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 colored inks, red, black and blue. Old Séchard, 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. Séchard 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. Séchard 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 Cérizet always on his feet, setting up type under Mme. Séchard’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 colored 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 Cérizet was working unaccountably slowly; all the work of composing fell to him; and Mme. Séchard, knowing so little, could not find fault, and was fain to content herself with watching the young Parisian.
Cérizet 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 Séchard’s fanatical worshiper. David put him under one of the cleverest workmen, and took him for his copy-holder, his page. Cérizet’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 Cérizet with an insignificant, rather pretty little countenance, red hair, and a pair of dull blue eyes; he had come to Angoulême 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 Angoulême; 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, Cérizet (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 Cérizet 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 Cérizet 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, Cérizet 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 Cérizet; “it is better to have her to look at than the phizes of your gaffers.”