



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





EVE AND DAVID

(Lost Illusions Part III)


By Honore De Balzac



Translated By Ellen Marriage



  PREPARER'S NOTE

  Eve and David is part three of a trilogy. Eve and David's story
  begins in part one, Two Poets. Part one also introduces Eve's
  brother, Lucien. Part two, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris,
  centers on Lucien's life in Paris. For part three the action once
  more returns to Eve and David in Angouleme. In many references parts
  one and three are combined under the title Lost Illusions and A
  Distinguished Provincial at Paris is given its individual title.
  Following this trilogy Lucien's story is continued in another book,
  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.





EVE AND DAVID


Lucien had gone to Paris; and David Sechard, with the courage
and intelligence of the ox which painters give the Evangelist for
accompanying symbol, set himself to make the large fortune for which he
had wished that evening down by the Charente, when he sat with Eve by
the weir, and she gave him her hand and her heart. He wanted to make the
money quickly, and less for himself than for Eve's sake and Lucien's. He
would place his wife amid the elegant and comfortable surroundings that
were hers by right, and his strong arm should sustain her brother's
ambitions--this was the programme that he saw before his eyes in letters
of fire.

Journalism and politics, the immense development of the book trade,
of literature and of the sciences; the increase of public interest in
matters touching the various industries in the country; in fact, the
whole social tendency of the epoch following the establishment of the
Restoration produced an enormous increase in the demand for paper. The
supply required was almost ten times as large as the quantity in which
the celebrated Ouvrard speculated at the outset of the Revolution.
Then Ouvrard could buy up first the entire stock of paper and then the
manufacturers; but in the year 1821 there were so many paper-mills in
France, that no one could hope to repeat his success; and David had
neither audacity enough nor capital enough for such speculation.
Machinery for producing paper in any length was just coming into use
in England. It was one of the most urgent needs of the time, therefore,
that the paper trade should keep pace with the requirements of the
French system of civil government, a system by which the right of
discussion was to be extended to every man, and the whole fabric based
upon continual expression of individual opinion; a grave misfortune, for
the nation that deliberates is but little wont to act.

So, strange coincidence! while Lucien was drawn into the great machinery
of journalism, where he was like to leave his honor and his intelligence
torn to shreds, David Sechard, at the back of his printing-house,
foresaw all the practical consequences of the increased activity of the
periodical press. He saw the direction in which the spirit of the age
was tending, and sought to find means to the required end. He saw also
that there was a fortune awaiting the discoverer of cheap paper, and the
event has justified his clearsightedness. Within the last fifteen years,
the Patent Office has received more than a hundred applications from
persons claiming to have discovered cheap substances to be employed in
the manufacture of paper. David felt more than ever convinced that this
would be no brilliant triumph, it is true, but a useful and immensely
profitable discovery; and after his brother-in-law went to Paris, he
became more and more absorbed in the problem which he had set himself to
solve.

The expenses of his marriage and of Lucien's journey to Paris had
exhausted all his resources; he confronted the extreme of poverty at
the very outset of married life. He had kept one thousand francs for the
working expenses of the business, and owed a like sum, for which he had
given a bill to Postel the druggist. So here was a double problem for
this deep thinker; he must invent a method of making cheap paper, and
that quickly; he must make the discovery, in fact, in order to apply the
proceeds to the needs of the household and of the business. What words
can describe the brain that can forget the cruel preoccupations caused
by hidden want, by the daily needs of a family and the daily drudgery of
a printer's business, which requires such minute, painstaking care; and
soar, with the enthusiasm and intoxication of the man of science, into
the regions of the unknown in quest of a secret which daily eludes the
most subtle experiment? And the inventor, alas! as will shortly be seen,
has plenty of woes to endure, besides the ingratitude of the many; idle
folk that can do nothing themselves tell them, "Such a one is a born
inventor; he could not do otherwise. He no more deserves credit for his
invention than a prince for being born to rule! He is simply exercising
his natural faculties, and his work is its own reward," and the people
believe them.

