Two Poets | Page 4

consequently was fain to
earn a living by some lawful industry. A bargain was struck. M. le
Comte de Maucombe, disguised in a provincial printer's jacket, set up,
read, and corrected the decrees which forbade citizens to harbor
aristocrats under pain of death; while the "bear," now a "gaffer,"
printed the copies and duly posted them, and the pair remained safe and
sound.
In 1795, when the squall of the Terror had passed over, Nicolas
Sechard was obliged to look out for another jack-of-all-trades to be
compositor, reader, and foreman in one; and an Abbe who declined the
oath succeeded the Comte de Maucombe as soon as the First Consul
restored public worship. The Abbe became a Bishop at the Restoration,
and in after days the Count and the Abbe met and sat together on the
same bench of the House of Peers.
In 1795 Jerome-Nicolas had not known how to read or write; in 1802
he had made no progress in either art; but by allowing a handsome
margin for "wear and tear" in his estimates, he managed to pay a
foreman's wages. The once easy-going journeyman was a terror to his

"bears" and "monkeys." Where poverty ceases, avarice begins. From
the day when Sechard first caught a glimpse of the possibility of
making a fortune, a growing covetousness developed and sharpened in
him a certain practical faculty for business--greedy, suspicious, and
keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory. In course of
time he had learned to estimate at a glance the cost of printing per page
or per sheet in every kind of type. He proved to unlettered customers
that large type costs more to move; or, if small type was under
discussion, that it was more difficult to handle. The setting-up of the
type was the one part of his craft of which he knew nothing; and so
great was his terror lest he should not charge enough, that he always
made a heavy profit. He never took his eyes off his compositors while
they were paid by the hour. If he knew that a paper manufacturer was 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