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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Dive into the profound social landscapes of 19th-century Europe with 'Masterpieces of 19th-Century Realism – 3 Classic Social-Reform Novels'. This anthology presents an incisive exploration of realism through the lens of social change, meticulously curated to reflect the zeitgeist of a transformative era. Within these pages, discover a tapestry of narratives that, while distinct in style, uniformly challenge societal norms and expose the underlying inequalities of the time. Each novel is a testament to the genre's ability to blend stark realism with poignant humanism, ensuring that readers feel the emotional weight intertwined with its stories of change and reform. Collated from the minds that helped shape 19th-century literature, Balzac, Dickens, and Hugo, this volume gathers voices united by their commitment to social critique and narrative authenticity. These literary giants, emblematic of realism, invite readers into a conversation bridging cultural and historical divides. Their works have been instrumental in the progression of literature, addressing themes of poverty, justice, and societal reforms, which remain resonant today. Embedding themselves within the rich tapestry of realist tradition, these authors bring varied perspectives that together encapsulate a holistic view of social reform and humanity. This collection is an essential journey for readers seeking both intellectual stimulation and emotional depth. Through the lens of three luminaries, it illuminates the complexities of societal structures and individual resilience. Encouraging a multidimensional understanding of realism, the anthology is a remarkable entryway to the dialogues between past and present, promising insights as relevant now as when they were penned. Embark on this educational odyssey and fathom the profound depths of 19th-century consciousness, enhanced by the synergy of these luminaries' crafted narratives.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Masterpieces of 19th-Century Realism – 3 Classic Social-Reform Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo to chart a shared commitment to nineteenth-century realism harnessed for social critique. Each novel interrogates the forces shaping modern lives—urban economies, legal and penal structures, family and patronage—that bear on ambition and conscience. Read together, they illuminate how personal destinies and public institutions intertwine. The selection emphasizes works where narrative pleasure and reformist urgency reinforce one another, inviting a sustained inquiry into responsibility, compassion, and the price of advancement amid rapidly changing societies.
Balzac’s Lost Illusions examines the entanglement of art, commerce, and reputation; Dickens’s Great Expectations explores moral formation under the pressures of class aspiration; Hugo’s Les Misérables confronts the machinery of punishment and the claims of mercy. The through-line is realism as ethical investigation: characters test the boundaries between self-interest and solidarity while navigating bustling streets, courts, and marketplaces. Each narrative insists that private choices reverberate across social networks. Bringing them together highlights a continental conversation about material need, symbolic capital, and the labor of hope, grounding questions of justice in detailed observation of everyday life.
Our curatorial aim is to foreground the drama of expectation and disillusion that silently structures all three novels. Lost Illusions anatomizes the seductions of success and the costs of compromise; Great Expectations probes the allure of advancement and the demands of conscience; Les Misérables measures the reach of forgiveness against hardened systems. The collection traces how desire, guilt, and recognition interlock within urban scenes of print shops, parlor rooms, streets, and courts. By emphasizing recurring patterns—masks and revelations, debts and gifts—it invites a comparative meditation on how realism turns social pressures into catalysts for moral awakening.
This grouping differs from encountering each work in isolation by framing a deliberate conversation about social reform across languages and national traditions. Rather than a succession of solitary masterpieces, the sequence forms a dynamic triptych: ambition and media in Lost Illusions, formation and remorse in Great Expectations, law and compassion in Les Misérables. Read side by side, the novels expose convergences and productive frictions that can remain muted when considered alone, clarifying how realism balances systemic critique with intimate psychological change and how divergent narrative strategies can pursue a shared ethical horizon.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across these works, obligations—legal, financial, familial, and moral—bind characters as tightly as any prison. Lost Illusions scrutinizes contracts and reputations; Great Expectations weighs gratitude, shame, and the price of patronage; Les Misérables contemplates justice, duty, and grace. The recurring tension between names and deeds, promise and performance, animates their plots without reliance on contrivance. Each novel asks how a person’s story is written by accounts kept by others, whether in ledgers, rumors, or law. The persistent motif of debt operates both literally and metaphorically, linking ambition to responsibility and exposure to judgment.
Tone and texture vary productively. Balzac’s Lost Illusions often proceeds with analytic coolness, detailing mechanisms of influence and exchange. Dickens’s Great Expectations blends satire, tenderness, and unease within a coming-of-age frame, using humor to probe painful self-recognition. Hugo’s Les Misérables adopts a fervent moral register, sweeping from intimate crisis to social panorama. These contrasts create dialogue: Balzac’s systemic mapping sharpens our sense of structures that Dickens turns into personal trials, while Hugo’s breadth tests the reach of compassion against institutional hardness. Together, they demonstrate how realism can be microscopic, midrange, or epic without losing ethical focus.