Marriage brings profound mental and physical perturbations into a
girl's life; and if she marries under the ordinary conditions of
lower middle-class life, she must moreover begin to study totally new
interests and initiate herself in the intricacies of business. With
marriage, therefore, she enters upon a phase of her existence when she
is necessarily on the watch before she can act. Unfortunately, David's
love for his wife retarded this training; he dared not tell her the
real state of affairs on the day after their wedding, nor for some time
afterwards. His father's avarice condemned him to the most grinding
poverty, but he could not bring himself to spoil the honeymoon by
beginning his wife's commercial education and prosaic apprenticeship to
his laborious craft. So it came to pass that housekeeping, no less than
working expenses, ate up the thousand francs, his whole fortune. For
four months David gave no thought to the future, and his wife remained
in ignorance. The awakening was terrible! Postel's bill fell due; there
was no money to meet it, and Eve knew enough of the debt and its cause
to give up her bridal trinkets and silver.

That evening Eve tried to induce David to talk of their affairs, for she
had noticed that he was giving less attention to the business and more
to the problem of which he had once spoken to her. Since the first few
weeks of married life, in fact, David spent most of his time in the
shed in the backyard, in the little room where he was wont to mould his
ink-rollers. Three months after his return to Angouleme, he had replaced
the old fashioned round ink-balls by rollers made of strong glue and
treacle, and an ink-table, on which the ink was evenly distributed, an
improvement so obvious that Cointet Brothers no sooner saw it than they
adopted the plan themselves.

By the partition wall of this kitchen, as it were, David had set up a
little furnace with a copper pan, ostensibly to save the cost of fuel
over the recasting of his rollers, though the moulds had not been used
twice, and hung there rusting upon the wall. Nor was this all; a solid
oak door had been put in by his orders, and the walls were lined with
sheet-iron; he even replaced the dirty window sash by panes of ribbed
glass, so that no one without could watch him at his work.

When Eve began to speak about the future, he looked uneasily at her,
and cut her short at the first word by saying, "I know all that you must
think, child, when you see that the workshop is left to itself, and
that I am dead, as it were, to all business interests; but see," he
continued, bringing her to the window, and pointing to the mysterious
shed, "there lies our fortune. For some months yet we must endure our
lot, but let us bear it patiently; leave me to solve the problem of
which I told you, and all our troubles will be at an end."

David was so good, his devotion was so thoroughly to be taken upon his
word, that the poor wife, with a wife's anxiety as to daily expenses,
determined to spare her husband the household cares and to take the
burden upon herself. So she came down from the pretty blue-and-white
room, where she sewed and talked contentedly with her mother, took
possession of one of the two dens at the back of the printing-room,
and set herself to learn the business routine of typography. Was it not
heroism in a wife who expected ere long to be a mother?

During the past few months David's workmen had left him one by one;
there was not enough work for them to do. Cointet Brothers, on the other
hand, were overwhelmed with orders; they were employing all the workmen
of the department; the alluring prospect of high wages even brought them
a few from Bordeaux, more especially apprentices, who thought themselves
sufficiently expert to cancel their articles and go elsewhere. When
Eve came to look into the affairs of Sechard's printing works, she
discovered that he employed three persons in all.

