Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  4. A plucky wife

  MARRIAGE brings about profound physical and psychological disturbances in a young girl. Furthermore, if she marries a middle-class husband with a business to run, she has to give her mind to an entirely new range of interests and get a grounding in business matters. She must therefore spend some time taking things in before she can play an active part. Unfortunately, David’s love for his wife retarded her education, for until some days or even weeks after the wedding he did not dare to tell her how their finances stood. In spite of the dire straits to which his father’s avarice had brought him he had not the heart to spoil their honeymoon period by putting her through the dismal apprenticeship of his exacting profession or by teaching her the things a tradesman’s wife has to know. And so the thousand francs – all the money he had – were spent on household needs instead of workshop expenses. David’s apathy and his wife’s ignorance lasted four months, and then they had a rude awakening! When the bill of exchange which David had drawn on Postel fell due, there was no money left for the housekeeping, and Eve knew only too well how this debt had been incurred not to sacrifice her wedding jewellery and her silver to its settlement. The very evening when this draft was paid off, Eve tried to make David talk about the business, for she had noticed that he was neglecting the printing-office and applying himself to the project he had explained to her some months before.

  Before he had been married two months David was spending most of his time in the shed at the bottom of the courtyard, in the small room which he used for moulding his rollers. Three months after his arrival in Angoulême David had replaced the old-fashioned ink-balls with a table and rollers made of glue and molasses which gave a smooth and even distribution of ink. The value of this early improvement in typography was so incontestable that the Cointet brothers adopted it as soon as they saw it in action. Against the party wall of this kitchen-laboratory David had built a fireplace and boiler on the pretext that he would thus need less fuel for recasting his rollers; but the rusty moulds stood ranged along the wall and the rollers were never cast a second time. Not only had David provided this room with a stout oak door lined with sheet-iron on the inside; he had also replaced the dirty window-panes with fluted glass so that they would admit less light and prevent people outside from seeing what he was about.

  At the first remark which Eve made to David on the subject of their future, he gave her a worried look and stopped her short with these words: ‘My dear, I know what your feelings must be when you see the workshop deserted and our business dwindling almost to nothing. But look,’ he continued as he led her to their bedroom window and pointed to his mysterious recess, ‘there our fortune lies… We must suffer for a few more months; but let’s suffer in patience. Leave me to solve the industrial problem you know about, and all our tribulations will come to an end.’

  David was so good-hearted, his devotion was so much to be taken for granted, that his poor wife, though concerned like all wives with the daily budget, took it upon herself to spare her husband all domestic worries. So she quitted the pretty blue and white bedroom where she had been content to do needlework while chatting with her mother and went down to one of the two wooden cages situated at the end of the printing-office so that she might study the practical side of typography. This in itself was an act of heroism on the part of an already pregnant woman. During these first months David’s presses had been idle, and the workmen required until then had one by one deserted. Snowed under with work, the brothers Cointet not only employed such journeymen in the district as were enticed by the prospect of working full time at their presses, but a few also from Bordeaux; and from there it was easy to obtain apprentices who thought they were clever enough to wriggle out of their articles. When she looked into the resources at their disposal Eve found that there were only three hands left: Cérizet, the apprentice David had brought with him from Paris, Marion, tethered to the firm like a watchdog, and Kolb, an Alsatian who had once been an odd-job man in the Didot firm. Having been called up for military service, Kolb happened to be stationed in Angoulême when David spotted him at a military review, just when his period of service was coming to an end. Kolb came to see David and fell in love with the bulky Marion, finding that she possessed all the qualities a man of his class looks for in a woman: the vigorous health which tans the cheeks, the masculine strength which enabled her to lift a type-forme with ease, the scrupulous honesty by which Alsatians lay great store, the devotion to one’s masters which is a sign of good character, and finally the thriftiness which had brought her a nest-egg consisting of one thousand francs, linen, clothes and personal effects of a truly provincial cleanliness. Marion was big and fat and thirty-six. She was flattered to receive attentions from a cuirassier who was five feet seven inches in height, well-built, and as strong as a fortress. He naturally conceived the idea of becoming a printer. As soon as the Alsatian had obtained his discharge from the army, Marion and David made quite an efficient ‘bear’ of him, although he could neither read nor write.

