The longest, without exception, of Balzac's books, and
one which contains hardly any passage that is not very nearly of
his best,Illusions Perduessuffers, I
think, a little in point of composition from the mixture of the
Angouleme scenes of its first and third parts with the purely
Parisian interest ofUn Grand Homme de
Province. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gain
in distinctness and lucidity of arrangement derived from
puttingLes Deux PoetesandEve et David(a much better
title than that which has been preferred in theEdition
Definitive) together in one volume, and reserving the
greatness and decadence of Lucien de Rubempre for another. It is
distinctly awkward that this should be divided, as it is itself an
enormous episode, a sort of Herodotean parenthesis, rather than an
integral part of the story. And, as a matter of fact, it joins on
much more to theSplendeurs et Miseres des
Courtisanesthan to its actual companions. In fact, it
is an instance of the somewhat haphazard and arbitrary way in which
the actual division of theComediehas
worked, that it should, dealing as it does wholly and solely with
Parisian life, be put in theScenes de la Vie de
Province, and should be separated from its natural
conclusion not merely as a matter of volumes, but as a matter of
divisions. In making the arrangement, however, it is necessary to
remember Balzac's own scheme, especially as the connection of the
three parts in other ways is too close to permit the wrenching of
them asunder altogether and finally. This caution given, all that
is necessary can be done by devoting the first part of the
introduction entirely to the first and third or Angouleme parts,
and by consecrating the latter part to the egregious Lucien by
himself.There is a double gain in doing this, for, independently of
the connection as above referred to, Lucien has little to do except
as an opportunity for the display of virtue by his sister and David
Sechard; and the parts in which they appear are among the most
interesting of Balzac's work. The "Idyllic" charm of this marriage
for love, combined as it is with exhibitions of the author's power
in more than one of the ways in which he loved best to show it, has
never escaped attention from Balzac's most competent critics. He
himself had speculated in print and paper before David Sechard was
conceived; he himself had for all "maniacs," all men of one idea,
the fraternal enthusiasm of a fellow-victim. He could never touch a
miser without a sort of shudder of interest; and that singular
fancy of his for describing complicated legal and commercial
undertakings came in too. Nor did he spare, in this wide-ranging
book, to bring in other favorite matters of his,
thehobereau—or squireen—aristocracy, the
tittle-tattle of the country town and so forth.The result is a book of multifarious interest, not hampered,
as some of its fellows are, by an uncertainty on the author's part
as to what particular hare he is coursing. Part of the interest,
after the description of the printing office and of old Sechard's
swindling of his son, is a doubling, it is true, upon that
ofLa muse du Departement, and is perhaps
a little less amusingly done; but it is blended with better
matters. Sixte du Chatelet is a considerable addition to Balzac's
gallery of the aristocracy in transition—of the
Bonaparteparvenuswhom perhaps he
understood even better than the old nobility, for they were already
in his time becoming adulterated and alloyed; or than the new folk
of business and finance, for they were but in their earliest
stages. Nor is the rest of the society of Madame de Bargeton
inferior.But the real interest both ofLes Deux
Poetes, and still more ofEve et
David, between which two, be it always remembered,
comes in theDistinguished Provincial,
lies in the characters who gave their name to the last part. In
David, the man of one idea, who yet has room for an honest love and
an all-deserved friendship, Balzac could not go wrong. David
Sechard takes a place by himself among the sheep of
theComedie. Some may indeed say that this
phrase is unfortunate, that Balzac's sheep have more qualities of
the mutton than innocence. It is not quite to be denied. But David
is very far indeed from being a good imbecile, like Cesar
Birotteau, or a man intoxicated out of common-sense by a passion
respectable in itself, like Goriot. His sacrifice of his mania in
time is something—nay, it is very much; and his disinterested
devotion to his brother-in-law does not quite pass the limits of
sense.But what shall we say of Eve? She is good of course, good as
gold, as Eugenie Grandet herself; and the novelist has been kind
enough to allow her to be happier. But has he quite interested us
in her love for David? Has he even persuaded us that the love
existed in a form deserving the name? Did not Eve rather take her
husband to protect him, to look after him, than either to love,
honor, and obey in the orthodox sense, or to love for love's sake
only, as some still take their husbands and wives even at the end
of the nineteenth century? This is a question which each reader
must answer for himself; but few are likely to refuse assent to the
sentence, "Happy the husband who has such a wife as Eve
Chardon!"The central part ofIllusions
Perdues, which in reason stands by itself, and may do
so ostensibly with considerably less than the introduction
explanatory which Balzac often gives to his own books, is one of
the most carefully worked out and diversely important of his
novels. It should, of course, be read beforeSplendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, which is
avowedly its second part, a small piece ofEve et
Davidserving as the link between them. But it is
almost sufficient by and to itself.Lucien de Rubempre
ou le Journalismewould be the most straightforward and
descriptive title for it, and one which Balzac in some of his moods
would have been content enough to use.The story of it is too continuous and interesting to need
elaborate argument, for nobody is likely to miss any important link
in it. But Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse and success of
analysis, the double disillusion which introduces itself at once
between Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes
anyredintegratio amorisof a valid kind
impossible, because each cannot but be aware that the other has
anticipated the rupture. It will not, perhaps, be a matter of such
general agreement whether he has or has not exceeded the fair
license of the novelist in attributing to Lucien those charms of
body and gifts of mind which make him, till his moral weakness and
worthlessness are exposed, irresistible, and enable him for a time
to repair his faults by a sort of fairy good-luck. The sonnets
ofLes Marguerites, which were given to
the author by poetical friends —Gautier, it is said, supplied the
"Tulip"—are undoubtedly good and sufficient. But Lucien's first
article, which is (according to a practice the rashness of which
cannot be too much deprecated) given likewise, is certainly not
very wonderful; and the Paris press must have been rather at a low
ebb if it made any sensation. As we are not favored with any actual
portrait of Lucien, detection is less possible here, but the
novelist has perhaps a very little abused the privilege of making a
hero, "Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave," or rather "Like
Paris handsome, and like Phoebus clever." There is no doubt,
however, that the interest of the book lies partly in the vivid and
severe picture of journalism given in it, and partly in the way in
which the character of Lucien is adjusted to show up that of the
abstract journalist still farther.How far is the picture true? It must be said, in fairness to
Balzac, that a good many persons of some competence in France have
pronounced for its truth there; and if that be so, all one can say
is, "So much the worse for French journalists." It is also certain
that a lesser, but still not inconsiderable number of persons in
England—generally persons who, not perhaps with Balzac's genius,
have like Balzac published books, and are not satisfied with their
