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 of Pantagruel; 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,

THEY will 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 their Cicero! 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 the

Double Liegeois on grocers' paper; and what came of it?--the original

Double Liegeois sold 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, could FEEL that 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 the Charente Chronicle fell 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 the Charente 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 the

Academie 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 of rentes, 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. The et nunc et

semper et in secula seculorum of 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 the Charente 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 keep bona fide rivals 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.

David's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the

man born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned

upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in

keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick

crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported

by a thick neck, he looked at first sight like one of Boileau's

canons: but on a second glance there was that in the lines about the

thick lips, in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of the square

nostrils, with the broad irregular line of central cleavage, and,

above all, in the eyes, with the steady light of an all-absorbing love

that burned in them, which revealed the real character of the man--the

wisdom of the thinker, the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that

discerns the horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end of

winding ways, turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of

fruition, known as yet in idea alone, and quick to turn from them in

disgust. You might look for the flash of genius from such a face; you

could not miss the ashes of the volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a

profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and

lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of

the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to

intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained,

drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he

might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul

and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some sculptured Indian Bacchus.

For in Lucien's face there was the distinction of line which stamps

the beauty of the antique; the Greek profile, with the velvet

whiteness of women's faces, and eyes full of love, eyes so blue that

they looked dark against a pearly setting, and dewy and fresh as those

of a child. Those beautiful eyes looked out from under their long

chestnut lashes, beneath eyebrows that might have been traced by a

Chinese pencil. The silken down on his cheeks, like his bright curling

hair, shone golden in the sunlight. A divine graciousness transfused

the white temples that caught that golden gleam; a matchless nobleness

had set its seal in the short chin raised, but not abruptly. The smile

that hovered about the coral lips, yet redder as they seemed by force

of contrast with the even teeth, was the smile of some sorrowing

angel. Lucien's hands denoted race; they were shapely hands; hands

that men obey at a sign, and women love to kiss. Lucien was slender

and of middle height. From a glance at his feet, he might have been

taken for a girl in disguise, and this so much the more easily from

the feminine contour of the hips, a characteristic of keen-witted, not

to say, astute, men. This is a trait which seldom misleads, and in

Lucien it was a true indication of character; for when he analyzed the

society of to-day, his restless mind was apt to take its stand on the

lower ground of those diplomatists who hold that success justifies the

use of any means however base. It is one of the misfortunes attendant

upon great intellects that perforce they comprehend all things, both

good and evil.

The two young men judged society by the more lofty standard because

their social position was at the lowest end of the scale, for

unrecognized power is apt to avenge itself for lowly station by

viewing the world from a lofty standpoint. Yet it is, nevertheless,

true that they grew but the more bitter and hopeless after these swift

soaring flights to the upper regions of thought, their world by right.

Lucien had read much and compared; David had thought much and deeply.

In spite of the young printer's look of robust, country-bred health,

his turn of mind was melancholy and somewhat morbid--he lacked

confidence in himself; but Lucien, on the other hand, with a boldness

little to be expected from his feminine, almost effeminate, figure,

graceful though it was, Lucien possessed the Gascon temperament to the

highest degree--rash, brave, and adventurous, prone to make the most

of the bright side, and as little as possible of the dark; his was the

nature that sticks at no crime if there is anything to be gained by

it, and laughs at the vice which serves as a stepping-stone. Just now

these tendencies of ambition were held in check, partly by the fair

illusions of youth, partly by the enthusiasm which led him to prefer

the nobler methods, which every man in love with glory tries first of

all. Lucien was struggling as yet with himself and his own desires,

and not with the difficulties of life; at strife with his own power,

and not with the baseness of other men, that fatal exemplar for

impressionable minds. The brilliancy of his intellect had a keen

attraction for David. David admired his friend, while he kept him out

of the scrapes into which he was led by the furie francaise.

David, with his well-balanced mind and timid nature at variance with a

strong constitution, was by no means wanting in the persistence of the

Northern temper; and if he saw all the difficulties before him, none

the less he vowed to himself to conquer, never to give way. In him the

unswerving virtue of an apostle was softened by pity that sprang from

inexhaustible indulgence. In the friendship grown old already, one was

the worshiper, and that one was David; Lucien ruled him like a woman

sure of love, and David loved to give way. He felt that his friend's

physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking

upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.

"The ox for patient labor in the fields, the free life for the bird,"

he thought to himself. "I will be the ox, and Lucien shall be the

eagle."

