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

Franciscan friars in La Fontaine’s
Tales.
He was short and pot-bellied like many of those old-fashioned lampions which consume more oil than wick – for excesses of every sort urge the body along its appointed path. Drunkenness, like addiction to study, makes a fat man fatter and a thin man thinner. For thirty years Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had been wearing the famous three-cornered municipal hat still to be seen on the heads of town-criers in certain provinces. His waistcoat and trousers were of greenish velvet. Finally, he wore an old brown frock-coat, stockings of patterned cotton and shoes with silver buckles. This costume, thanks to which the artisan was still manifest behind the bourgeois, was so suited to his vices and habits, so expressive of his way of life, that he looked as if he had come into the world fully clad: you could no more have imagined him without his clothes than you could imagine an onion without its peel.
    If this aged printer had not long since shown how far his blind cupidity could go, his plan for retirement would suffice to depict his character. In spite of the expert knowledge that his son must have acquired while training in the great Didot firm, he was proposing to strike a profitable deal with him – one which he had long been meditating. If the father was to make a good bargain, it had to be a bad one for the son. For this sorry individual recognized no father-and-son relationship in business. If in the beginning he had thought of David asbeing an only child, he later had only looked on him as an obvious purchaser whose interests were opposed to his own: he wanted to sell dear, whereas David would want to buy cheap; therefore his son was an enemy to be vanquished. This transformation of feeling into self-interest, which in educated people is usually a slow, tortuous and hypocritical process, was rapid and undeviating in the old ‘bear’, who thus showed how easily guileful
tipsiography
could triumph over expertise in typography. When his son arrived home, the old man displayed the commercial-minded tenderness which wily people show to their intended dupes: he fussed over him as a lover might have fussed over a mistress; he took him by the arm and told him where to step in order not to get mud on his shoes; he had had his bed warmed, a fire lit, a supper prepared. Next day, after trying to get his son intoxicated in the course of a copious dinner, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, by now well-seasoned, said to him: ‘Let’s talk business’: a proposal so strangely sandwiched between two hiccoughs that David begged him to put it off until the following morning. But the old ‘bear’ was too expert at drawing advantage from his own tipsiness to delay so long-prepared a battle. Moreover, he said, having had his nose so close to the grindstone for fifty years, he did not intend to keep it there one single hour more. Tomorrow his son would be the ‘gaffer’.
    Here perhaps a word about Séchard’s establishment is needed. The printing-office stood at the spot where the rue de Beaulieu runs into the Place du Mûrier, and had been set up in the building towards the end of the reign of Louis XV. And so a long time had elapsed since these premises had been adapted to the needs of this industry. The ground-floor consisted of one enormous room to which light came from the street through an old glazed window, and from an inner court through a large sash-frame. There was also an alley, leading to the master-printer’s office. But in provincial towns the processes of printing always arouse such lively curiosity that customers preferred to come in by the front entrance, even though this meant walking down a few steps, since the workshopfloor was below street level. Gaping visitors never minded the inconvenience of threading their devious way through the workshop. If they paid heed to the sheets of paper hanging like cradles from cords attached to the ceiling, they stumbled against rows of cases, or had