reception by the press—agree more or less as to England. For
myself, I can only say that I do not believe things have ever been
quite so bad in England, and that I am quite sure there never has
been any need for them to be. There are, no doubt, spiteful,
unprincipled, incompetent practitioners of journalism as of
everything else; and it is of course obvious that while
advertisements, the favor of the chiefs of parties, and so forth,
are temptations to newspaper managers not to hold up a very high
standard of honor, anonymity affords to newspaper writers a
dangerously easy shield to cover malice or dishonesty. But I can
only say that during long practice in every kind of political and
literary journalism, I never was seriously asked to write anything
I did not think, and never had the slightest difficulty in
confining myself to what I did think.In fact Balzac, like a good many other men of letters who
abuse journalism, put himself very much out of court by continually
practising it, not merely during his struggling period, but long
after he had made his name, indeed almost to the very last. And it
is very hard to resist the conclusion that when he charged
journalism generally not merely with envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, but with hopeless and pervading dishonesty, he
had little more ground for it than an inability to conceive how any
one, except from vile reasons of this kind, could fail to praise
Honore de Balzac.At any rate, either his art by itself, or his art assisted
and strengthened by that personal feeling which, as we have seen
counted for much with him, has here produced a wonderfully vivid
piece of fiction—one, I think, inferior in success to hardly
anything he has done. Whether, as at a late period a very
well-informed, well-affected, and well-equipped critic hinted, his
picture of the Luciens and the Lousteaus did not a little to
propagate both is another matter. The seriousness with which Balzac
took the accusation perhaps shows a little sense of galling. But
putting this aside,Un Grand Homme de Province a
Parismust be ranked, both for comedy and tragedy, both
for scheme and execution, in the first rank of his
work.The bibliography of this long and curious book—almost the
only one which contains some verse, some of Balzac's own, some
given to him by his more poetical friends—occupies full ten pages
of M. de Lovenjoul's record. The first part, which bore the general
title, was a book from the beginning, and appeared in 1837 in
theScenes de la Vie de Province. It had
five chapters, and the original verse it contained had appeared in
theAnnalaes Romantiquesten years earlier
with slight variants. The second part,Un Grand Homme
de Province, likewise appeared as a book,
independently published by Souverain in 1839 in two volumes and
forty chapters. But two of these chapters had been inserted a few
days before the publications in
theEstafette. Here Canalis was more
distinctly identified with Lamartine than in the subsequent texts.
The third part, unlike its forerunners, appeared serially in two
papers,L'EtatandLe
Parisien, in the year 1843, under the title
ofDavid Sechard, ou les Souffrances d'un
Inventeur, and next year became a book under the first
title only. But before this last issue it had been united to the
other two parts, and had appeared asEve et
Davidin the first edition of the
_Comedie.George
Saintsbury
I
At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the
ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small
provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely
connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in
Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention
to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans"
was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls
were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman
dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on
which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of
paper, being made of marble, literally deserved its name of
"impression-stone." Modern machinery has swept all this old-world
mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which, with all its
imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for the Elzevirs,
Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that
something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for
it plays a part in this chronicle of great small
things.Sechard had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a "bear"
in compositors' slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the
pressman from ink-table to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt
suggested the nickname. The "bears," however, make matters even by
calling the compositors monkeys, on account of the nimble industry
displayed by those gentlemen in picking out the type from the
hundred and fifty-two compartments of the cases.In the disastrous year 1793, Sechard, being fifty years old
and a married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the
bulk of French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only
hand left in the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the
"gaffer") died, leaving a widow, but no children, the business
seemed to be on the verge of extinction; for the solitary "bear"
was quite incapable of the feat of transformation into a "monkey,"
and in his quality of pressman had never learned to read or write.
Just then, however, a Representative of the People being in a
mighty hurry to publish the Decrees of the Convention, bestowed a
master printer's license on Sechard, and requisitioned the
establishment. Citizen Sechard accepted the dangerous patent,
bought the business of his master's widow with his wife's savings,
and took over the plant at half its value. But he was not even at
the beginning. He was bound to print the Decrees of the Republic
without mistakes and without delay.In this strait Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had the luck to
discover a noble Marseillais who had no mind to emigrate and lose
his lands, nor yet to show himself openly and lose his head, and
consequently was fain to earn a living by some lawful industry. A
bargain was struck. M. le Comte de Maucombe, disguised in a
provincial printer's jacket, set up, read, and corrected the
decrees which forbade citizens to harbor aristocrats under pain of
death; while the "bear," now a "gaffer," printed the copies and
duly posted them, and the pair remained safe and
sound.In 1795, when the squall of the Terror had passed over,
Nicolas Sechard was obliged to look out for another
jack-of-all-trades to be compositor, reader, and foreman in one;
and an Abbe who declined the oath succeeded the Comte de Maucombe
as soon as the First Consul restored public worship. The Abbe
became a Bishop at the Restoration, and in after days the Count and
the Abbe met and sat together on the same bench of the House of
Peers.In 1795 Jerome-Nicolas had not known how to read or write; in
1802 he had made no progress in either art; but by allowing a
handsome margin for "wear and tear" in his estimates, he managed to
pay a foreman's wages. The once easy-going journeyman was a terror
to his "bears" and "monkeys." Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
From the day when Sechard first caught a glimpse of the possibility
of making a fortune, a growing covetousness developed and sharpened
in him a certain practical faculty for business—greedy, suspicious,
and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory. In
course of time he had learned to estimate at a glance the cost of
printing per page or per sheet in every kind of type. He proved to
unlettered customers that large type costs more to move; or, if
small type was under discussion, that it was more difficult to
handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of his craft of
which he knew nothing; and so great was his terror lest he should
not charge enough, that he always made a heavy profit. He never
took his eyes off his compositors while they were paid by the hour.
