Author: Honoré de Balzac

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 9780266492863

Excerpt from Lost Illusions: The Two Poets, And, Eve and David Séchard was formerly a journeyman printer, of the kind which the workmen whose dutv it was to collect the letters called, in typographic Slang, a bear. The incessant coming and going and turning, very like that of a bear in his cage, with which the pressmen moved from the ink to the press, and from the press to the ink, was no doubt the origin of the nickname In return, the bears called the compositors monkeys, on account Of the agility with which those gentry were obliged to catch up the letters from the hundred and fifty little cases which contained them. At the dis astrous period of the Revolution, Séchard, then about fifty years old, was lately married. His age and his marriage saved him from the great draft which swept nearly all'the workmen of France into the army. The old pressman was left alone in the printing-othee, the master of which (otherwise termed the had just died, leaving a widow and two children. The establishment seemed threatened with immediate col lapse. The solitary bear could not be transformed into a monkey for the reason that, in his capacity as a press man, he had not known how to read or write. At this juncture a representative of the people, eager to dis tribute the noble decrees of the Convention, bestowed upon the pressman, without paying any heed to his incapacity, the license of a master-printer, and gave him the work to do. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.