Shared images reinforce that dialogue. The city functions as both crucible and maze, where chance meetings alter lives and public spaces stage private reckonings. Writing, money, and law—paper in various guises—recur as instruments that build reputations and also undo them. Scenes of education, whether formal or improvised, suggest that moral learning rarely follows a straight path. Light and shadow often register ethical possibility, while thresholds—doors, gates, bridges—mark decisive crossings. These motifs echo across Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, and Les Misérables, forming a visual and conceptual lexicon that intensifies the reader’s sense of connection across distinct narrative worlds.
Influence circulates less through explicit citation than through shared ambitions. Balzac’s relentless attention to the social energies of print and credit clarifies the stakes that Dickens translates into a drama of conscience in Great Expectations. Hugo’s insistence that law answer to a higher mercy reshapes the moral horizon against which both worldly success and personal growth are measured. While direct borrowings cannot be assumed, the novels inhabit a common conversation about modern justice and dignity. Their interplay shows how realism can cross national boundaries by reworking analogous problems in different keys, sustaining dialogue without overt allusion.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels retain urgency because their questions persist: what we owe one another amid inequality, how institutions constrain or enable repair, and whether ambition can be reconciled with integrity. Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, and Les Misérables depict social mechanisms that remain recognizable, from information economies to punitive regimes and precarious mobility. Their realism anchors ethical debate in concrete situations, modeling how narrative can diagnose systemic harm while tracing personal change. As public conversations revisit fairness, responsibility, and forgiveness, these books continue to supply language, scenes, and arguments that inform civic imagination and everyday judgment.
Critical reception has repeatedly situated these works at the center of nineteenth-century cultural history, citing their blend of psychological acuity and social range. Their characters and episodes have become common reference points in discussions of poverty, education, justice, and reputational life. Great Expectations is frequently invoked in reflections on moral growth; Les Misérables often anchors debate about punishment and compassion; Lost Illusions is regularly cited in analyses of media and ambition. Such recognition reflects not only storytelling power but also the diagnostic clarity with which each novel maps relations between individual desire and collective order.
Their cultural afterlives are extensive, spanning theater, cinema, broadcast, and classroom repertoires across generations. The names and situations introduced by Dickens, Balzac, and Hugo circulate widely in public discourse, often serving as shorthand for moral dilemmas or institutional critique. Adaptations and retellings have renewed their appeal while testing the elasticity of their themes, from redemption to social mobility. Scholarly conversations continue to mine their structures and motifs, using them to articulate major approaches to narrative realism, ethics, and the representation of the city. The endurance of these works reflects both artistic richness and continuing relevance.
Bringing Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, and Les Misérables into one frame renews their capacity to challenge complacency. By juxtaposing differing angles on ambition, conscience, and justice, the collection fosters a synoptic understanding of how realism can intervene in social thought without forfeiting narrative complexity. It also foregrounds the dignity of ordinary lives as a measure for evaluating institutions. The result is a sustained occasion for reflection on reform that honors competing values—mercy and law, aspiration and restraint—while recognizing the fragile work of self-revision. These novels endure because they dramatize that work with inexhaustible clarity.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Nineteenth-century Europe convulsed with alternating restorations and reforms, creating uneven terrains of authority in which literature functioned as a public tribunal. France navigated monarchic returns, urban uprisings, and accelerating capitalism; Britain managed industrial expansion, parliamentary recalibration, and a consolidating empire. In this shifting order, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, and Les Misérables confront the mechanisms through which power touches everyday life: credit and the press, the law and its punishments, charity and its limits, mobility and its costs. Each work dramatizes the negotiation between inherited hierarchies and emergent bourgeois aspirations, asking how institutions reward calculation, punish vulnerability, and define what counts as success.
Lost Illusions unfolds within a French milieu oscillating between restorationist authority and a commercialized public sphere. Patronage remains potent, yet markets increasingly decide cultural value. Censorship still shadows opinion, but the press—cheap, fast, and theatrical—rises as an informal parliament where reputations and fortunes are minted or destroyed. Provincial ambition confronts a Paris that converts talent into commodity through salons, publishers, and speculative advertising. The machinery of credit binds art to finance, while bureaucratic routines mask private collusions. Balancing nostalgia for aristocratic codes with an unsparing audit of bourgeois mores, the novel anatomizes how institutions normalize compromise and convert ideals into negotiable paper.