If he knew that a paper manufacturer was in difficulties, he would
buy up his stock at a cheap rate and warehouse the paper. So from
this time forward he was his own landlord, and owned the old house
which had been a printing office from time immemorial.He had every sort of luck. He was left a widower with but one
son. The boy he sent to the grammar school; he must be educated,
not so much for his own sake as to train a successor to the
business; and Sechard treated the lad harshly so as to prolong the
time of parental rule, making him work at case on holidays, telling
him that he must learn to earn his own living, so as to recompense
his poor old father, who was slaving his life out to give him an
education.Then the Abbe went, and Sechard promoted one of his four
compositors to be foreman, making his choice on the future bishop's
recommendation of the man as an honest and intelligent workman. In
these ways the worthy printer thought to tide over the time until
his son could take a business which was sure to extend in young and
clever hands.David Sechard's school career was a brilliant one. Old
Sechard, as a "bear" who had succeeded in life without any
education, entertained a very considerable contempt for attainments
in book learning; and when he sent his son to Paris to study the
higher branches of typography, he recommended the lad so earnestly
to save a good round sum in the "working man's paradise" (as he was
pleased to call the city), and so distinctly gave the boy to
understand that he was not to draw upon the paternal purse, that it
seemed as if old Sechard saw some way of gaining private ends of
his own by that sojourn in the Land of Sapience. So David learned
his trade, and completed his education at the same time, and
Didot's foreman became a scholar; and yet when he left Paris at the
end of 1819, summoned home by his father to take the helm of
business, he had not cost his parent a farthing.Now Nicolas Sechard's establishment hitherto had enjoyed a
monopoly of all the official printing in the department, besides
the work of the prefecture and the diocese—three connections which
should prove mighty profitable to an active young printer; but
precisely at this juncture the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper
manufacturers, applied to the authorities for the second printer's
license in Angouleme. Hitherto old Sechard had contrived to reduce
this license to a dead letter, thanks to the war crisis of the
Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial enterprise; but he had
neglected to buy up the right himself, and this piece of parsimony
was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought joyfully when he
heard the news that the coming struggle with the Cointets would be
fought out by his son and not by himself."I should have gone to the wall," he thought, "but a young
fellow from the Didots will pull through."The septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at
ease in his own fashion. If his knowledge of the higher branches of
the craft of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was
supposed to be past master of an art which workmen pleasantly call
"tipple-ography," an art held in high esteem by the divine author
ofPantagruel; though of late,
by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the
cult has fallen, day by day, into disuse.Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, bound by the laws of etymology to be
a dry subject, suffered from an inextinguishable thirst. His wife,
during her lifetime, managed to control within reasonable bounds
the passion for the juice of the grape, a taste so natural to the
bear that M. de Chateaubriand remarked it among the ursine tribes
of the New World. But philosophers inform us that old age is apt to
revert to the habits of youth, and Sechard senior is a case in
point—the older he grew, the better he loved to drink. The
master-passion had given a stamp of originality to an ursine
physiognomy; his nose had developed till it reached the proportions
of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks looked like
vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches of purple,
madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the
countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine
tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick
eyebrows like bushes covered with snow, were agleam with the
cunning of avarice that had extinguished everything else in the
man, down to the very instinct of fatherhood. Those eyes never lost
their cunning even when disguised in drink. Sechard put you in mind
of one of La Fontaine's Franciscan friars, with the fringe of
grizzled hair still curling about his bald pate. He was short and
corpulent, like one of the old-fashioned lamps for illumination,
that burn a vast deal of oil to a very small piece of wick; for
excess of any sort confirms the habit of body, and drunkenness,
like much study, makes the fat man stouter, and the lean man leaner
still.For thirty years Jerome-Nicolas-Sechard had worn the famous
municipal three-cornered hat, which you may still see here and
there on the head of the towncrier in out-of-the-way places. His
breeches and waistcoat were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an
old-fashioned brown greatcoat, gray cotton stockings, and shoes
with silver buckles to them. This costume, in which the workman
shone through the burgess, was so thoroughly in keeping with the
man's character, defects, and way of life, that he might have come
ready dressed into the world. You could no more imagine him apart
from his clothes than you could think of a bulb without its husk.
If the old printer had not long since given the measure of his
blind greed, the very nature of the man came out in the manner of
his abdication.Knowing, as he did, that his son must have learned his
business pretty thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he
had yet been ruminating for a long while over the bargain that he
meant to drive with David. All that the father made, the son, of
course, was bound to lose, but in business this worthy knew nothing
of father or son. If, in the first instance, he had looked on David
as his only child, later he came to regard him as the natural
purchaser of the business, whose interests were therefore his own.
Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of course, to buy cheap; his
son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was his duty to get the
better of him. The transformation of sentiment into self-seeking,
ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in better
educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who
demonstrated the superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over
book-learned typography.David came home, and the old man received him with all the
cordiality which cunning folk can assume with an eye to business.
