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

and beauty.’
    At this reply, David saw through his father completely, and realized that, in order to extract such a reckoning from him, he would have to take legal proceedings, and that these would be interminable, costly and discreditable. The noble-hearted young man decided to shoulder the burden – a heavy one, for he knew what an effort it would be to discharge the obligations he was contracting towards his father.
    ‘I will work hard,’ he told himself. ‘After all, if I find it heavy going, so did the old fellow. Besides, shall I not be working for myself?’
    Séchard senior was worried by his son’s silence. ‘I’m leaving you a treasure,’ he said.
    David asked what this treasure was.
    ‘Marion,’ he replied.
    Marion was a sturdy country girl, indispensable for the running of the printing-works. She wetted the paper and trimmed it, ran errands, did the cooking, washed the clothes, unloaded the paper from the vans, went round collecting debts and cleaned the ink-balls. Had she had been able to read, old Séchard would have made a compositor of her.
    He set off on foot for the country. Although well pleased with his sale, which he was passing off as a venture in partnership, he was anxious about the way payment would be made. After the agony of making a sale, there always comes theagony of turning it into cash. All passions are essentially jesuitical. This man, who regarded education as useless, strove hard to believe in the effect it produces. His thirty thousand francs were so to speak lent out on mortgage, and the security for them was the sense of honour which education must have developed in his son. As a properly brought-up young man, David would sweat blood in order to meet his engagements; his knowledge of the trade would suggest ways and means; he had shown plenty of fine sentiments; he would certainly pay! Many fathers who act thus believe they have really been paternal, and old Séchard had managed to persuade himself of this by the time he reached his vineyard at Marsac, a little village some ten miles away from Angoulême. This domain, on which the previous owner had built a pleasant habitation, had grown in size from year to year since 1809, when the old ‘bear’ had acquired it. It was there that he exchanged the care of the printing-press for that of the winepress and, as he used to say, he had had too much to do with wine not to know all about the vine.
    For the first year of his retirement to the country, old Séchard showed a troubled countenance as he leaned over his vine-poles, for he spent all his time in his vineyard, just as formerly he had remained inside his workship. The unhoped-for thirty thousand francs went to his head even more than his cloudy September vintage: in his mind’s eye he could already see himself fingering them lovingly. The less he deserved this money, the more he desired to lay hands on it. And so anxiety often brought him back from Marsac to Angoulême. He toiled up the slopes of the rock on whose pinnacle the town is perched and entered the workshop to see how his son was getting on. The presses were in their usual place. The one and only apprentice, with a paper cap on his head, would be cleaning the ink-balls. The old ‘bear’ could hear the press creaking over an invitation card, recognize his old type and see his son and the foreman, each in his cage, reading what he supposed to be the proofs of a book. After dining with David, he returned to his Marsac property, brooding over his fears. Avarice, like love, is endowed with second sight as regardsfuture contingencies; it sniffs them out and worries them. At a distance from the workshop where the sight of his apparatus fascinated him and carried him back to the days when he was prospering, the vine-grower could detect disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son’s demeanour. He took fright at the very name of
Cointet Brothers,
and could see it eclipsing that of
Séchard and Son.
In short the old man