Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) by Honoré de Balzac Read Free Book Online

then do you reckon, David, for the printer’s licence? Do you know what the
Advertising Journal
is worth at ten sous a line? It’s a monopoly, and it brought in five hundred francs last month. My lad, take a look at the ledgers and see what comes in from the prefecture posters and registers and the work we do for the Mayor and the Bishop. You’re a lazy-bones with no thought of getting on. You’re boggling about the price of a horse which will carry you to some fine piece of property like the Marsac one.’
    To the inventory was appended a deed of partnership between father and son. The benevolent father was letting his house to the firm for twelve hundred francs a year, although he had bought it for less than six thousand francs; and he was reserving one of the two attic rooms for his own use. Until such time as David Séchard had paid off the thirty thousand francs, profits were to be equally divided; once he had repaid this sum to his father, he would become the one and only owner of the printing-office. David computed the value ofthe licence, the good-will and the journal without taking the plant into account; he decided he would be able to make good and accepted the terms. His father, accustomed to the niggling cautiousness of the peasant class, and knowing nothing of the wider scope of Parisian calculations, was astonished at so prompt a conclusion.
    ‘Can my son have made money?’ he wondered. ‘Or is he even now thinking of not paying up?’ With this thought in mind, he questioned him in order to find out if he had money with him, so as to take it from him as a first instalment. The father’s curiosity awakened the son’s suspicions, and the latter remained as tight as a clam. The next day, Séchard senior ordered his apprentice to remove to the second-floor bedroom all the furniture which he planned to have transported to his country cottage in carts which would be returning there empty. He stripped the three first-floor rooms bare and handed them over to his son; he also put him in possession of the printing-works without giving him a farthing for the workmen’s wages. When David asked his father, as a partner, to contribute to the outlay needed for their joint enterprise, the old pressman affected not to understand. He was not obliged, he said, to hand over money as well as the printing-office; his capital was already sunk in it. His son’s logic became more pressing, and he replied that, when he had bought the printing-works from Rouzeau’s widow, he had managed without a penny in his pocket. If he, a poor and completely ignorant workman, had succeeded, a pupil of the Didots would do better still. Moreover, David had been earning money thanks to the education his old father had paid for by the sweat of his brow, and now he could very well put it to use.
    ‘What have you done with your earnings?’ he asked, returning to the attack in order to clear up the problem which his son’s silence had left unsolved the previous day.
    ‘Well, I had to live, and I had to buy books,’ David answered indignantly.
    ‘Oh, you bought books! You won’t do well in business. People who buy books can’t be much good at printing them,’ the ‘bear’ replied.
    David experienced the most horrible of humiliations: a father’s degradation. He had to endure the spate of mean, tearful, shifty, mercenary arguments which the old miser used to express his refusal. Realizing that he had to stand alone, without support, finding that he was dealing with a speculator instead of a father, he thrust back his grief and tried, out of philosophical curiosity, to get to the bottom of his character. He drew his attention to the fact that he had never asked him to render an account of his mother’s fortune. Even if this fortune could not be set off against the price asked for the printing-works, it should at least go towards the running of the new partnership.
    ‘Why’, old Séchard replied, ‘all your mother owned was her brains