He was as full of thought for him as any lover for his mistress;
giving him his arm, telling him where to put his foot down so as to
avoid the mud, warming the bed for him, lighting a fire in his
room, making his supper ready. The next day, after he had done his
best to fluster his son's wits over a sumptuous dinner,
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, after copious potations, began with a "Now
for business," a remark so singularly misplaced between two
hiccoughs, that David begged his parent to postpone serious matters
until the morrow. But the old "bear" was by no means inclined to
put off the long-expected battle; he was too well prepared to turn
his tipsiness to good account. He had dragged the chain these fifty
years, he would not wear it another hour; to-morrow his son should
be the "gaffer."Perhaps a word or two about the business premises may be said
here. The printing-house had been established since the reign of
Louis XIV. in the angle made by the Rue de Beaulieu and the Place
du Murier; it had been devoted to its present purposes for a long
time past. The ground floor consisted of a single huge room lighted
on the side next the street by an old-fashioned casement, and by a
large sash window that gave upon the yard at the back. A passage at
the side led to the private office; but in the provinces the
processes of typography excite such a lively interest, that
customers usually preferred to enter by way of the glass door in
the street front, though they at once descended three steps, for
the floor of the workshop lay below the level of the street. The
gaping newcomer always failed to note the perils of the passage
through the shop; and while staring at the sheets of paper strung
in groves across the ceiling, ran against the rows of cases, or
knocked his hat against the tie-bars that secured the presses in
position. Or the customer's eyes would follow the agile movements
of a compositor, picking out type from the hundred and fifty-two
compartments of his case, reading his copy, verifying the words in
the composing-stick, and leading the lines, till a ream of damp
paper weighted with heavy slabs, and set down in the middle of the
gangway, tripped up the bemused spectator, or he caught his hip
against the angle of a bench, to the huge delight of boys, "bears,"
and "monkeys." No wight had ever been known to reach the further
end without accident. A couple of glass-windowed cages had been
built out into the yard at the back; the foreman sat in state in
the one, the master printer in the other. Out in the yard the walls
were agreeably decorated by trellised vines, a tempting bit of
color, considering the owner's reputation. On the one side of the
space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in a
ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was
trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary
language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams
issuing thence blended with the ooze from the kitchen sink, and
found their way into the kennel in the street outside; till
peasants coming into the town of a market day believed that the
Devil was taking a wash inside the establishment.As to the house above the printing office, it consisted of
three rooms on the first floor and a couple of attics in the roof.
The first room did duty as dining-room and lobby; it was exactly
the same length as the passage below, less the space taken up by
the old-fashioned wooden staircase; and was lighted by a narrow
casement on the street and a bull's-eye window looking into the
yard. The chief characteristic of the apartment was a cynic
simplicity, due to money-making greed. The bare walls were covered
with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured,
the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and
a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a
sitting-room. Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated
grime. Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered
the floor, and more frequently than not the remains of Sechard's
dinner, empty bottles and plates, were lying about on the
packages.The bedroom was lighted on the side of the yard by a window
with leaded panes, and hung with the old-world tapestry that
decorated house fronts in provincial towns on Corpus Christi Day.
For furniture it boasted a vast four-post bedstead with canopy,
valances and quilt of crimson serge, a couple of worm-eaten
armchairs, two tapestry-covered chairs in walnut wood, an aged
bureau, and a timepiece on the mantel-shelf. The Seigneur Rouzeau,
Jerome-Nicolas' master and predecessor, had furnished the homely
old-world room; it was just as he had left it.The sitting-room had been partly modernized by the late Mme.
Sechard; the walls were adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold,
painted the color of powder blue. The panels were decorated with
wall-paper —Oriental scenes in sepia tint—and for all furniture,
half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped backs and blue leather
cushions were ranged round the room. The two clumsy arched windows
that gave upon the Place du Murier were curtainless; there was
neither clock nor candle sconce nor mirror above the mantel-shelf,
for Mme. Sechard had died before she carried out her scheme of
decoration; and the "bear," unable to conceive the use of
improvements that brought in no return in money, had left it at
this point.Hither,pede titubante,
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard brought his son, and pointed to a sheet of
paper lying on the table—a valuation of plant drawn up by the
foreman under his direction."Read that, my boy," said Jerome-Nicolas, rolling a drunken
eye from the paper to his son, and back to the paper. "You will see
what a jewel of a printing-house I am giving you.""'Three wooden presses, held in position by iron tie-bars,
cast-iron plates——'""An improvement of my own," put in Sechard
senior."'——Together with all the implements, ink-tables, balls,
benches, et cetera, sixteen hundred francs!' Why, father," cried
David, letting the sheet fall, "these presses of yours are old
sabots not worth a hundred crowns; they are only fit for
firewood.""Sabots?" cried old Sechard, "Sabots? There, take the inventory and
let us go downstairs. You will soon see whether your paltry
iron-work contrivances will work like these solid old tools, tried
and trusty. You will not have the heart after that to slander
honest old presses that go like mail coaches, and are good to last
you your lifetime without needing repairs of any sort. Sabots! Yes,
sabots that are like to hold salt enough to cook your eggs
with—sabots that your father has plodded on with these twenty
years; they have helped him to make you what you are."The father, without coming to grief on the way, lurched down
the worn, knotty staircase that shook under his tread. In the
passage he opened the door of the workshop, flew to the nearest
press (artfully oiled and cleaned for the occasion) and pointed out
the strong oaken cheeks, polished up by the
apprentice."Isn't it a love of a press?"A wedding announcement lay in the press. The old "bear"
folded down the frisket upon the tympan, and the tympan upon the
form, ran in the carriage, worked the lever, drew out the carriage,
and lifted the frisket and tympan, all with as much agility as the
youngest of the tribe. The press, handled in this sort, creaked
aloud in such fine style that you might have thought some bird had
dashed itself against the window pane and flown away
again."Where is the English press that could go at that pace?" the
parent asked of his astonished son.Old Sechard hurried to the second, and then to the third in
order, repeating the manoeuvre with equal dexterity. The third
presenting to his wine-troubled eye a patch overlooked by the
apprentice, with a notable oath he rubbed it with the skirt of his
overcoat, much as a horse-dealer polishes the coat of an animal
that he is trying to sell."With those three presses, David, you can make your nine
thousand francs a year without a foreman. As your future partner, I
am opposed to your replacing these presses by your cursed cast-iron
machinery, that wears out the type. You in Paris have been making
such a to-do over that damned Englishman's invention—a foreigner,
an enemy of France who wants to help the ironfounders to a fortune.