  The composition of the ‘town work’, as it was called, was not too abundant during these three months for Cérizet not to have coped with it. Being at one and the same time compositor, page-setter and senior hand in the printing-office, Cérizet achieved what Kant calls the ‘phenomenal triplicity’: he set up and corrected his settings, entered the orders and drew up the bills; but more often than not having no work to do, he sat in his cage at the back of the office reading novels while waiting for orders to come in – a poster or an invitation card. Marion, whom Séchard senior had trained, cut the paper, damped it, helped Kolb to print it, laid it out and trimmed it. None the less she also cooked the meals after doing the marketing in the early morning.

  When Eve asked Cérizet for the first six months’ accounts, she discovered that receipts only came to eight hundred francs. Expenditure, at a rate of three francs a day for Cérizet and Kolb – the one drawing a daily wage of two francs, the other of one franc – amounted to six hundred francs. Now, since the cost of material needed for work done and delivered amounted to something over a hundred francs, it was clear to Eve that during the first six months of his wedded life David had failed to cover his rent, the interest on capital based on the value of his stock and his printer’s licence, Marion’s wages, ink and finally the profits a printer should make: an accumulation of items expressed in printers’ language by the word stuffs, an expression derived from the cloth and silk used to soften the pressure of the clamping-screws on the type by the insertion of a square of ‘stuff’ (the ‘blanket’) between the platen of the press and the paper which is being printed. Having roughly computed the means at their disposal and the results they yielded, Eve could easily guess how small were the resources offered by their presses which were almost brought to a standstill by the voracious activity of the brothers Cointet who were at once paper-manufacturers, newspaper proprietors and appointed printers to the Bishop, the Prefect and the municipal authorities. The newspaper which, two years before, Séchard father and son had sold for twenty-two thousand francs, was now bringing in eighteen thousand francs a year. Eve saw through the calculations concealed behind the apparent generosity of the brothers Cointet, who were leaving the Séchard press just enough work to subsist on but not enough for it to compete with them.

  Taking over the business side, Eve began by drawing up an exact inventory of all the stock. She set Kolb, Marion and Cérizet to the task of tidying, cleaning and putting the workshop in order. Then, one evening when David was returning from a ramble in the fields, followed by an old woman who was carrying an enormous bundle wrapped in linen, Eve asked his advice as to how they could make use of the lumber left by old Séchard and promised him she would look after the business herself. At her husband’s suggestion she decided to use up all the remnants of paper she had found and sorted out by printing, in double columns and on one single sheet, the illustrated folk-tales which peasants paste up on the walls of their cottages: the story of the Wandering Je
w, Robert the Devil, the Fair Maguelonne and various legends of the saints. Eve turned Kolb into a pedlar. At first Cérizet wasted no time: from morning to night he set up these ingenuous broadsheets with their crude illustrations, and Marion pulled them off. Madame Chardon took charge of all domestic tasks while Eve coloured the engravings. In two months, thanks to Kolb’s activity and honesty, Madame Séchard sold three thousand sheets over an area of thirty miles round Angoulême. They cost her thirty francs to produce and brought in three hundred francs at a penny apiece.

