Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

calamitous period of 1793, Séchard was about fifty, and a married man. His age and marital status saved him from the great call-up which bore off almost all working-men to the armed forces. The old pressman was the only hand left in the printing-office whose owner, known as ‘the gaffer’, had just died, leaving a childless widow. It looked as if the business was doomed to immediate extinction: the solitary ‘bear’ could not change into a ‘monkey’ because, being a merepressman, he could neither read nor write. Taking no account of his incompetence, a ‘Representative of the People’, in a hurry to promulgate the eloquent decrees issued by the National Convention, invested the pressman with a licence as master printer and requisitioned the printing-press. After accepting this dangerous licence, Citizen Séchard indemnified his master’s widow by paying over his own wife’s savings, with which he bought the whole plant at half its value. So far so good, but the Republican decrees had to be accurately and punctually printed. Faced with this difficult problem, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was lucky enough to come upon a nobleman from Marseilles who did not relish the idea of losing his estates by emigrating or of risking his head by showing himself in public, and could only earn his daily bread by taking on some sort of employment. And so Monsieur le Comte de Maucombe donned the humble overalls of a foreman in a provincial printing-office. He set up, read and himself corrected the decrees which imposed the death penalty on citizens who gave concealment to noblemen; the ‘bear’, who had now become the ‘gaffer’, struck them off and posted them up; and both of them came through safe and sound. By 1795 the squall of the Terror was over, and Nicolas Séchard had to find another factotum as compositor, proof-reader and foreman. An Abbé, who was destined to become a bishop under the Restoration for having refused to conform to the Civil Constitutions, replaced the Comte de Maucombe until the day when the First Consul re-established the Catholic religion. Later the Count and the bishop were to find themselves both sitting on the same bench in the House of Peers. Although in 1802 Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was no better at reading and writing than in 1793, his ‘makings’ were enough for him to be able to engage a foreman. The journeyman once so unconcerned about his future had become quite a martinet to his ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. Avarice begins where poverty ends. No sooner had the printer espied the possibility of making a fortune than self-interest developed in him a material understanding of his craft, but he became greedy, wary and sharp-sighted. With him practice made a long nose at theory. In theend he was able to appraise at a glance the cost of a page or folio according to the kind of character required. He proved to his ignorant customers that heavy type cost more to set than light; and when it came to the smaller type he averred that this was more difficult to handle. Composing being that part of printing of which he understood nothing, he was so afraid of undercharging that he never made anything but excessive estimates. If his compositors worked on a time-contract he never took his eyes off them. If he knew that a paper-manufacturer was in difficulties, he bought his stock for next to nothing and put it in store. And so by now he was already owner of the building which had housed the printing-office from time immemorial. He had every sort of good luck: he lost his wife, and had only one son, whom he sent to the town
lycée,
not so much in order to have him educated as to prepare the way for a successor: he treated him harshly in order to prolong the duration of his paternal authority; thus, during holidays, he made him work at the type-case, telling him that he must earn his living so that one day he might repay his poor father who was bleeding himself white in order to educate him. When the Abbé