Oh! you wanted Stanhopes, did you? Thanks for your Stanhopes, that
cost two thousand five hundred francs apiece, about twice as much
as my three jewels put together, and maul your type to pieces,
because there is no give in them. I haven't book-learning like you,
but you keep this well in mind, the life of the Stanhope is the
death of the type. Those three presses will serve your turn well
enough, the printing will be properly done, and folk here in
Angouleme won't ask any more of you. You may print with presses
made of wood or iron or gold or silver,theywill never pay you a farthing
more.""'Item,'" pursued David, "'five thousand pounds weight of
type from M. Vaflard's foundry——'" Didot's apprentice could not
help smiling at the name."Laugh away! After twelve years of wear, that type is as good
as new. That is what I call a typefounder! M. Vaflard is an honest
man, who uses hard metal; and, to my way of thinking, the best
typefounder is the one you go to most seldom.""'——Taken at ten thousand francs,'" continued David. "Ten
thousand francs, father! Why, that is two francs a pound, and the
Messrs. Didot only ask thirty-six sous for theirCicero! These nail-heads of yours will
only fetch the price of old metal—fivepence a pound.""You call M. Gille's italics, running-hand and round-hand,
'nail-heads,' do you? M. Gille, that used to be printer to the
Emperor! And type that costs six francs a pound! masterpieces of
engraving, bought only five years ago. Some of them are as bright
yet as when they came from the foundry. Look here!"Old Sechard pounced upon some packets of unused sorts, and
held them out for David to see."I am not book-learned; I don't know how to read or write;
but, all the same, I know enough to see that M. Gille's sloping
letters are the fathers of your Messrs. Didot's English
running-hand. Here is the round-hand," he went on, taking up an
unused pica type.David saw that there was no way of coming to terms with his
father. It was a case of Yes or No—of taking or leaving it. The
very ropes across the ceiling had gone down into the old "bear's"
inventory, and not the smallest item was omitted; jobbing chases,
wetting-boards, paste-pots, rinsing-trough, and lye-brushes had all
been put down and valued separately with miserly exactitude. The
total amounted to thirty thousand francs, including the license and
the goodwill. David asked himself whether or not this thing was
feasible.Old Sechard grew uneasy over his son's silence; he would
rather have had stormy argument than a wordless acceptance of the
situation. Chaffering in these sorts of bargains means that a man
can look after his interests. "A man who is ready to pay you
anything you ask will pay nothing," old Sechard was saying to
himself. While he tried to follow his son's train of thought, he
went through the list of odds and ends of plant needed by a country
business, drawing David now to a hot-press, now to a cutting-press,
bragging of its usefulness and sound condition."Old tools are always the best tools," said he. "In our line
of business they ought to fetch more than the new, like
goldbeaters' tools."Hideous vignettes, representing Hymen and Cupids, skeletons
raising the lids of their tombs to describe a V or an M, and huge
borders of masks for theatrical posters became in turn objects of
tremendous value through old Jerome-Nicolas' vinous eloquence. Old
custom, he told his son, was so deeply rooted in the district that
he (David) would only waste his pains if he gave them the finest
things in life. He himself had tried to sell them a better class of
almanac than theDouble Liegeoison grocers' paper; and what came of it?—the originalDouble Liegeoissold better than the
most sumptuous calendars. David would soon see the importance of
these old-fashioned things when he found he could get more for them
than for the most costly new-fangled articles."Aha! my boy, Paris is Paris, and the provinces are the
provinces. If a man came in from L'Houmeau with an order for
wedding cards, and you were to print them without a Cupid and
garlands, he would not believe that he was properly married; you
would have them all back again if you sent them out with a plain M
on them after the style of your Messrs. Didot. They may be fine
printers, but their inventions won't take in the provinces for
another hundred years. So there you are."A generous man is a bad bargain-driver. David's nature was of
the sensitive and affectionate type that shrinks from a dispute,
and gives way at once if an opponent touches his feelings. His
loftiness of feeling, and the fact that the old toper had himself
well in hand, put him still further at a disadvantage in a dispute
about money matters with his own father, especially as he credited
that father with the best intentions, and took his covetous greed
for a printer's attachment to his old familiar tools. Still, as
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had taken the whole place over from
Rouzeau's widow for ten thousand francs, paid in assignats, it
stood to reason that thirty thousand francs in coin at the present
day was an exorbitant demand."Father, you are cutting my throat!" exclaimed
David."I," cried the old
toper, raising his hand to the lines of cord across the ceiling, "I
who gave you life? Why, David, what do you suppose the license is
worth? Do you know that the sheet of advertisements alone, at
fivepence a line, brought in five hundred francs last month? You
turn up the books, lad, and see what we make by placards and the
registers at the Prefecture, and the work for the mayor's office,
and the bishop too. You are a do-nothing that has no mind to get
on. You are haggling over the horse that will carry you to some
pretty bit of property like Marsac."Attached to the valuation of plant there was a deed of
partnership between Sechard senior and his son. The good father was
to let his house and premises to the new firm for twelve hundred
francs per annum, reserving one of the two rooms in the roof for
himself. So long as David's purchase-money was not paid in full,
the profits were to be divided equally; as soon as he paid off his
father, he was to be made sole proprietor of the
business.David made a mental calculation of the value of the license,
the goodwill, and the stock of paper, leaving the plant out of
account. It was just possible, he thought, to clear off the debt.
He accepted the conditions. Old Sechard, accustomed to peasants'
haggling, knowing nothing of the wider business views of Paris, was
amazed at such a prompt conclusion."Can he have been putting money by?" he asked himself. "Or is
he scheming out, at this moment, some way of not paying
me?"With this notion in his head, he tried to find out whether
David had any money with him; he wanted to be paid something on
account. The old man's inquisitiveness roused his son's distrust;
David remained close buttoned up to the chin.Next day, old Sechard made the apprentice move all his own
household stuff up into the attic until such time as an empty
market cart could take it out on the return journey into the
country; and David entered into possession of three bare,
unfurnished rooms on the day that saw him installed in the
printing-house, without one sou wherewith to pay his men's wages.
