Before long Cérizet began to fraternize with the Cointets’ workpeople, drawn to them by the mutual attraction of blouse and jacket, and the class feeling, which is, perhaps, strongest of all in the lowest ranks of society. In their company Cérizet forgot the little good doctrine which David had managed to instil into him; but, nevertheless, when the others joked the boy about the presses in his workshop (“old sabots,” as the “bears” contemptuously called them), and showed him the magnificent machines, twelve in number, now at work in the Cointets’ great printing office, where the single wooden press was only used for experiments, Cérizet would stand up for David and fling out at the braggarts.
“My gaffer will go farther with his ‘sabots’ than yours with their cast-iron contrivances that turn out mass books all day long,” he would boast. “He is trying to find out a secret that will lick all the printing offices in France and Navarre.”
“And meantime you take your orders from a washerwoman, you snip of a foreman, on two francs a day.”
“She is pretty though,” retorted Cérizet; “it is better to have her to look at than the phizes of your gaffers.”
“And do you live by looking at his wife?”
From the region of the wineshop, or from the door of the printing office, where these bickerings took place, a dim light began to break in upon the brothers Cointet as to the real state of things in the Séchard establishment. They came to hear of Eve’s experiment, and held it expedient to stop these flights at once, lest the business should begin to prosper under the poor young wife’s management.
“Let us give her a rap over the knuckles, and disgust her with the business,” said the brothers Cointet.
One of the pair, the practical printer, spoke to Cérizet, and asked him to do the proofreading for them by piecework, to relieve their reader, who had more than he could manage. So it came to pass that Cérizet earned more by a few hours’ work of an evening for the brothers Cointet than by a whole day’s work for David Séchard. Other transactions followed; the Cointets seeing no small aptitude in Cérizet, he was told that it was a pity that he should be in a position so little favorable to his interests.
“You might be foreman some day in a big printing office, making six francs a day,” said one of the Cointets one day, “and with your intelligence you might come to have a share in the business.”
“Where is the use of my being a good foreman?” returned Cérizet. “I am an orphan, I shall be drawn for the army next year, and if I get a bad number who is there to pay someone else to take my place?”
“If you make yourself useful,” said the well-to-do printer, “why should not somebody advance the money?”
“It won’t be my gaffer in any case!” said Cérizet.
“Pooh! Perhaps by that time he will have found out the secret.”
The words were spoken in a way that could not but rouse the worst thoughts in the listener; and Cérizet gave the papermaker and printer a very searching look.
“I do not know what he is busy about,” he began prudently, as the master said nothing, “but he is not the kind of man to look for capitals in the lower case!”
“Look here, my friend,” said the printer, taking up half-a-dozen sheets of the diocesan prayerbook and holding them out to Cérizet, “if you can correct these for us by tomorrow, you shall have eighteen francs tomorrow for them. We are not shabby here; we put our competitor’s foreman in the way of making money. As a matter of fact, we might let Mme. Séchard go too far to draw back with her Shepherd’s Calendar, and ruin her; very well, we give you permission to tell her that we are bringing out a Shepherd’s Calendar of our own, and to call her attention too to the fact that she will not be the first in the field.”
Cérizet’s motive for working so slowly on the composition of the almanac should be clear enough by this time.
When Eve heard that the Cointets meant to spoil her poor little speculation, dread seized upon her; at first she tried to see a proof of attachment in Cérizet’s hypocritical warning of competition; but before long she saw signs of an over-keen curiosity in her sole compositor—the curiosity of youth, she tried to think.
“Cérizet,” she said one morning, “you stand about on the threshold, and wait for M. Séchard in the passage, to pry into his private affairs; when he comes out into the yard to melt down the rollers, you are there looking at him, instead of getting on with the almanac. These things are not right, especially when you see that I, his wife, respect
