Two Poets

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION
To Monsieur Victor Hugo,

It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great
poet at an age when other men are children; it was your fate, the

fate of Chateaubriand and of every man of genius, to struggle
against jealousy skulking behind the columns of a newspaper, or

crouching in the subterranean places of journalism. For this
reason I desired that your victorious name should help to win a

victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work which, if
some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well as a

veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of
Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers,

doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the
writer of plays? And why should Comedy, qui castigat ridendo

mores, make an exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian
press spares none? I am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity of

subscribing myself your sincereadmirer and friend,
DE BALZAC.

TWO POETS
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 primitivewoodeninvention 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 superstitiousaffection, 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 workman的复数">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" target="_blank" title="ad.因此，所以">consequently was fain to
earn a living by some lawful industry. A bargain was struck. M. le

Comte de Maucombe, disguised in a provincialprinter'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 intelligentworkman. In these ways the
worthyprinter 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 considerablecontempt 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 establishmenthitherto 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
mightyprofitable 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 commercialenterprise; 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 workman的复数">workmenpleasantly call "tipple-ography," an
art held in high esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel; though of