David Sechard’s school career was a brilliant one.  Old Sechard, as a “bear” who had succeeded in life without any education, entertained a very considerable contempt for attainments in book learning; and when he sent his son to Paris to study the higher branches of typography, he recommended the lad so earnestly to save a good round sum in the “working man’s paradise” (as he was pleased to call the city), and so distinctly gave the boy to understand that he was not to draw upon the paternal purse, that it seemed as if old Sechard saw some way of gaining private ends of his own by that sojourn in the Land of Sapience.  So David learned his trade, and completed his education at the same time, and Didot’s foreman became a scholar; and yet when he left Paris at the end of 1819, summoned home by his father to take the helm of business, he had not cost his parent a farthing.

Now Nicolas Sechard’s establishment hitherto had enjoyed a monopoly of all the official printing in the department, besides the work of the prefecture and the diocese—­three connections which should prove mighty profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this juncture the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the authorities for the second printer’s license in Angouleme.  Hitherto old Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business.  Sechard thought joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the Cointets would be fought out by his son and not by himself.

“I should have gone to the wall,” he thought, “but a young fellow from the Didots will pull through.”

The septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at ease in his own fashion.  If his knowledge of the higher branches of the craft of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past master of an art which workmen pleasantly call “tipple-ography,” an art held in high esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel; though of late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the cult has fallen, day by day, into disuse.

Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, bound by the laws of etymology to be a dry subject, suffered from an inextinguishable thirst.  His wife, during her lifetime, managed to control within reasonable bounds the passion for the juice of the grape, a taste so natural to the bear that M. de Chateaubriand remarked it among the ursine tribes of the New World.  But philosophers inform us that old age is apt to revert to the habits of youth, and Sechard senior is a case in point—­the older he grew, the better he loved to drink.  The master-passion had given a stamp of originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it reached the proportions of a double great-canon