Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF

departed, Séchard chose a new foreman from among his four compositors, one whom the future bishop had singled out as being as honest as he was intelligent. He was thus in a position to look forward to the time when his son would be able to run the business so that it might expand in young and able hands. David Séchard was a brilliant pupil at the
lycée
of Angoulême. Although the elder Séchard was only a ‘bear’ who had made good without knowledge or education and had a healthy contempt for learning, he sent his son to Paris to study more advanced typography; but he so vehemently recommended him to amass a fair sum of money in the capital, which he called the ‘working-man’s paradise’, and so often warned him not to count on dipping into his father’s purse, that it was obvious that he looked on his son’s sojourn in that ‘home of sapience’ as a means for gaining his own ends. While learning his trade in Paris, David completed his education: the foreman of the Didot works became a scholar. Towards the end of 1819he left Paris without having cost his father a penny. The latter was now recalling him in order to hand over the management to him. At that time the Séchard press owned the only journal for legal notices that existed in the
département.
It also did all the printing for the prefectoral and episcopal administrations: these three clients were enough to give great prosperity to an energetic young man.
    At that period precisely, a firm of paper-manufacturers, the brothers Cointet, purchased the second printer’s licence in the Angoulême district. Up to then Séchard senior had managed to keep it completely inoperative by taking advantage of the military crisis which, during the Empire, damped down all industrial enterprise. For this reason he had not bothered to buy it himself and his parsimony was destined to bring ruin in the end to his ancient printing-press. When he learnt of this acquisition, old Séchard thanked his stars that the conflict likely to ensue between his own establishment and that of the Cointets would be sustained by his son, and not himself. ‘I should have had the worst of it’, he told himself. ‘But a young man trained by the Didots will come out all right.’ The septuagenarian was sighing for the moment when he could take his ease. His knowledge of high-class typography was scanty, but, to compensate for this, he was known as a past master in an art which workmen printers have jestingly dubbed
tipsiography:
an art held in great esteem by the divine author of
Pantagruel,
but one whose cultivation, persecuted as it is by so-called Temperance Societies, has fallen more and more into disrepute. Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, true to the destiny which his patronymic marked out for him, 1 was endowed with an unquenchable thirst. This passion for the crushed grape – a taste so natural with ‘bears’ that Monsieur de Chateaubriand has discovered its effects in the genuine bears of North America – had for long been kept within just bounds by his wife; but philosophers have observed that habits contracted in early life attack old age with renewed vigour. Séchard’s case confirmed this moral law: the older hegrew, the more he loved imbibing. This passion left such marks on his ursine countenance as to make it truly unique: his nose had assumed the shape and contours of a capital A of triple canon size, while both of his veinous cheeks resembled the kind of vine-leaf which is swollen with violet, purple and often multi-coloured gibbosities: it made one think of a monstrous truffle wrapped round with autumn shoots. Lurking behind tufty eyebrows which were like two snow-laden bushes, his small grey eyes, sparkling with the cunning of avarice that was killing all other emotions, even fatherly affection, in him, showed that he kept his wits about him even when he was drunk. His cranium, completely bald on top, though it was still fringed with greying curls, called to mind the