Les Misérables locates ethical conflicts within French urban space under regimes anxious about order. Police surveillance, identification papers, and a punitive penal code structure life chances long after wartime upheavals. Charity, parish relief, and municipal institutions mitigate misery unevenly, revealing tensions between private benevolence and public responsibility. An epidemic, inflation, and a short-lived insurrection expose the fragility of legitimacy when inequality concentrates in tenements and workshops. The barricade becomes a civic barometer: part theater of citizenship, part verdict on exclusion. Law, religion, and education contend to define redemption, while the street—its rumors, songs, and debris—emerges as the electorate of last resort.
Great Expectations is situated amid Britain’s early–Victorian recalibrations: expanding rail and river traffic, the growth of London into a labyrinth of professions, and debates over representation and reform. The penal system’s reliance on transportation and harsh deterrence coexists with philanthropic impulses and an evolving belief in rehabilitation. Rural apprenticeship and craft traditions encounter metropolitan finance and office work, unsettling hierarchies of birth and occupation. Social ascent appears newly possible yet remains precarious, tethered to property law, guardianship arrangements, and reputational codes. The novel stages how aspiration navigates a maze of institutions—schools, courts, chambers, and clubs—whose decorum conceals coercive power.
Across these contexts, work and learning are gateways closely policed by class, gender, and locality. Education reforms widen literacy yet stratify opportunity through fees and gatekeeping curricula. Guild remnants, clerical posts, and bureaucratic offices distribute status in exchange for deference; informal patronage thrives alongside exam-based merit. Debt enforcement and prison discipline extend the state’s reach into households, while charities publicize virtue and ration aid. Migration from provinces to capitals intensifies competition for attention, credit, and rent. The result is a political economy of aspiration: rules promise mobility, but entry costs multiply, and the poor pay fees—of time, dignity, and health—for every step.
The media environment forms a decisive power center. Serialized fiction, feuilletons, penny papers, and subscription libraries transform reading into a mass event and public controversy into profitable spectacle. Advertising finances opinion; criticism doubles as brokerage; theater and journalism exchange personas and cash. Elections, trials, and scandals become narrative commodities that shape careers and laws. This fusion of publicity and governance informs Lost Illusions directly, shadows Great Expectations through metropolitan rumor and celebrity, and saturates Les Misérables in street-level communications. The works collectively reveal how a society that counts votes and coins also counts column inches—and how each tally claims to measure truth.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Realism in these novels is less a checklist of surface detail than a moral experiment: if society is a network of pressures, what lives are possible within it? The authors inherit Romantic intensity—an insistence on the dignity of the outcast and the sublimity of revolt—yet redirect it toward institutional analysis. Minute description, documentary digression, and ethical argument sit side by side. The street scene, the ledger, and the courtroom become laboratories for testing ideals of justice and freedom. The result is a realism at once empirical and visionary, committed to showing how structures produce behavior while preserving room for conscience.
Technological and scientific transformations recalibrate narrative plausibility and pace. Steam engines shrink distance; improved presses multiply copies; gaslight and sewerage redraw nocturnal and sanitary geographies; the telegraph and rail timetables discipline time itself. Statistics, criminology, and urban planning claim expert authority over populations, translating human fates into aggregates and charts. These shifts authorize the novels’ panoramic sweeps and their attention to systems. They also inspire skepticism: quantification can conceal suffering in averages, and speed can cheapen judgment. The city, wired and piped, becomes both organism and machine—an image the narratives exploit to stage collisions between calculation and mercy.
Philosophically, the texts negotiate liberal constitutionalism, humanitarian religion, nascent socialism, and debates over deterrence versus rehabilitation. Each novel interrogates whether poverty is a moral failing or a manufactured condition, whether guilt adheres to the person or to the circumstances that ensnare them. Conscience confronts necessity; vows confront hunger; education confronts stigma. The works test legalism against grace, enterprise against exploitation, and the promise of equality against the inertia of inherited privilege. Their ethical frameworks remain plural: reform may come from law, from private responsibility, or from moments of unmerited kindness that legislate new possibilities for living.
The literary field is itself an object of study. Lost Illusions dissects the marketplace of poems, plays, and puffery, exposing how success depends on cliques, credit, and theatricality. Great Expectations absorbs and renovates the bildungsroman, using first-person retrospection to measure the cost of becoming a “gentleman” in a commercial city. Les Misérables fuses epic architecture with reportage, allowing long inquiries into sewers, schools, and slums to coexist with intimate vows. Serialization shapes suspense, cliffhangers cultivate attention, and circulating libraries expand audiences. Meanwhile, copyright controversies and reprint practices demonstrate that aesthetic value and property rights uneasily share a stage.