When he asked his father, as a partner, to contribute his share
towards the working expenses, the old man pretended not to
understand. He had found the printing-house, he said, and he was
not bound to find the money too. He had paid his share. Pressed
close by his son's reasoning, he answered that when he himself had
paid Rouzeau's widow he had not had a penny left. If he, a poor,
ignorant working man, had made his way, Didot's apprentice should
do still better. Besides, had not David been earning money, thanks
to an education paid for by the sweat of his old father's brow? Now
surely was the time when the education would come in
useful."What have you done with your 'polls?'" he asked, returning
to the charge. He meant to have light on a problem which his son
left unresolved the day before."Why, had I not to live?" David asked indignantly, "and books
to buy besides?""Oh! you bought books, did you? You will make a poor man of
business. A man that buys books is hardly fit to print them,"
retorted the "bear."Then David endured the most painful of humiliations—the sense
of shame for a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive
while his father poured out a flood of reasons—sordid, whining,
contemptible, money-getting reasons—in which the niggardly old man
wrapped his refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of
his soul; he saw that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look
to but himself; saw, too, that his father was trying to make money
out of him; and in a spirit of philosophical curiosity, he tried to
find out how far the old man would go. He called old Sechard's
attention to the fact that he had never as yet made any inquiry as
to his mother's fortune; if that fortune would not buy the
printing-house, it might go some ways towards paying the working
expenses."Your mother's fortune?" echoed old Sechard; "why, it was her
beauty and intelligence!"David understood his father thoroughly after that answer; he
understood that only after an interminable, expensive, and
disgraceful lawsuit could he obtain any account of the money which
by rights was his. The noble heart accepted the heavy burden laid
upon it, seeing clearly beforehand how difficult it would be to
free himself from the engagements into which he had entered with
his father."I will work," he said to himself. "After all, if I have a
rough time of it, so had the old man; besides, I shall be working
for myself, shall I not?""I am leaving you a treasure," said Sechard, uneasy at his
son's silence.David asked what the treasure might be."Marion!" said his father.Marion, a big country girl, was an indispensable part of the
establishment. It was Marion who damped the paper and cut it to
size; Marion did the cooking, washing, and marketing; Marion
unloaded the paper carts, collected accounts, and cleaned the
ink-balls; and if Marion had but known how to read, old Sechard
would have put her to set up type into the bargain.Old Sechard set out on foot for the country. Delighted as he
was with his sale of the business, he was not quite easy in his
mind as to the payment. To the throes of the vendor, the agony of
uncertainty as to the completion of the purchase inevitably
succeeds. Passion of every sort is essentially Jesuitical. Here was
a man who thought that education was useless, forcing himself to
believe in the influence of education. He was mortgaging thirty
thousand francs upon the ideas of honor and conduct which education
should have developed in his son; David had received a good
training, so David would sweat blood and water to fulfil his
engagements; David's knowledge would discover new resources; and
David seemed to be full of fine feelings, so—David would pay! Many
a parent does in this way, and thinks that he has acted a father's
part; old Sechard was quite of that opinion by the time that he had
reached his vineyard at Marsac, a hamlet some four leagues out of
Angouleme. The previous owner had built a nice little house on the
bit of property, and from year to year had added other bits of land
to it, until in 1809 the old "bear" bought the whole, and went
thither, exchanging the toil of the printing press for the labor of
the winepress. As he put it himself, "he had been in that line so
long that he ought to know something about it."During the first twelvemonth of rural retirement, Sechard
senior showed a careful countenance among his vine props; for he
was always in his vineyard now, just as, in the old days, he had
lived in his shop, day in, day out. The prospect of thirty thousand
francs was even more intoxicating than sweet wine; already in
imagination he fingered the coin. The less the claim to the money,
the more eager he grew to pouch it. Not seldom his anxieties sent
him hurrying from Marsac to Angouleme; he would climb up the rocky
staircases into the old city and walk into his son's workshop to
see how business went. There stood the presses in their places; the
one apprentice, in a paper cap, was cleaning the ink-balls; there
was a creaking of a press over the printing of some trade circular,
the old type was still unchanged, and in the dens at the end of the
room he saw his son and the foreman reading books, which the "bear"
took for proof-sheets. Then he would join David at dinner and go
back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy reflection.Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight,
instinctively guessing at future contingencies, and hugging its
presentiments. Sechard senior living at a distance, far from the
workshop and the machinery which possessed such a fascination for
him, reminding him, as it did, of days when he was making his way,
couldfeelthat there were
disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son. The name of Cointet
Brothers haunted him like a dread; he saw Sechard & Son
dropping into the second place. In short, the old man scented
misfortune in the wind.His presentiments were too well founded; disaster was
hovering over the house of Sechard. But there is a tutelary deity
for misers, and by a chain of unforeseen circumstances that
tutelary deity was so ordering matters that the purchase-money of
his extortionate bargain was to be tumbled after all into the old
toper's pouch.Indifferent to the religious reaction brought about by the
Restoration, indifferent no less to the Liberal movement, David
preserved a most unlucky neutrality on the burning questions of the
day. In those times provincial men of business were bound to
profess political opinions of some sort if they meant to secure
custom; they were forced to choose for themselves between the
patronage of the Liberals on the one hand or the Royalists on the
other. And Love, moreover, had come to David's heart, and with his
scientific preoccupation and finer nature he had not room for the
dogged greed of which our successful man of business is made; it
choked the keen money-getting instinct which would have led him to
study the differences between the Paris trade and the business of a
provincial printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined
in the country are blurred and lost in the great currents of
Parisian business life. Cointet Brothers set themselves
deliberately to assimilate all shades of monarchical opinion. They
let every one know that they fasted of a Friday and kept Lent; they
haunted the cathedral; they cultivated the society of the clergy;
and in consequence, when books of devotion were once more in
demand, Cointet Brothers were the first in this lucrative field.
