Two Poets | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

TWO POETS
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION
To Monsieur Victor Hugo,
It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great poet at an age
when other men are children; it was your fate, the fate of Chateaubriand
and of every man of genius, to struggle against jealousy skulking

behind the columns of a newspaper, or crouching in the subterranean
places of journalism. For this reason I desired that your victorious name
should help to win a victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work
which, if some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well
as a veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of
Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers,
doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the writer
of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo mores, make
an exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian press spares
none? I am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity of subscribing myself
your sincere admirer and friend,
DE BALZAC.

TWO POETS

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-
distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small provincial
printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected
through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only
machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the
language owes a figure of speech--"the press groans" was no mere
rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in
old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on
the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was
placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble,
literally deserved its name of "impression-stone." Modern machinery
has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press
which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for the
Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that
something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome-
Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it plays a part
in this chronicle of great small things.
Sechard had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a "bear" in
compositors' slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the pressman
from ink-table to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt suggested the
nickname. The "bears," however, make matters even by calling the
compositors monkeys, on account of the nimble industry displayed by

those gentlemen in picking out the type from the hundred and fifty-two
compartments of the cases.
In the disastrous year 1793, Sechard, being fifty years old and a
married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the bulk of
French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only hand
left in the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the "gaffer")
died, leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed to be on
the verge of extinction; for the solitary "bear" was quite incapable of
the feat of transformation into a "monkey," and in his quality of
pressman had never learned to read or write. Just then, however, a
Representative of the People being in a mighty hurry to publish the
Decrees of the Convention, bestowed a master printer's license on
Sechard, and requisitioned the establishment. Citizen Sechard accepted
the dangerous patent, bought the business of his master's widow with
his wife's savings, and took over the plant at half its value. But he was
not even at the beginning. He was bound to print the Decrees of the
Republic without mistakes and without delay.
In this strait Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had the luck to discover a noble
Marseillais who had no mind to emigrate and lose his lands, nor yet to
show himself openly and lose his head, and