First in order stood Cerizet, an apprentice of Didot's, whom David had
chosen to train. Most foremen have some one favorite among the great
numbers of workers under them, and David had brought Cerizet to
Angouleme, where he had been learning more of the business. Marion, as
much attached to the house as a watch-dog, was the second; and the third
was Kolb, an Alsacien, at one time a porter in the employ of the Messrs.
Didot. Kolb had been drawn for military service, chance brought him to
Angouleme, and David recognized the man's face at a review just as
his time was about to expire. Kolb came to see David, and was smitten
forthwith by the charms of the portly Marion; she possessed all the
qualities which a man of his class looks for in a wife--the robust
health that bronzes the cheeks, the strength of a man (Marion could lift
a form of type with ease), the scrupulous honesty on which an Alsacien
sets such store, the faithful service which bespeaks a sterling
character, and finally, the thrift which had saved a little sum of a
thousand francs, besides a stock of clothing and linen, neat and
clean, as country linen can be. Marion herself, a big, stout woman
of thirty-six, felt sufficiently flattered by the admiration of a
cuirassier, who stood five feet seven in his stockings, a well-built
warrior, strong as a bastion, and not unnaturally suggested that
he should become a printer. So, by the time Kolb received his full
discharge, Marion and David between them had transformed him into a
tolerably creditable "bear," though their pupil could neither read nor
write.

Job printing, as it is called, was not so abundant at this season but
that Cerizet could manage it without help. Cerizet, compositor, clicker,
and foreman, realized in his person the "phenomenal triplicity" of Kant;
he set up type, read proof, took orders, and made out invoices; but the
most part of the time he had nothing to do, and used to read novels in
his den at the back of the workshop while he waited for an order for a
bill-head or a trade circular. Marion, trained by old Sechard, prepared
and wetted down the paper, helped Kolb with the printing, hung the
sheets to dry, and cut them to size; yet cooked the dinner, none the
less, and did her marketing very early of a morning.

Eve told Cerizet to draw out a balance-sheet for the last six months,
and found that the gross receipts amounted to eight hundred francs. On
the other hand, wages at the rate of three francs per day--two francs to
Cerizet, and one to Kolb--reached a total of six hundred francs; and as
the goods supplied for the work printed and delivered amounted to some
hundred odd francs, it was clear to Eve that David had been carrying
on business at a loss during the first half-year of their married life.
There was nothing to show for rent, nothing for Marion's wages, nor for
the interest on capital represented by the plant, the license, and
the ink; nothing, finally, by way of allowance for the host of things
included in the technical expression "wear and tear," a word which owes
its origin to the cloths and silks which are used to moderate the force
of the impression, and to save wear to the type; a square of stuff (the
_blanket_) being placed between the platen and the sheet of paper in the
press.

Eve made a rough calculation of the resources of the printing office and
of the output, and saw how little hope there was for a business drained
dry by the all-devouring activity of the brothers Cointet; for by this
time the Cointets were not only contract printers to the town and the
prefecture, and printers to the Diocese by special appointment--they
were paper-makers and proprietors of a newspaper to boot. That
newspaper, sold two years ago by the Sechards, father and son, for
twenty-two thousand francs, was now bringing in eighteen thousand francs
per annum. Eve began to understand the motives lurking beneath the
apparent generosity of the brothers Cointet; they were leaving the
Sechard establishment just sufficient work to gain a pittance, but not
enough to establish a rival house.

When Eve took the management of the business, she began by taking stock.
She set Kolb and Marion and Cerizet to work, and the workshop was put to
rights, cleaned out, and set in order. Then one evening when David came
in from a country excursion, followed by an old woman with a huge bundle
tied up in a cloth, Eve asked counsel of him as to the best way of
turning to profit the odds and ends left them by old Sechard, promising
that she herself would look after the business. Acting upon her
husband's advice, Mme. Sechard sorted all the remnants of paper which
she found, and printed old popular legends in double columns upon a
single sheet, such as peasants paste on their walls, the histories
of _The Wandering Jew_, _Robert the Devil_, _La Belle Maguelonne_ and
sundry miracles. Eve sent Kolb out as a hawker.

Cerizet had not a moment to spare now; he was composing the naive pages,
with the rough cuts that adorned them, from morning to night; Marion
was able to manage the taking off; and all domestic cares fell to Mme.
Chardon, for Eve was busy coloring the prints. Thanks to Kolb's activity
and honesty, Eve sold three thousand broad sheets at a penny apiece, and
made three hundred francs in all at a cost of thirty francs.