They slandered David, accusing him of Liberalism, Atheism, and what
not. How, asked they, could any one employ a man whose father had
been a Septembrist, a Bonapartist, and a drunkard to boot? The old
man was sure to leave plenty of gold pieces behind him. They
themselves were poor men with families to support, while David was
a bachelor and could do as he pleased; he would have plenty one of
these days; he could afford to take things easily; whereas . . .
and so forth and so forth.Such tales against David, once put into circulation, produced
their effect. The monopoly of the prefectorial and diocesan work
passed gradually into the hands of Cointet Brothers; and before
long David's keen competitors, emboldened by his inaction, started
a second local sheet of advertisements and announcements. The older
establishment was left at length with the job-printing orders from
the town, and the circulation of theCharente
Chroniclefell off by one-half. Meanwhile the
Cointets grew richer; they had made handsome profits on their
devotional books; and now they offered to buy Sechard's paper, to
have all the trade and judicial announcements of the department in
their own hands.The news of this proposal sent by David to his father brought
the old vinegrower from Marsac into the Place du Murier with the
swiftness of the raven that scents the corpses on a
battlefield."Leave me to manage the Cointets," said he to his son; "don't
you meddle in this business."The old man saw what the Cointets meant; and they took alarm
at his clearsighted sagacity. His son was making a blunder, he
said, and he, Sechard, had come to put a stop to it."What was to become of the connection if David gave up the
paper? It all depended upon the paper. All the attorneys and
solicitors and men of business in L'Houmeau were Liberals to a man.
The Cointets had tried to ruin the Sechards by accusing them of
Liberalism, and by so doing gave them a plank to cling to—the
Sechards should keep the Liberal business. Sell the paper indeed!
Why, you might as well sell the stock-in-trade and the
license!"Old Sechard asked the Cointets sixty thousand francs for the
printing business, so as not to ruin his son; he was fond of his
son; he was taking his son's part. The vinegrower brought his son
to the front to gain his point, as a peasant brings in his
wife.His son was unwilling to do this, that, or the other; it
varied according to the offers which he wrung one after another
from the Cointets, until, not without an effort, he drew them on to
give twenty-two thousand francs for theCharente
Chronicle. But, at the same time, David must
pledge himself thenceforward to print no newspaper whatsoever,
under a penalty of thirty thousand francs for damages.That transaction dealt the deathblow to the Sechard
establishment; but the old vinegrower did not trouble himself much
on that head. Murder usually follows robbery. Our worthy friend
intended to pay himself with the ready money. To have the cash in
his own hands he would have given in David himself over and above
the bargain, and so much the more willingly since that this
nuisance of a son could claim one-half of the unexpected windfall.
Taking this fact into consideration, therefore, the generous parent
consented to abandon his share of the business but not the business
premises; and the rental was still maintained at the famous sum of
twelve hundred francs per annum.The old man came into town very seldom after the paper was
sold to the Cointets. He pleaded his advanced age, but the truth
was that he took little interest in the establishment now that it
was his no longer. Still, he could not quite shake off his old
kindness for his stock-in-trade; and when business brought him into
Angouleme, it would have been hard to say which was the stronger
attraction to the old house —his wooden presses or the son whom (as
a matter of form) he asked for rent. The old foreman, who had gone
over to the rival establishment, knew exactly how much this
fatherly generosity was worth; the old fox meant to reserve a right
to interfere in his son's affairs, and had taken care to appear in
the bankruptcy as a privileged creditor for arrears of
rent.The causes of David's heedlessness throw a light on the
character of that young man. Only a few days after his
establishment in the paternal printing office, he came across an
old school friend in the direst poverty. Lucien Chardon, a young
fellow of one-and-twenty or thereabouts, was the son of a
surgeon-major who had retired with a wound from the republican
army. Nature had meant M. Chardon senior for a chemist; chance
opened the way for a retail druggist's business in Angouleme. After
many years of scientific research, death cut him off in the midst
of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery that should
have brought wealth to the family was never made. Chardon had tried
to find a specific for the gout. Gout is a rich man's malady; the
rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it,
and for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his
problem. Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the
charlatan on the other, he saw that the scientific method was the
one road to assured success, and had studied the causes of the
complaint, and based his remedy on a certain general theory of
treatment, with modifications in practice for varying temperaments.
Then, on a visit to Paris undertaken to solicit the approval of
theAcademie des Sciences, he
died, and lost all the fruits of his labors.It may have been that some presentiment of the end had led
the country druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and
girl a good education; the family had been living up to the income
brought in by the business; and now when they were left almost
destitute, it was an aggravation of their misfortune that they had
been brought up in the expectations of a brilliant future; for
these hopes were extinguished by their father's death. The great
Desplein, who attended Chardon in his last illness, saw him die in
convulsions of rage.The secret of the army surgeon's ambition lay in his
passionate love for his wife, the last survivor of the family of
Rubempre, saved as by a miracle from the guillotine in 1793. He had
gained time by declaring that she was pregnant, a lie told without
the girl's knowledge or consent. Then, when in a manner he had
created a claim to call her his wife, he had married her in spite
of their common poverty. The children of this marriage, like all
children of love, inherited the mother's wonderful beauty, that
gift so often fatal when accompanied by poverty. The life of hope
and hard work and despair, in all of which Mme. Chardon had shared
with such keen sympathy, had left deep traces in her beautiful
face, just as the slow decline of a scanty income had changed her
ways and habits; but both she and her children confronted evil days
bravely enough. She sold the druggist's shop in the Grand' Rue de
L'Houmeau, the principal suburb of Angouleme; but it was impossible
for even one woman to exist on the three hundred francs of income
brought in by the investment of the purchase-money, so the mother
and daughter accepted the position, and worked to earn a living.
The mother went out as a monthly nurse, and for her gentle manners
was preferred to any other among the wealthy houses, where she
lived without expense to her children, and earned some seven francs
a week. To save her son the embarrassment of seeing his mother
reduced to this humble position, she assumed the name of Madame
Charlotte; and persons requiring her services were requested to
apply to M. Postel, M. Chardon's successor in the business.
Lucien's sister worked for a laundress, a decent woman much
respected in L'Houmeau, and earned fifteen daily sous. As Mme.
Prieur's forewoman she had a certain position in the workroom,
which raised her slightly above the class of
working-girls.The two women's slender earnings, together with Mme.
