As to the house above the printing office, it consisted of three rooms on the first floor and a couple of attics in the roof.  The first room did duty as dining-room and lobby; it was exactly the same length as the passage below, less the space taken up by the old-fashioned wooden staircase; and was lighted by a narrow casement on the street and a bull’s-eye window looking into the yard.  The chief characteristic of the apartment was a cynic simplicity, due to money-making greed.  The bare walls were covered with plain whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured, the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and a sideboard stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a sitting-room.  Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated grime.  Reams of blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the floor, and more frequently than not the remains of Sechard’s dinner, empty bottles and plates, were lying about on the packages.

The bedroom was lighted on the side of the yard by a window with leaded panes, and hung with the old-world tapestry that decorated house fronts in provincial towns on Corpus Christi Day.  For furniture it boasted a vast four-post bedstead with canopy, valances and quilt of crimson serge, a couple of worm-eaten armchairs, two tapestry-covered chairs in walnut wood, an aged bureau, and a timepiece on the mantel-shelf.  The Seigneur Rouzeau, Jerome-Nicolas’ master and predecessor, had furnished the homely old-world room; it was just as he had left it.

The sitting-room had been partly modernized by the late Mme. Sechard; the walls were adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold, painted the color of powder blue.  The panels were decorated with wall-paper —­Oriental scenes in sepia tint—­and for all furniture, half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped backs and blue leather cushions were ranged round the room.  The two clumsy arched windows that gave upon the Place du Murier were curtainless; there was neither clock nor candle sconce nor mirror above the mantel-shelf, for Mme. Sechard had died before she carried out her scheme of decoration; and the “bear,” unable to conceive the use of improvements that brought in no return in money, had left it at this point.

Hither, pede titubante, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard brought his son, and pointed to a sheet of paper lying on the table—­a valuation of plant drawn up by the foreman under his direction.

“Read that, my boy,” said Jerome-Nicolas, rolling a drunken eye from the paper to his son, and back to the paper.  “You will see what a jewel of a printing-house I am giving you.”

“’Three wooden presses, held in position by iron tie-bars, cast-iron plates——­’”

“An improvement of my own,” put in Sechard senior.

“’——­Together with all the implements, ink-tables, balls, benches, et cetera, sixteen hundred francs!’ Why, father,” cried David, letting the sheet fall, “these presses of yours are old sabots not worth a hundred crowns; they are only fit for firewood.”