Lost Illusions | Page 6

of La
Fontaine's Franciscan friars, with the fringe of grizzled hair still curling
about his bald pate. He was short and corpulent, like one of the
old-fashioned lamps for illumination, that burn a vast deal of oil to a
very small piece of wick; for excess of any sort confirms the habit of
body, and drunkenness, like much study, makes the fat man stouter,
and the lean man leaner still.
For thirty years Jerome-Nicolas-Sechard had worn the famous
municipal three-cornered hat, which you may still see here and there on
the head of the towncrier in out-of-the-way places. His breeches and
waistcoat were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an old-fashioned
brown greatcoat, gray cotton stockings, and shoes with silver buckles to
them. This costume, in which the workman shone through the burgess,
was so thoroughly in keeping with the man's character, defects, and
way of life, that he might have come ready dressed into the world. You

could no more imagine him apart from his clothes than you could think
of a bulb without its husk. If the old printer had not long since given the
measure of his blind greed, the very nature of the man came out in the
manner of his abdication.
Knowing, as he did, that his son must have learned his business pretty
thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been
ruminating for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive with
David. All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to lose,
but in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If, in the first
instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later he came to
regard him as the natural purchaser of the business, whose interests
were therefore his own. Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to
buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty to
get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into self-seeking,
ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in better educated
people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who demonstrated the
superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over book-learned typography.
David came home, and the old man received him with all the cordiality
which cunning folk can assume with an eye to business. He was as full
of thought for him as any lover for his mistress; giving him his arm,
telling him where to put his foot down so as to avoid the mud, warming
the bed for him, lighting a fire in his room, making his supper ready.
The next day, after he had done his best to fluster his son's wits over a
sumptuous dinner, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, after copious potations,
began with a "Now for business," a remark so singularly misplaced
between two hiccoughs, that David begged his parent to postpone
serious matters until the morrow. But the old "bear" was by no means
inclined to put off the long-expected battle; he was too well prepared to
turn his tipsiness to good account. He had dragged the chain these fifty
years, he would not wear it another hour; to-morrow his son should be
the "gaffer."
Perhaps a word or two about the business premises may be said here.
The printing-house had been established since the reign of Louis XIV.
in the angle made by the Rue de Beaulieu and the Place du Murier; it
had been devoted to its present purposes for a long time past. The
ground floor consisted of a single huge room lighted on the side next
the street by an old-fashioned casement, and by a large sash window

that gave upon the yard at the back. A passage at the side led to the
private office; but in the provinces the processes of typography excite
such a lively interest, that customers usually preferred to enter by way
of the glass door in the street front, though they at once descended three
steps, for the floor of the workshop lay below the level of the street.
The gaping newcomer always failed to note the perils of the passage
through the shop; and while staring at the sheets of paper strung in
groves across the ceiling, ran against the rows of cases, or knocked his
hat against the tie-bars that secured the presses in position. Or the
customer's eyes would follow the agile movements of a compositor,
picking out type from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of his
case, reading his copy, verifying the words in the composing-stick, and
leading the lines, till a ream of damp paper weighted with heavy slabs,
and set down in the middle of the gangway, tripped up the bemused
spectator, or he caught his hip against the angle of a bench, to the huge
delight