study, makes a fat man fatter and a thin man thinner. For thirty years Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had been wearing the famous three-cornered municipal hat still to be seen on the heads of town-criers in certain provinces. His waistcoat and trousers were of greenish velvet. Finally, he wore an old brown frock-coat, stockings of patterned cotton and shoes with silver buckles. This costume, thanks to which the artisan was still manifest behind the bourgeois, was so suited to his vices and habits, so expressive of his way of life, that he looked as if he had come into the world fully clad: you could no more have imagined him without his clothes than you could imagine an onion without its peel.

If this aged printer had not long since shown how far his blind cupidity could go, his plan for retirement would suffice to depict his character. In spite of the expert knowledge that his son must have acquired while training in the great Didot firm, he was proposing to strike a profitable deal with him – one which he had long been meditating. If the father was to make a good bargain, it had to be a bad one for the son. For this sorry individual recognized no father-and-son relationship in business. If in the beginning he had thought of David as
being an only child, he later had only looked on him as an obvious purchaser whose interests were opposed to his own: he wanted to sell dear, whereas David would want to buy cheap; therefore his son was an enemy to be vanquished. This transformation of feeling into self-interest, which in educated people is usually a slow, tortuous and hypocritical process, was rapid and undeviating in the old ‘bear’, who thus showed how easily guileful
tipsiography
could triumph over expertise in typography. When his son arrived home, the old man displayed the commercial-minded tenderness which wily people show to their intended dupes: he fussed over him as a lover might have fussed over a mistress; he took him by the arm and told him where to step in order not to get mud on his shoes; he had had his bed warmed, a fire lit, a supper prepared. Next day, after trying to get his son intoxicated in the course of a copious dinner, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, by now well-seasoned, said to him: ‘Let’s talk business’: a proposal so strangely sandwiched between two hiccoughs that David begged him to put it off until the following morning. But the old ‘bear’ was too expert at drawing advantage from his own tipsiness to delay so long-prepared a battle. Moreover, he said, having had his nose so close to the grindstone for fifty years, he did not intend to keep it there one single hour more. Tomorrow his son would be the ‘gaffer’.

Here perhaps a word about Séchard’s establishment is needed. The printing-office stood at the spot where the rue de Beaulieu runs into the Place du Mûrier, and had been set up in the building towards the end of the reign of Louis XV. And so a long time had elapsed since these premises had been adapted to the needs of this industry. The ground-floor consisted of one enormous room to which light came from the street through an old glazed window, and from an inner court through a large sash-frame. There was also an alley, leading to the master-printer’s office. But in provincial towns the processes of printing always arouse such lively curiosity that customers preferred to come in by the front entrance, even though this meant walking down a few steps, since the workshop
floor was below street level. Gaping visitors never minded the inconvenience of threading their devious way through the workshop. If they paid heed to the sheets of paper hanging like cradles from cords attached to the ceiling, they stumbled against rows of cases, or had their hats knocked off by the iron bars which supported the presses. If they watched the agile movements of a compositor plucking his letters out of the hundred-and-fifty-two compartments of type, reading his copy, re-reading the line in his composing-stick and slipping in a lead, they bumped into a ream of damp paper lying under its weights, or caught their hips against the corner of a bench: all to the great amusement of ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. No one had ever arrived without mishap at the two large cages at the farther end of this cavern which formed two dismal annexes giving on to the courtyard and in which, on one side, the foreman sat in state and, on the other side, the master-printer. The courtyard walls were pleasantly decorated with vine-trellises which, given the owner’s reputation, lent an appetizing touch of local colour. At the farther end a tumbledown lean-to, in which the paper was damped and cut, backed on to a jet-black party wall. There too was the sink in which, before and after the printing-off, the ‘formes’ were washed. From this sink seeped away a decoction of ink mingled with the household slops, and that gave the peasants passing by on market-days the idea that the Devil was taking his ablutions inside the house. On one side of the lean-to was the kitchen, on the other a wood-pile. The first floor of the house, which had only two attic bedrooms above it, contained three rooms. The first, which ran the whole length of the alley except for the well of the old wooden staircase and received its light from the street through a little wooden casement, and from a court-yard through a bull’s-eye window, served both as antechamber and dining-room. Having no other decoration than white-wash, it exemplified the cynical simplicity of commercial greed; the dirty flags had never been washed; it was furnished with three rickety chairs, a round table and a sideboard standing between two doors which gave access, one to a bedroom, the other to the living-room; the
windows and doors were brown with grime; as a rule it was cluttered with blank or printed paper, the bales of which were often covered with the remains of Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard’s dinner: dessert, dishes and bottles. The bedroom, whose leaded window-panes drew their light from the courtyard, was hung with some of those old tapestries which in provincial towns are displayed along the house-fronts on Corpus Christi day. The bed was a curtained four-poster with a coarse linen counterpane and a red serge coverlet over the foot; there were worm-eaten armchairs, two upholstered walnut chairs, an old writing-desk and a wall-clock hanging over the chimney-piece. This room owed its atmosphere of patriarchal simplicity and its abundance of brown tints to the worthy Rouzeau, Séchard’s predecessor and former employer. The living-room had been modernized by the late Madame Séchard and shocked the eye with its appalling wainscots painted in wig-maker’s blue; the panels were decorated with wall-paper depicting Oriental scenes in sepia on a white ground; the furniture consisted of six chairs with blue roan seats and backs in the shape of lyres. The two crudely-arched windows looking out on to the Place du Mûrier had no curtains; the chimney-piece was devoid of candelabra, clock and mirror. Madame Séchard had died when she was only half-way through with her plans for embellishment, and the ‘bear’, seeing no purpose in unproductive improvements, had abandoned them. It was into this room that Jérôme-Nicholas Séchard,
pede titubante,
ushered his son and pointed to a round table, on which was a statement of his printing-house stock drawn up by the foreman at his direction.