But when every peasant's hut and every little wine-shop for twenty
leagues round was papered with these legends, a fresh speculation
must be discovered; the Alsacien could not go beyond the limits of the
department. Eve, turning over everything in the whole printing house,
had found a collection of figures for printing a "Shepherd's Calendar,"
a kind of almanac meant for those who cannot read, letterpress being
replaced by symbols, signs, and pictures in  inks, red, black and
blue. Old Sechard, who could neither read nor write himself, had made a
good deal of money at one time by bringing out an almanac in hieroglyph.
It was in book form, a single sheet folded to make one hundred and
twenty-eight pages.

Thoroughly satisfied with the success of the broad sheets, a piece
of business only undertaken by country printing offices, Mme. Sechard
invested all the proceeds in the _Shepherd's Calendar_, and began it
upon a large scale. Millions of copies of this work are sold annually
in France. It is printed upon even coarser paper than the _Almanac of
Liege_, a ream (five hundred sheets) costing in the first instance about
four francs; while the printed sheets sell at the rate of a halfpenny
apiece--twenty-five francs per ream.

Mme. Sechard determined to use one hundred reams for the first
impression; fifty thousand copies would bring in two thousand francs. A
man so deeply absorbed in his work as David in his researches is seldom
observant; yet David, taking a look round his workshop, was astonished
to hear the groaning of a press and to see Cerizet always on his feet,
setting up type under Mme. Sechard's direction. There was a pretty
triumph for Eve on the day when David came in to see what she was doing,
and praised the idea, and thought the calendar an excellent stroke of
business. Furthermore, David promised to give advice in the matter of
 inks, for an almanac meant to appeal to the eye; and finally, he
resolved to recast the ink-rollers himself in his mysterious workshop,
so as to help his wife as far as he could in her important little
enterprise.

But just as the work began with strenuous industry, there came letters
from Lucien in Paris, heart-sinking letters that told his mother and
sister and brother-in-law of his failure and distress; and when Eve,
Mme. Chardon, and David each secretly sent money to their poet, it must
be plain to the reader that the three hundred francs they sent were like
their very blood. The overwhelming news, the disheartening sense that
work as bravely as she might, she made so little, left Eve looking
forward with a certain dread to an event which fills the cup of
happiness to the full. The time was coming very near now, and to herself
she said, "If my dear David has not reached the end of his researches
before my confinement, what will become of us? And who will look after
our poor printing office and the business that is growing up?"

The _Shepherd's Calendar_ ought by rights to have been ready before the
1st of January, but Cerizet was working unaccountably slowly; all the
work of composing fell to him; and Mme. Sechard, knowing so little,
could not find fault, and was fain to content herself with watching the
young Parisian.

Cerizet came from the great Foundling Hospital in Paris. He had been
apprenticed to the MM. Didot, and between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen he was David Sechard's fanatical worshiper. David put him
under one of the cleverest workmen, and took him for his copy-holder,
his page. Cerizet's intelligence naturally interested David; he won
the lad's affection by procuring amusements now and again for him,
and comforts from which he was cut off by poverty. Nature had endowed
Cerizet with an insignificant, rather pretty little countenance, red
hair, and a pair of dull blue eyes; he had come to Angouleme and brought
the manners of the Parisian street-boy with him. He was formidable by
reason of a quick, sarcastic turn and a spiteful disposition. Perhaps
David looked less strictly after him in Angouleme; or, perhaps, as the
lad grew older, his mentor put more trust in him, or in the sobering
influences of a country town; but be that as it may, Cerizet (all
unknown to his sponsor) was going completely to the bad, and the
printer's apprentice was acting the part of a Don Juan among little work
girls. His morality, learned in Paris drinking-saloons, laid down the
law of self-interest as the sole rule of guidance; he knew, moreover,
that next year he would be "drawn for a soldier," to use the popular
expression, saw that he had no prospects, and ran into debt, thinking
that soon he should be in the army, and none of his creditors would run
after him. David still possessed some ascendency over the young fellow,
due not to his position as master, nor yet to the interest that he
had taken in his pupil, but to the great intellectual power which the
sometime street-boy fully recognized.