  But by the time every cottage and tavern wall was papered with these legends, they had to think of some other speculation, for the Alsatian was not allowed to travel outside the Department. After rummaging round the workshop Eve discovered a collection of figures required for the printing of a so-called Shepherds’ Almanac, in which objects are represented by signs, pictures and symbols in red, black and blue. Old Séchard, illiterate as he was, had formerly made a lot of money by printing this little book intended for equally illiterate people. An almanac of this kind costs only a penny and comprises a hundred and twenty-eight pages of very small format. Delighted at the success of her broadsheets – the sort of production which is a speciality with small provincial presses – Madame Séchard decided to print the Shepherds’ Almanac on a large scale by putting her profits into it. The paper used for the Shepherds’ Almanac, sold annually in France in its millions, is coarser than that used for the Liège Almanac and costs about four francs a ream. Madame Séchard resolved to use up a hundred reams on a first run: that would make fifty thousand almanacs to dispose of and two thousand francs’ profit to reap.

  Preoccupied as a man so deeply engrossed must be, David nevertheless felt some surprise when he looked in at the office and heard a press groaning and saw Cérizet busily setting type under Madame Séchard’s direction. When he came in one day to survey the operations Eve had undertaken, it was a great triumph for her to win her husband’s approval. He thought the Almanac an excellent piece of business, and promised advice on the use of the various coloured inks needed for the figures in a production whose appeal was only to the eye. In fact, he decided that he would himself recast the rollers in his mysterious workshop so that he might, as far as possible, help his wife in her fine little venture.

  While this bustling activity was in its beginnings there came the heart-rending letters in which Lucien told his mother, sister and brother-in-law of his failure and financial difficulties in Paris. It is therefore easy to see that, in sending three hundred francs to the spoilt child, Eve, Madame Chardon and David had offered the poet their very heart’s blood. Overwhelmed at the news Lucien gave them and in despair at earning so little while working so courageously, Eve was awaiting with some trepidation an event which in most cases brings a young couple to the highest pitch of joy. Realizing that she was about to become a mother, she said to herself: ‘If my dear David has not reached his goal by the time of my confinement, what will become of us?… And who will look after the new ventures of our unfortunate printing-press?’

  5. A Judas in the making

  THE Shepherds’ Almanac ought to have been ready by the first of January, but Cérizet, who was responsible for all the composing, was now working at it so slowly that Madame Séchard was reduced to despair, the more so because she did not know enough about printing to be able to scold him: all she could do was to keep an eye on the young man from Paris. Cérizet was an orphan from the great Foundling Hospital in Paris and had been articled as apprentice to the Didot firm. From the age of fourteen to seventeen he had been devoted to David, who had him trained by one of his best journeymen while keeping him under his wing as printer’s devil. He naturally became interested in Cérizet because he found him intelligent, and he won his affection by giving him occasional enjoyments and treats which he was too poor to pay for himself. Blessed with an attractive though sly little face, reddish hair and cloudy blue eyes, Cérizet had brought his Paris street-arab ways with him to Angoulême. In this provincial capital his sharp, caustic and spiteful turn of mind made him a person to be feared. In Angoulême he was less under David’s surveillance, either because his mentor felt he could trust him now he was older, or because he thought that provincial life would have a salutary influence on him. He little guessed that Cérizet was playing the role of a plebeian Don Juan to three or four working-class girls and had gone to the bad completely. His moral code, a product of Paris taverns, made self-interest a law unto itself. And besides, the following year Cérizet was to ‘draw his number’, as the expression goes, for conscription, and so he could see no career for him and began to run up debts with the thought that he would be a soldier in six months’ time and beyond the reach of creditors. David still maintained some authority over this young man, not because he was his employer, nor because of the interest he had taken in him, but because the former street-urchin of Paris realized that David was a highly intelligent man. Cérizet soon began to fraternize with the Cointets’ workmen, attracted to them as he was by the prestige of the journeyman’s jacket and blouse, in fact by that esprit de corps which perhaps carries more weight among the lower than the upper classes. In their company Cérizet lost the few moral scruples that David had instilled in him. Nevertheless, when they chaffed him about the ‘old clogs’ in his printing-office – a contemptuous term applied by the ‘bears’ to the Séchards’ antiquated presses – and showed him the dozen fine steel presses at work in the Cointet’s immense printing-office, where the only wooden press remaining was used for striking off proofs, he still sided with David and proudly flung the following taunt at the scoffers: ‘With his “old clogs” my boss will go further than yours with their cast-iron contraptions which can turn out nothing but mass-books! He’s working on a new process which will make all the printers in France and Navarre queue up for it!’

