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their hats knocked off by the iron bars which supported the presses. If they watched the agile movements of a compositor plucking his letters out of the hundred-and-fifty-two compartments of type, reading his copy, re-reading the line in his composing-stick and slipping in a lead, they bumped into a ream of damp paper lying under its weights, or caught their hips against the corner of a bench: all to the great amusement of ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. No one had ever arrived without mishap at the two large cages at the farther end of this cavern which formed two dismal annexes giving on to the courtyard and in which, on one side, the foreman sat in state and, on the other side, the master-printer. The courtyard walls were pleasantly decorated with vine-trellises which, given the owner’s reputation, lent an appetizing touch of local colour. At the farther end a tumbledown lean-to, in which the paper was damped and cut, backed on to a jet-black party wall. There too was the sink in which, before and after the printing-off, the ‘formes’ were washed. From this sink seeped away a decoction of ink mingled with the household slops, and that gave the peasants passing by on market-days the idea that the Devil was taking his ablutions inside the house. On one side of the lean-to was the kitchen, on the other a wood-pile. The first floor of the house, which had only two attic bedrooms above it, contained three rooms. The first, which ran the whole length of the alley except for the well of the old wooden staircase and received its light from the street through a little wooden casement, and from a court-yard through a bull’s-eye window, served both as antechamber and dining-room. Having no other decoration than white-wash, it exemplified the cynical simplicity of commercial greed; the dirty flags had never been washed; it was furnished with three rickety chairs, a round table and a sideboard standing between two doors which gave access, one to a bedroom, the other to the living-room; thewindows and doors were brown with grime; as a rule it was cluttered with blank or printed paper, the bales of which were often covered with the remains of Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard’s dinner: dessert, dishes and bottles. The bedroom, whose leaded window-panes drew their light from the courtyard, was hung with some of those old tapestries which in provincial towns are displayed along the house-fronts on Corpus Christi day. The bed was a curtained four-poster with a coarse linen counterpane and a red serge coverlet over the foot; there were worm-eaten armchairs, two upholstered walnut chairs, an old writing-desk and a wall-clock hanging over the chimney-piece. This room owed its atmosphere of patriarchal simplicity and its abundance of brown tints to the worthy Rouzeau, Séchard’s predecessor and former employer. The living-room had been modernized by the late Madame Séchard and shocked the eye with its appalling wainscots painted in wig-maker’s blue; the panels were decorated with wall-paper depicting Oriental scenes in sepia on a white ground; the furniture consisted of six chairs with blue roan seats and backs in the shape of lyres. The two crudely-arched windows looking out on to the Place du Mûrier had no curtains; the chimney-piece was devoid of candelabra, clock and mirror. Madame Séchard had died when she was only half-way through with her plans for embellishment, and the ‘bear’, seeing no purpose in unproductive improvements, had abandoned them. It was into this room that Jérôme-Nicholas Séchard,
pede titubante,
ushered his son and pointed to a round table, on which was a statement of his printing-house stock drawn up by the foreman at his direction.
    ‘Read that, my boy’, said Jérôme-Nicolas as his besotted eyes rolled from the document to his son and from his son to the document. ‘You’ll see what a champion printing-office I’m giving you.’
    ‘Three wooden presses supported by iron bars, with imposing-stone of