Before long Cerizet began to fraternize with the Cointets' workpeople,
drawn to them by the mutual attraction of blouse and jacket, and the
class feeling, which is, perhaps, strongest of all in the lowest ranks
of society. In their company Cerizet forgot the little good doctrine
which David had managed to instil into him; but, nevertheless, when the
others joked the boy about the presses in his workshop ("old sabots," as
the "bears" contemptuously called them), and showed him the magnificent
machines, twelve in number, now at work in the Cointets' great printing
office, where the single wooden press was only used for experiments,
Cerizet would stand up for David and fling out at the braggarts.

"My gaffer will go farther with his'sabots' than yours with their
cast-iron contrivances that turn out mass books all day long," he
would boast. "He is trying to find out a secret that will lick all the
printing offices in France and Navarre."

"And meantime you take your orders from a washer-woman, you snip of a
foreman, on two francs a day."

"She is pretty though," retorted Cerizet; "it is better to have her to
look at than the phizes of your gaffers."

"And do you live by looking at his wife?"

From the region of the wineshop, or from the door of the printing
office, where these bickerings took place, a dim light began to break in
upon the brothers Cointet as to the real state of things in the Sechard
establishment. They came to hear of Eve's experiment, and held it
expedient to stop these flights at once, lest the business should begin
to prosper under the poor young wife's management.

"Let us give her a rap over the knuckles, and disgust her with the
business," said the brothers Cointet.

One of the pair, the practical printer, spoke to Cerizet, and asked him
to do the proof-reading for them by piecework, to relieve their reader,
who had more than he could manage. So it came to pass that Cerizet
earned more by a few hours' work of an evening for the brothers Cointet
than by a whole day's work for David Sechard. Other transactions
followed; the Cointets seeing no small aptitude in Cerizet, he was told
that it was a pity that he should be in a position so little favorable
to his interests.

"You might be foreman some day in a big printing office, making
six francs a day," said one of the Cointets one day, "and with your
intelligence you might come to have a share in the business."

"Where is the use of my being a good foreman?" returned Cerizet. "I am
an orphan, I shall be drawn for the army next year, and if I get a bad
number who is there to pay some one else to take my place?"

"If you make yourself useful," said the well-to-do printer, "why should
not somebody advance the money?"

"It won't be my gaffer in any case!" said Cerizet.

"Pooh! Perhaps by that time he will have found out the secret."

The words were spoken in a way that could not but rouse the worst
thoughts in the listener; and Cerizet gave the papermaker and printer a
very searching look.

"I do not know what he is busy about," he began prudently, as the master
said nothing, "but he is not the kind of man to look for capitals in the
lower case!"

"Look here, my friend," said the printer, taking up half-a-dozen sheets
of the diocesan prayer-book and holding them out to Cerizet, "if you
can correct these for us by to-morrow, you shall have eighteen francs
to-morrow for them. We are not shabby here; we put our competitor's
foreman in the way of making money. As a matter of fact, we might let
Mme. Sechard go too far to draw back with her _Shepherd's Calendar_,
and ruin her; very well, we give you permission to tell her that we
are bringing out a _Shepherd's Calendar_ of our own, and to call her
attention too to the fact that she will not be the first in the field."

Cerizet's motive for working so slowly on the composition of the almanac
should be clear enough by this time.

When Eve heard that the Cointets meant to spoil her poor little
speculation, dread seized upon her; at first she tried to see a proof of
attachment in Cerizet's hypocritical warning of competition; but before
long she saw signs of an over-keen curiosity in her sole compositor--the
curiosity of youth, she tried to think.

