Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  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 workshop floor 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 their hats knocked off by the iron bars which supported the presses. If they watched the agile movements of a compositor plucking his letters out of the hundred-and-fifty-two compartments of type, reading his copy, re-reading the line in his composing-stick and slipping in a lead, they bumped into a ream of damp paper lying under its weights, or caught their hips against the corner of a bench: all to the great amusement of ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. No one had ever arrived without mishap at the two large cages at the farther end of this cavern which formed two dismal annexes giving on to the courtyard and in which, on one side, the foreman sat in state and, on the other side, the master-printer. The courtyard walls were pleasantly decorated with vine-trellises which, given the owner’s reputation, lent an appetizing touch of local colour. At the farther end a tumbledown lean-to, in which the paper was damped and cut, backed on to a jet-black party wall. There too was the sink in which, before and after the printing-off, the ‘formes’ were washed. From this sink seeped away a decoction of ink mingled with the household slops, and that gave the peasants passing by on market-days the idea that the Devil was taking his ablutions inside the house. On one side of the lean-to was the kitchen, on the other a wood-pile. The first floor of the house, which had only two attic bedrooms above it, contained three rooms. The first, which ran the whole length of the alley except for the well of the old wooden staircase and received its light from the street through a little wooden casement, and from a court-yard through a bull’s-eye window, served both as antechamber and dining-room. Having no other decoration than white-wash, it exemplified the cynical simplicity of commercial greed; the dirty flags had never been washed; it was furnished with three rickety chairs, a round table and a sideboard standing between two doors which gave access, one to a bedroom, the other to the living-room; the windows and doors were brown with grime; as a rule it was cluttered with blank or printed paper, the bales of which were often covered with the remains of Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard’s dinner: dessert, dishes and bottles. The bedroom, whose leaded window-panes drew their light from the courtyard, was hung with some of those old tapestries which in provincial towns are displayed along the house-fronts on Corpus Christi day. The bed was a curtained four-poster with a coarse linen counterpane and a red serge coverlet over the foot; there were worm-eaten armchairs, two upholstered walnut chairs, an old writing-desk and a wall-clock hanging over the chimney-piece. This room owed its atmosphere of patriarchal simplicity and its abundance of brown tints to the worthy Rouzeau, Séchard’s predecessor and former employer. The living-room had been modernized by the late Madame Séchard and shocked the eye with its appalling wainscots painted in wig-maker’s blue; the panels were decorated with wall-paper depicting Oriental scenes in sepia on a white ground; the furniture consisted of six chairs with blue roan seats and backs in the shape of lyres. The two crudely-arched windows looking out on to the Place du Mûrier had no curtains; the chimney-piece was devoid of candelabra, clock and mirror. Madame Séchard had died when she was only half-way through with her plans for embellishment, and the ‘bear’, seeing no purpose in unproductive improvements, had abandoned them. It was into this room that Jérôme-Nicholas Séchard, pede titubante, ushered his son and pointed to a round table, on which was a statement of his printing-house stock drawn up by the foreman at his direction.

  ‘Read that, my boy’, said Jérôme-Nicolas as his besotted eyes rolled from the document to his son and from his son to the document. ‘You’ll see what a champion printing-office I’m giving you.’

  ‘Three wooden presses supported by iron bars, with imposing-stone of cast iron…’

  ‘One of my improvements,’ said the old man, interrupting his son’s reading.

  ‘With all their appurtenances: ink-troughs, balls and benches, etc. Sixteen hundred francs!… Why, father,’ said David, letting the inventory fall, ‘your presses are just old lumber, not worth three hundred francs. All they’re fit for is firewood.’

  ‘Old lumber, are they?…’ Séchard senior exclaimed, ‘Old lumber! Take the inventory and come downstairs! You’ll see whether the new-fangled ironmongery they make nowadays works like these good, well-tried tools. And then you’ll be ashamed to cry down honest presses which roll along like the mail-coaches and will go on running the rest of your life without needing the slightest repair. Old lumber! Yes, but good enough to keep your pot boiling! Old lumber which your father has been handling for twenty years and which helped him to make you just what you are!’

  The old man clattered down the rugged, worn, rickety staircase without tumbling over himself, opened the alley door leading to the workshop, rushed to the first of his presses which he had been crafty enough to have oiled and cleaned, and pointed to the strong oaken side-pieces which his apprentices had polished.

  ‘Isn’t that a jewel of a press?’ he asked. There was a wedding-invitation on it. The old ‘bear’ lowered the frisket on to the tympan and the tympan on to the carriage and rolled it under the press; he pulled the bar, unrolled the cord to draw back the carriage, and raised tympan and frisket with all the agility a young ‘bear’ might have shown. Thus handled, the press gave a pretty little squeak like that of a bird fluttering away after striking against a window-pane.

  ‘Is there a single English press that can do such quick work?’ said the father to his astonished son.