So for three years these friends had mingled the destinies bright with

such glorious promise. Together they read the great works that

appeared above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace--

the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott,

Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They

warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their

powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again

with new glow of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the

unwearied vitality of youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the

consuming love of art and science, till they forgot the hard life of

the present, for their minds were wholly bent on laying the

foundations of future fame.

"Lucien," said David, "do you know what I have just received from

Paris?" He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. "Listen!"

And David read, as a poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll

Neerc, then Le Malade, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide,

another elegy in the classic taste, and the last two Iambes.

"So that is Andre de Chenier!" Lucien exclaimed again and again. "It

fills one with despair!" he cried for the third time, when David

surrendered the book to him, unable to read further for emotion.--"A

poet rediscovered by a poet!" said Lucien, reading the signature of

the preface.

"After Chenier had written those poems, he thought that he had written

nothing worth publishing," added David.

Then Lucien in his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called

L'Aveugle and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came upon the

line--

If they know not bliss, is there happiness on earth?

He pressed the book to his lips, and tears came to the eyes of either,

for the two friends were lovers and fellow-worshipers.

The vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the

rifted, battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were

spreading in every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-

reliefs and uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of

architecture, erected by fairy hands. Fancy had scattered flowers and

crimson gems over the gloomy little yard, and Chenier's Camille became

for David the Eve whom he worshiped, for Lucien a great lady to whom

he paid his homage. Poetry had shaken out her starry robe above the

workshop where the "monkeys" and "bears" were grotesquely busy among

types and presses. Five o'clock struck, but the friends felt neither

hunger nor thirst; life had turned to a golden dream, and all the

treasures of the world lay at their feet. Far away on the horizon lay

the blue streak to which Hope points a finger in storm and stress; and

a siren voice sounded in their ears, calling, "Come, spread your

wings; through that streak of gold or silver or azure lies the sure

way of escape from evil fortune!"

Just at that moment the low glass door of the workshop was opened, and

out came Cerizet, an apprentice (David had brought the urchin from

Paris). This youth introduced a stranger, who saluted the friends

politely, and spoke to David.

"This, sir, is a monograph which I am desirous of printing," said he,

drawing a huge package of manuscript from his pocket. "Will you oblige

me with an estimate?"

"We do not undertake work on such a scale, sir," David answered,

without looking at the manuscript. "You had better see the Messieurs

Cointet about it."

"Still we have a very pretty type which might suit it," put in Lucien,

taking up the roll. "We must ask you to be kind enough, sir, to leave

your commission with us and call again to-morrow, and we will give you

an estimate."

"Have I the pleasure of addressing M. Lucien Chardon?"

"Yes, sir," said the foreman.

"I am fortunate in this opportunity of meeting with a young poet

destined to such greatness," returned the author. "Mme. de Bargeton

sent me here."

Lucien flushed red at the name, and stammered out something about

gratitude for the interest which Mme. de Bargeton took in him. David

noticed his friend's embarrassed flush, and left him in conversation

with the country gentleman, the author of a monograph on silkwork

cultivation, prompted by vanity to print the effort for the benefit of

fellow-members of the local agricultural society.

When the author had gone, David spoke.

"Lucien, are you in love with Mme. de Bargeton?"

"Passionately."

"But social prejudices set you as far apart as if she were living at

Pekin and you in Greenland."

"The will of two lovers can rise victorious over all things," said

Lucien, lowering his eyes.

"You will forget us," returned the alarmed lover, as Eve's fair face

rose before his mind.

"On the contrary, I have perhaps sacrificed my love to you," cried

Lucien.

"What do you mean?"

"In spite of my love, in spite of the different motives which bid me

obtain a secure footing in her house, I have told her that I will

never go thither again unless another is made welcome too, a man whose

gifts are greater than mine, a man destined for a brilliant future--

David Sechard, my brother, my friend. I shall find an answer waiting

when I go home. All the aristocrats may have been asked to hear me

read my verses this evening, but I shall not go if the answer is

negative, and I will never set foot in Mme. de Bargeton's house

again."

David brushed the tears from his eyes, and wrung Lucien's hand. The

clock struck six.

"Eve must be anxious; good-bye," Lucien added abruptly.

He hurried away. David stood overcome by the emotion that is only felt

to the full at his age, and more especially in such a position as his

--the friends were like two young swans with wings unclipped as yet by

the experiences of provincial life.

"Heart of gold!" David exclaimed to himself, as his eyes followed

Lucien across the workshop.