"Cerizet," she said one morning, "you stand about on the threshold, and
wait for M. Sechard in the passage, to pry into his private affairs;
when he comes out into the yard to melt down the rollers, you are there
looking at him, instead of getting on with the almanac. These things
are not right, especially when you see that I, his wife, respect his
secrets, and take so much trouble on myself to leave him free to give
himself up to his work. If you had not wasted time, the almanac would
be finished by now, and Kolb would be selling it, and the Cointets could
have done us no harm."

"Eh! madame," answered Cerizet. "Here am I doing five francs' worth of
composing for two francs a day, and don't you think that that is enough?
Why, if I did not read proofs of an evening for the Cointets, I might
feed myself on husks."

"You are turning ungrateful early," said Eve, deeply hurt, not so much
by Cerizet's grumbling as by his coarse tone, threatening attitude, and
aggressive stare; "you will get on in life."

"Not with a woman to order me about though, for it is not often that the
month has thirty days in it then."

Feeling wounded in her womanly dignity, Eve gave Cerizet a withering
look and went upstairs again. At dinner-time she spoke to David.

"Are you sure, dear, of that little rogue Cerizet?"

"Cerizet!" said David. "Why, he was my youngster; I trained him, I took
him on as my copy-holder. I put him to composing; anything that he is he
owes to me, in fact! You might as well ask a father if he is sure of his
child."

Upon this, Eve told her husband that Cerizet was reading proofs for the
Cointets.

"Poor fellow! he must live," said David, humbled by the consciousness
that he had not done his duty as a master.

"Yes, but there is a difference, dear, between Kolb and Cerizet--Kolb
tramps about twenty leagues every day, spends fifteen or twenty sous,
and brings us back seven and eight and sometimes nine francs of sales;
and when his expenses are paid, he never asks for more than his wages.
Kolb would sooner cut off his hand than work a lever for the Cointets;
Kolb would not peer among the things that you throw out into the yard if
people offered him a thousand crowns to do it; but Cerizet picks them up
and looks at them."

It is hard for noble natures to think evil, to believe in ingratitude;
only through rough experience do they learn the extent of human
corruption; and even when there is nothing left them to learn in this
kind, they rise to an indulgence which is the last degree of contempt.

"Pooh! pure Paris street-boy's curiosity," cried David.

"Very well, dear, do me the pleasure to step downstairs and look at the
work done by this boy of yours, and tell me then whether he ought not to
have finished our almanac this month."

David went into the workshop after dinner, and saw that the calendar
should have been set up in a week. Then, when he heard that the Cointets
were bringing out a similar almanac, he came to the rescue. He took
command of the printing office, Kolb helped at home instead of selling
broadsheets. Kolb and Marion pulled off the impressions from one form
while David worked another press with Cerizet, and superintended the
printing in various inks. Every sheet must be printed four separate
times, for which reason none but small houses will attempt to produce
a _Shepherd's Calendar_, and that only in the country where labor is
cheap, and the amount of capital employed in the business is so small
that the interest amounts to little. Wherefore, a press which turns out
beautiful work cannot compete in the printing of such sheets, coarse
though they may be.

So, for the first time since old Sechard retired, two presses were at
work in the old house. The calendar was, in its way, a masterpiece; but
Eve was obliged to sell it for less than a halfpenny, for the Cointets
were supplying hawkers at the rate of three centimes per copy. Eve made
no loss on the copies sold to hawkers; on Kolb's sales, made directly,
she gained; but her little speculation was spoiled. Cerizet saw that
his fair employer distrusted him; in his own conscience he posed as the
accuser, and said to himself, "You suspect me, do you? I will have
my revenge," for the Paris street-boy is made on this wise. Cerizet
accordingly took pay out of all proportion to the work of proof-reading
done for the Cointets, going to their office every evening for the
sheets, and returning them in the morning. He came to be on familiar
terms with them through the daily chat, and at length saw a chance of
escaping the military service, a