  The old man ran to the second and third presses in succession and performed the same operation on each of them with equal adroitness. The last one revealed to his wine-blurred gaze a spot which his apprentice had overlooked: with a resounding oath the drunkard gave it a rub with his coat-tail, like a horse-coper smoothing the hide of a horse he wants to sell.

  ‘With these presses, and without a foreman, you can earn yourself nine thousand francs a year, David. As your future partner, I am against your replacing them by those accursed iron presses which wear out the type. You went into raptures in Paris over the invention of that damned Englishman, an enemy of France, trying to make a fortune for the type-founders. Oh yes! You wanted Stanhope presses! To hell with your Stanhope presses. They cost two thousand five hundred francs apiece, almost twice as much as my three beauties put together, and wear down the type because there’s no give in them. I’m not educated like you, but bear this in mind: Stanhope presses may last longer, but they spell ruin for the type. My three presses will give you good service, the work will be pulled clean, and that’s all the people in Angoulême will ask for. Print with iron or wood, gold or silver, they won’t pay you a farthing more.’

  ‘Item,’ said David. ‘Five thousand pounds of type from the Vaflard foundry…’ The pupil of the Didots could not repress a smile on reading this name.

  ‘All right, laugh away! After a dozen years, the characters are as good as new. There’s a type-founder for you! Monsieur Vaflard is an honest man who turns out hard-wearing material; and in my opinion the best founder is the one you go to least often.’

  ‘Valued at ten thousand francs,’ David continued. ‘Ten thousand francs, father! But that works out at forty sous
a pound, and Messrs Didot only charge thirty-six sous a pound for their new pica. Your old batter is only worth the metal it’s cast in – ten sous a pound.’

  ‘So you call it better, do you? Bastard, italic and round type made by Monsieur Gillé, formerly printer to the Emperor: type worth six francs a pound, masterpieces of punch-cutting which I bought five years ago. And look, some of them still have the white of the casting on them!’ Séchard senior caught up a handful of still unused ‘sorts’ and showed them to his son, ‘I’m no scholar and can’t read or write, but I know enough about it to guess that the English script types used by your precious Didots were cribbed from those of the Gillé foundry. Here’s a ronde,’ he added, pointing to a case and taking an M from it: ‘a ronde in pica size which is still brand-new.’

  David perceived that there could be no arguing with his father. He had to take it or leave it, accept or refuse the lot. The old ‘bear’ had included everything in the inventory, even the ropes in the drying room. The smallest job-chase, the wetting-boards, the basins, the stone and brushes for cleaning, everything was priced with miserly precision. The total amounted to thirty thousand francs, including the master-printer’s licence and the good-will. David was mentally computing whether the transaction was feasible or not. Seeing his son musing in silence over the figure, Séchard senior grew anxious, for he preferred heated bargaining to mute acceptance. In this sort of dealing, bargaining denotes a business man capable of defending his interests. ‘The man who never haggles never pays,’ old Séchard used to say. As he watched his son closely to guess his thoughts, he ran through the list of his sorry utensils, all of them needed, he argued, for running a provincial printing-office. He took David round to a glazing-press and a trimmer for jobbing-work, and boasted of their usefulness and soundness.

  ‘Old tools are always best,’ he said. ‘In the printing business they ought to fetch a better price than the new ones, as they do in the gold-beaters’ trade.’

  Hideous vignettes representing Hymens and Cupids, dead people pushing up the lids of their sepulchres and representing a V or an M, and enormous play-bill borders complete with mummers’ masks were transformed, by virtue of Jérôme-Nicolas’s wine-sodden eloquence, into articles of tremendous value. He told his son that provincial people were strongly rooted in their habits, and that any attempt to provide them with better products would be wasted. He, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, had tried to sell them better almanacs than the Double Liégois, which was printed on sugar-bag paper. Well, they had preferred the original Double Liégois to the most splendid almanacs. David would soon recognize the importance of such old-fashioned stuff, which would sell better than the most costly novelties.

  ‘Ha! Ha! my boy! The provinces are one thing, Paris is another. If a man from L’Houmeau comes and orders wedding-cards, and if you print them without a Cupid and garlands, he won’t think he’s properly married: he’ll bring them back to you if he only sees an M on them, as with your Messrs Didot. They are the glory of the printing-trade, but their new-fangled ideas won’t take on in the provinces for a hundred years. And that’s the truth.’

  Generous souls make poor business men. David was one of those shy and sensitive people who shrink from argument and give way as soon as their opponent’s foil pricks too near to their heart. His lofty sentiments and the deference he still paid to the old drunkard made him even less fit to hold his own in discussion with his father, particularly since he credited him with the best intentions – for at first he put down the pressman’s voracious selfishness to affection for his tools. Nonetheless, since Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had bought the entire concern from Rouzeau’s widow for ten thousand francs in assignats, and since at present values thirty thousand francs was an exorbitant price, young David exclaimed:

  ‘But father, you are bleeding me white!’

