Lost Illusions | Page 5

in
difficulties, he would buy up his stock at a cheap rate and warehouse
the paper. So from this time forward he was his own landlord, and
owned the old house which had been a printing office from time
immemorial.
He had every sort of luck. He was left a widower with but one son. The
boy he sent to the grammar school; he must be educated, not so much
for his own sake as to train a successor to the business; and Sechard
treated the lad harshly so as to prolong the time of parental rule,
making him work at case on holidays, telling him that he must learn to

earn his own living, so as to recompense his poor old father, who was
slaving his life out to give him an education.
Then the Abbe went, and Sechard promoted one of his four
compositors to be foreman, making his choice on the future bishop's
recommendation of the man as an honest and intelligent workman. In
these ways the worthy printer thought to tide over the time until his son
could take a business which was sure to extend in young and clever
hands.
David Sechard's school career was a brilliant one. Old Sechard, as a
"bear" who had succeeded in life without any education, entertained a
very considerable contempt for attainments in book learning; and when
he sent his son to Paris to study the higher branches of typography, he
recommended the lad so earnestly to save a good round sum in the
"working man's paradise" (as he was pleased to call the city), and so
distinctly gave the boy to understand that he was not to draw upon the
paternal purse, that it seemed as if old Sechard saw some way of
gaining private ends of his own by that sojourn in the Land of Sapience.
So David learned his trade, and completed his education at the same
time, and Didot's foreman became a scholar; and yet when he left Paris
at the end of 1819, summoned home by his father to take the helm of
business, he had not cost his parent a farthing.
Now Nicolas Sechard's establishment hitherto had enjoyed a monopoly
of all the official printing in the department, besides the work of the
prefecture and the diocese--three connections which should prove
mighty profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this
juncture the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to
the authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto
old Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks
to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial
enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this
piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought
joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the
Cointets would be fought out by his son and not by himself.
"I should have gone to the wall," he thought, "but a young fellow from
the Didots will pull through."
The septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at ease in his
own fashion. If his knowledge of the higher branches of the craft of

printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past
master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an art
held in high esteem by the divine author of _Pantagruel_; though of late,
by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the cult
has fallen, day by day, into disuse.
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, bound by the laws of etymology to be a dry
subject, suffered from an inextinguishable thirst. His wife, during her
lifetime, managed to control within reasonable bounds the passion for
the juice of the grape, a taste so natural to the bear that M. de
Chateaubriand remarked it among the ursine tribes of the New World.
But philosophers inform us that old age is apt to revert to the habits of
youth, and Sechard senior is a case in point--the older he grew, the
better he loved to drink. The master-passion had given a stamp of
originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it
reached the proportions of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks
looked like vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches of
purple, madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the
countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine
tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick eyebrows
like bushes covered with snow, were agleam with the cunning of
avarice that had extinguished everything else in the man, down to the
very instinct of fatherhood. Those eyes never lost their cunning even
when disguised in drink. Sechard put you in mind of one