Narrative technique becomes social theory. Omniscience surveys institutions like a cartographer, while confession registers the moral vibration of choices made under pressure. Free-indirect satire punctures social lies; catalogues and digressions embed documents within drama; motifs—stairs, ledgers, chains, letters—materialize abstraction. Urban topographies act as characters, guiding or defying inhabitants. Coincidence, far from mere contrivance, models networks hidden from individuals but legible to society. Each novel balances pity with discipline, sentiment with skepticism, producing an aesthetic of clarity that refuses to flatten complexity. Realism here does not neutralize feeling; it clarifies how feelings are shaped by systems.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial receptions registered both admiration and alarm. Popular audiences celebrated thrilling plots and recognizable streets; officials and tastemakers worried over perceived sensationalism, political provocation, or disrespect toward established hierarchies. Controversies over depiction of crime, poverty, and clerical or judicial authority accompanied sales figures that affirmed a vast new reading public. Early critics debated whether these works elevated morals or courted scandal by dramatizing vice. The authors’ meticulous documentation extended journalism’s reach, while their ethical intensity suggested sermons in disguise. From the outset, the novels functioned as civic forums, with readers treating them as evidence in arguments about national character.
As the century turned, evolving schools of criticism repositioned these texts. Naturalist and modernist sensibilities sometimes charged them with moralizing or melodrama; defenders hailed their structural acuity and psychological penetration. University canons installed them as exemplars of the social novel and vehicles for teaching urban history, rhetoric, and ethics. The books’ accessibility aided classroom adoption, while their complexity sustained graduate seminars and annotated editions. Translation expanded their reach, encouraging comparative readings of French and British pathways to modernity. Debates shifted from verisimilitude toward questions of ideology: do the novels confirm bourgeois order or expose its contradictions?
Twentieth-century upheavals reframed interpretation. Occupation, censorship, and mass displacement renewed attention to surveillance, identity documents, and underground solidarities. Postwar reconstruction foregrounded questions of welfare, housing, and education that the novels had dramatized in earlier registers. Readers recognized afresh how emergencies—epidemic, economic panic, riot—stress-test legitimacy. Debates about punishment and forgiveness acquired urgency amid prison reforms and human-rights campaigns. The image of the barricade returned as a democratic emblem and a cautionary symptom. Meanwhile, bureaucratic language and propaganda made the novels’ assaults on euphemism newly legible, as if the nineteenth century had already rehearsed modern authoritarian vocabularies.
Adaptation amplified legacy. Stage and screen versions of Les Misérables turned its ethical argument into a global public ritual; films and television serials of Great Expectations renewed interest in class performance and the city’s moral topography. Lost Illusions, with its newsroom intrigue and theatrical economy, found periodic reinventions in cinema and television, often during moments of media anxiety. Editions with maps, glossaries, and historical notes democratized access. School curricula canonized excerpts, while reading groups treated the novels as shared civic texts. Each adaptation rebalances spectacle and critique, making the works barometers for changing tastes and political climates.
Academic methodologies diversified. Sociological readings track networks of credit, kinship, and professional gateways; Marxist analyses parse labor, commodity fetishism, and ideology; feminist critics examine domestic labor and the education of desire; law-and-literature approaches probe policing, punishment, and equity; postcolonial critiques interrogate penal transportation and imperial circuits implicit in fortunes and careers. Ethical criticism returns to difficult questions about complicity, complicity’s gradations, and the limits of forgiveness. Across methods, scholars debate whether the works endorse meritocratic ideals or expose merit as a story elites tell to the unlucky. Consensus remains elusive, which helps explain their longevity.
Contemporary readers find uncanny relevance. Platform media echo the nineteenth-century press in monetizing attention and fusing outrage with advertising. Financial crises revive anxieties about speculation, debt, and the morality of credit. Prison reform movements revisit questions about deterrence and redemption; urban protests reanimate barricade iconography and the politics of visibility. Mass migration to capitals reproduces familiar dramas of mentorship, imposture, and reinvention. Meanwhile, debates about philanthropy versus public provision make the novels’ portrayals of charity newly contentious. Their endurance lies in diagnosing mechanisms rather than moments, equipping each era to recognize itself—temptations, alibis, and hopes—in nineteenth-century mirrors.
Masterpieces of 19th-Century Realism – 3 Classic Social-Reform Novels
Ambition, Aspiration, and the Price of Social Mobility
Justice, Morality, and Social Reform
Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions
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 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.