  ‘I who brought you into the world…’ said the old sot, with his arms raised towards the drying-poles. ‘How much then do you reckon, David, for the printer’s licence? Do you know what the Advertising Journal is worth at ten sous a line? It’s a monopoly, and it brought in five hundred francs last month. My lad, take a look at the ledgers and see what comes in from the prefecture posters and registers and the work we do for the Mayor and the Bishop. You’re a lazy-bones with no thought of getting on. You’re boggling about the price of a horse which will carry you to some fine piece of property like the Marsac one.’

  To the inventory was appended a deed of partnership between father and son. The benevolent father was letting his house to the firm for twelve hundred francs a year, although he had bought it for less than six thousand francs; and he was reserving one of the two attic rooms for his own use. Until such time as David Séchard had paid off the thirty thousand francs, profits were to be equally divided; once he had repaid this sum to his father, he would become the one and only owner of the printing-office. David computed the value of the licence, the good-will and the journal without taking the plant into account; he decided he would be able to make good and accepted the terms. His father, accustomed to the niggling cautiousness of the peasant class, and knowing nothing of the wider scope of Parisian calculations, was astonished at so prompt a conclusion.

  ‘Can my son have made money?’ he wondered. ‘Or is he even now thinking of not paying up?’ With this thought in mind, he questioned him in order to find out if he had money with him, so as to take it from him as a first instalment. The father’s curiosity awakened the son’s suspicions, and the latter remained as tight as a clam. The next day, Séchard senior ordered his apprentice to remove to the second-floor bedroom all the furniture which he planned to have transported to his country cottage in carts which would be returning there empty. He stripped the three first-floor rooms bare and handed them over to his son; he also put him in possession of the printing-works without giving him a farthing for the workmen’s wages. When David asked his father, as a partner, to contribute to the outlay needed for their joint enterprise, the old pressman affected not to understand. He was not obliged, he said, to hand over money as well as the printing-office; his capital was already sunk in it. His son’s logic became more pressing, and he replied that, when he had bought the printing-works from Rouzeau’s widow, he had managed without a penny in his pocket. If he, a poor and completely ignorant workman, had succeeded, a pupil of the Didots would do better still. Moreover, David had been earning money thanks to the education his old father had paid for by the sweat of his brow, and now he could very well put it to use.

  ‘What have you done with your earnings?’ he asked, returning to the attack in order to clear up the problem which his son’s silence had left unsolved the previous day.

  ‘Well, I had to live, and I had to buy books,’ David answered indignantly.

  ‘Oh, you bought books! You won’t do well in business. People who buy books can’t be much good at printing them,’ the ‘bear’ replied.

  David experienced the most horrible of humiliations: a father’s degradation. He had to endure the spate of mean, tearful, shifty, mercenary arguments which the old miser used to express his refusal. Realizing that he had to stand alone, without support, finding that he was dealing with a speculator instead of a father, he thrust back his grief and tried, out of philosophical curiosity, to get to the bottom of his character. He drew his attention to the fact that he had never asked him to render an account of his mother’s fortune. Even if this fortune could not be set off against the price asked for the printing-works, it should at least go towards the running of the new partnership.

  ‘Why’, old Séchard replied, ‘all your mother owned was her brains and beauty.’

  At this reply, David saw through his father completely, and realized that, in order to extract such a reckoning from him, he would have to take legal proceedings, and that these would be interminable, costly and discreditable. The noble-hearted young man decided to shoulder the burden – a heavy one, for he knew what an effort it would be to discharge the obligations he was contract
ing towards his father.

  ‘I will work hard,’ he told himself. ‘After all, if I find it heavy going, so did the old fellow. Besides, shall I not be working for myself?’

  Séchard senior was worried by his son’s silence. ‘I’m leaving you a treasure,’ he said.

  David asked what this treasure was.

  ‘Marion,’ he replied.

  Marion was a sturdy country girl, indispensable for the running of the printing-works. She wetted the paper and trimmed it, ran errands, did the cooking, washed the clothes, unloaded the paper from the vans, went round collecting debts and cleaned the ink-balls. Had she had been able to read, old Séchard would have made a compositor of her.

  He set off on foot for the country. Although well pleased with his sale, which he was passing off as a venture in partnership, he was anxious about the way payment would be made. After the agony of making a sale, there always comes the agony of turning it into cash. All passions are essentially jesuitical. This man, who regarded education as useless, strove hard to believe in the effect it produces. His thirty thousand francs were so to speak lent out on mortgage, and the security for them was the sense of honour which education must have developed in his son. As a properly brought-up young man, David would sweat blood in order to meet his engagements; his knowledge of the trade would suggest ways and means; he had shown plenty of fine sentiments; he would certainly pay! Many fathers who act thus believe they have really been paternal, and old Séchard had managed to persuade himself of this by the time he reached his vineyard at Marsac, a little village some ten miles away from Angoulême. This domain, on which the previous owner had built a pleasant habitation, had grown in size from year to year since 1809, when the old ‘bear’ had acquired it. It was there that he exchanged the care of the printing-press for that of the winepress and, as he used to say, he had had too much to do with wine not to know all about the vine.