



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





TWO POETS

(Lost Illusions Part I)


By Honore De Balzac



Translated By Ellen Marriage



PREPARER'S NOTE

  Two Poets is part one of a trilogy and begins the story of
  Lucien, his sister Eve, and his friend David in the provincial
  town of Angouleme. Part two, A Distinguished Provincial at
  Paris is centered on Lucien's Parisian life. Part three, Eve
  and David, reverts to the setting of 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.





                              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 sincere admirer 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 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