  ‘All very fine, you miserable little twopenny-halfpenny type-setter,’ they would retort, ‘but your real boss is a laundrywoman!’

  ‘Never mind!’ Cérizet would reply. ‘She’s pretty. She’s nicer to look at than your bosses’ ugly mugs!’

  ‘Does looking at her keep you in food and drink?’

  From the public bars or perhaps from the printing-office door where these friendly wranglings went on, some inkling of the situation of the Séchard press came through to the Cointet brothers: they learnt of Eve’s speculative venture and decided that an enterprise which might set the unfortunate woman on the way to prosperity ought to be nipped in the bud.

  ‘We must give her a rap over the knuckles and put her off the taste for business,’ the two brothers told each other.

  The particular Cointet who ran the printing-office got in touch with Cérizet and suggested that he should do some proof-reading for them at so much per proof, in order, they said, to relieve their own proof-corrector who could not cope with all the jobs in hand. In this way, by putting in a few hours in the evenings, Cérizet was able to earn more with the Cointets than he earned the whole day with David. This meant that the Cointets were in contact with Cérizet: they discerned great possibilities in him and condoled with him for being in a situation so unfavourable to his interests.

  ‘You might well,’ one of the Cointets told him one day, ‘rise to being foreman in an important printing-office and earn six francs a day; and with your intelligence you might well acquire an interest in the business.’

  ‘How would it help me to have a good job?’ Cérizet replied. ‘I’m an orphan. I’m in next year’s call-up, and if I don’t draw a lucky number who’ll pay for a substitute for me?…’

  ‘If you make yourself useful,’ the affluent printer replied, ‘why should not someone advance you the money needed to buy you out?’

  ‘You don’t imagine my boss would do it?’

  ‘Why not? perhaps by then he will have discovered the secret he’s looking for.’

  Cointet made this remark in such a way as to arouse the worst possible thoughts in his listener’s mind, and Cérizet darte
d a look at the paper-manufacturer which was as eloquent as the most searching question.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s after,’ he answered warily, seeing that the master-printer was holding back. ‘But he’s not the sort of man to be looking for capitals in his lower case.’

  ‘Look here, my friend,’ said Cointet, taking up six sheets of the diocesan prayer-book and offering them to Cérizet. ‘If you can correct all that for us by tomorrow, you’ll have eighteen francs tomorrow. We’re being very decent, since we’re putting our competitor’s foreman in a way to make a bit of money. As a matter of fact, we could allow Madame Séchard to go all out for her Shepherds’ Almanac and then ruin her. Well, you have our permission to tell her that she won’t be the first in the market…’

  The reader will now understand why Cérizet was being so slow in composing the Séchard almanac. When Eve learnt that the Cointets were upsetting her poor little venture she was seized with terror, and though she tried to see a proof of loyalty in Cérizet’s somewhat hypocritical divulgation of the competition awaiting her, she soon noticed that this man, her only compositor, was showing signs of too lively a curiosity. She tried to believe that it was due to his youthfulness.

  ‘Cérizet,’ she said one morning, ‘you plant yourself on the doorstep and you wait for Monsieur Séchard to pass through so as to find out what he’s doing. You stare into the courtyard when he comes out of the workshop where the rollers are cast instead of getting on with the setting-up of our almanac. You ought not to do that, particularly when you see that I, his wife, respect his secrets and spare no effort to leave him free to get on with his work. If you hadn’t wasted time the almanac would be finished, Kolb would already be selling it, and the Cointets could do us no harm.’