Two Poets | Page 5

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 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