Chardon's three hundred francs ofrentes, amounted to about eight
hundred francs a year, and on this sum three persons must be fed,
clothed, and lodged. Yet, with all their frugal thrift, the
pittance was scarcely sufficient; nearly the whole of it was needed
for Lucien. Mme. Chardon and her daughter Eve believed in Lucien as
Mahomet's wife believed in her husband; their devotion for his
future knew no bounds. Their present landlord was the successor to
the business, for M. Postel let them have rooms at the further end
of a yard at the back of the laboratory for a very low rent, and
Lucien slept in the poor garret above. A father's passion for
natural science had stimulated the boy, and at first induced him to
follow in the same path. Lucien was one of the most brilliant
pupils at the grammar school of Angouleme, and when David Sechard
left, his future friend was in the third form.When chance brought the school-fellows together again, Lucien
was weary of drinking from the rude cup of penury, and ready for
any of the rash, decisive steps that youth takes at the age of
twenty. David's generous offer of forty francs a month if Lucien
would come to him and learn the work of a printer's reader came in
time; David had no need whatever of a printer's reader, but he
saved Lucien from despair. The ties of a school friendship thus
renewed were soon drawn closer than ever by the similarity of their
lot in life and the dissimilarity of their characters. Both felt
high swelling hopes of manifold success; both consciously possessed
the high order of intelligence which sets a man on a level with
lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to the lowest
level. Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And then,
by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had
attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative
fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame
through literature; while David, with that meditative temperament
which inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards natural
science.The exchange of roles was the beginning of an intellectual
comradeship. Before long, Lucien told David of his own father's
farsighted views of the application of science to manufacture,
while David pointed out the new ways in literature that Lucien must
follow if he meant to succeed. Not many days had passed before the
young men's friendship became a passion such as is only known in
early manhood. Then it was that David caught a glimpse of Eve's
fair face, and loved, as grave and meditative natures can love.
Theet nunc et semper et in secula
seculorumof the Liturgy is the device taken by
many a sublime unknown poet, whose works consist in magnificent
epics conceived and lost between heart and heart. With a lover's
insight, David read the secret hopes set by the mother and sister
on Lucien's poet's brow; and knowing their blind devotion, it was
very sweet to him to draw nearer to his love by sharing her hopes
and her self-sacrifice. And in this way Lucien came to be David's
chosen brother. As there are ultras who would fain be more Royalist
than the King, so David outdid the mother and sister in his belief
in Lucien's genius; he spoiled Lucien as a mother spoils her
child.Once, under pressure of the lack of money which tied their
hands, the two were ruminating after the manner of young men over
ways of promptly realizing a large fortune; and, after fruitless
shakings of all the trees already stripped by previous comers,
Lucien bethought himself of two of his father's ideas. M. Chardon
had talked of a method of refining sugar by a chemical process,
which would reduce the cost of production by one-half; and he had
another plan for employing an American vegetable fibre for making
paper, something after the Chinese fashion, and effecting an
enormous saving in the cost of raw material. David, knowing the
importance of a question raised already by the Didots, caught at
this latter notion, saw a fortune in it, and looked upon Lucien as
the benefactor whom he could never repay.Any one may guess how the ruling thoughts and inner life of
this pair of friends unfitted them for carrying on the business of
a printing house. So far from making fifteen to twenty thousand
francs, like Cointet Brothers, printers and publishers to the
diocese, and proprietors of theCharente
Chronicle(now the only newspaper in the
department)—Sechard & Son made a bare three hundred francs per
month, out of which the foreman's salary must be paid, as well as
Marion's wages and the rent and taxes; so that David himself was
scarcely making twelve hundred francs per annum. Active and
industrious men of business would have bought new type and new
machinery, and made an effort to secure orders for cheap printing
from the Paris book trade; but master and foreman, deep in
absorbing intellectual interests, were quite content with such
orders as came to them from their remaining customers.In the long length the Cointets had come to understand
David's character and habits. They did not slander him now; on the
contrary, wise policy required that they should allow the business
to flicker on; it was to their interest indeed to maintain it in a
small way, lest it should fall into the hands of some more
formidable competitor; they made a practice of sending prospectuses
and circulars —job-printing, as it is called—to the Sechard's
establishment. So it came about that, all unwittingly, David owed
his existence, commercially speaking, to the cunning schemes of his
competitors. The Cointets, well pleased with his "craze," as they
called it, behaved to all appearance both fairly and handsomely;
but, as a matter of fact, they were adopting the tactics of the
mail-coach owners who set up a sham opposition coach to keepbona fiderivals out of the
field.Inside and outside, the condition of the Sechard printing
establishment bore testimony to the sordid avarice of the old
"bear," who never spent a penny on repairs. The old house had stood
in sun and rain, and borne the brunt of the weather, till it looked
like some venerable tree trunk set down at the entrance of the
alley, so riven it was with seams and cracks of all sorts and
sizes. The house front, built of brick and stone, with no
pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of
a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common use in
the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the
heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in
place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find
a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity
of mortar kept it together. Try to picture the workshop, lighted at
either end, and dark in the middle; the walls covered with
handbills and begrimed by friction of all the workmen who had
rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of cordage across the
ceiling, the stacks of paper, the old-fashioned presses, the pile
of slabs for weighting the damp sheets, the rows of cases, and the
two dens in the far corners where the master printer and foreman
sat—and you will have some idea of the life led by the two
friends.One day early in May, 1821, David and Lucien were standing
together by the window that looked into the yard. It was nearly two
o'clock, and the four or five men were going out to dinner. David
waited until the apprentice had shut the street door with the bell
fastened to it; then he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the
smell of paper, ink, and presses and old woodwork had grown
intolerable to him, and together they sat down under the vines,
keeping the office and the door in view. The sunbeams, playing
among the trellised vine-shoots, hovered over the two poets,
making, as it were, an aureole about their heads, bringing the
contrast between their faces and their characters into a vigorous
relief that would have tempted the brush of some great
painter.