“Gentlemen,” said Eve, while Cérizet went across to David’s workshop to announce the two printers, “while my husband was with the MM. Didot he came to know of excellent workers, honest and industrious men; he will choose his successor, no doubt, from among the best of them. If he sold his business outright for some twenty thousand francs, it might bring us in a thousand francs per annum; that would be better than losing a thousand yearly over such trade as you leave us. Why did you envy us the poor little almanac speculation, especially as we have always brought it out?”
“Oh, why did you not give us notice, madame? We would not have interfered with you,” one of the brothers answered blandly (he was known as the “tall Cointet”).
“Oh, come gentlemen! you only began your almanac after Cérizet told you that I was bringing out mine.”
She spoke briskly, looking full at “the tall Cointet” as she spoke. He lowered his eyes; Cérizet’s treachery was proven to her.
This brother managed the business and the paper mill; he was by far the cleverer man of business of the two. Jean showed no small ability in the conduct of the printing establishment, but in intellectual capacity he might be said to take colonel’s rank, while Boniface was a general. Jean left the command to Boniface. This latter was thin and spare in person; his face, sallow as an altar candle, was mottled with reddish patches; his lips were pinched; there was something in his eyes that reminded you of a cat’s eyes. Boniface Cointet never excited himself; he would listen to the grossest insults with the serenity of a bigot, and reply in a smooth voice. He went to mass, he went to confession, he took the sacrament. Beneath his caressing manners, beneath an almost spiritless look, lurked the tenacity and ambition of the priest, and the greed of the man of business consumed with a thirst for riches and honors. In the year 1820 “tall Cointet” wanted all that the bourgeoisie finally obtained by the Revolution of 1830. In his heart he hated the aristocrats, and in religion he was indifferent; he was as much or as little of a bigot as Bonaparte was a member of the Mountain; yet his vertebral column bent with a flexibility wonderful to behold before the noblesse and the official hierarchy; for the powers that be, he humbled himself, he was meek and obsequious. One final characteristic will describe him for those who are accustomed to dealings with all kinds of men, and can appreciate its value—Cointet concealed the expression of his eyes by wearing colored glasses, ostensibly to preserve his sight from the reflection of the sunlight on the white buildings in the streets; for Angoulême, being set upon a hill, is exposed to the full glare of the sun. Tall Cointet was really scarcely above middle height; he looked much taller than he actually was by reason of the thinness, which told of overwork and a brain in continual ferment. His lank, sleek gray hair, cut in somewhat ecclesiastical fashion; the black trousers, black stockings, black waistcoat, and long puce-colored greatcoat (styled a lévite in the south), all completed his resemblance to a Jesuit.
Boniface was called “tall Cointet” to distinguish him from his brother, “fat Cointet,” and the nicknames expressed a difference in character as well as a physical difference between a pair of equally redoubtable personages. As for Jean Cointet, a jolly, stout fellow, with a face from a Flemish interior, colored by the southern sun of Angoulême, thickset, short and paunchy as Sancho Panza; with a smile on his lips and a pair of sturdy shoulders, he was a striking contrast to his older brother. Nor was the difference only physical and intellectual. Jean might almost be called Liberal in politics; he belonged to the Left Centre, only went to mass on Sundays, and lived on a remarkably good understanding with the Liberal men of business. There were those in L’Houmeau who said that this divergence between the brothers was more apparent than real. Tall Cointet turned his brother’s seeming good nature to advantage very skilfully. Jean was his bludgeon. It was Jean who gave all the hard words; it was Jean who conducted the executions which little beseemed the elder brother’s benevolence. Jean took the storms department; he would fly into a rage, and propose terms that nobody would think of accepting, to pave the way for his brother’s less unreasonable propositions. And by such policy the pair attained their ends, sooner or later.
Eve, with a woman’s tact, had soon divined the characters of the two brothers; she was on her guard with foes so formidable. David, informed beforehand of everything by his wife, lent a profoundly inattentive mind to his enemies’ proposals.
“Come to an understanding with my wife,” he said, as he left the Cointets in the office and went back to his laboratory. “Mme. Séchard knows more about the business than I do myself. I am interested in something that will pay better than this poor place; I hope to find a way to retrieve the losses that I have made through you—”
“And how?” asked the fat Cointet, chuckling.
Eve gave her husband a look that meant, “Be careful!”
“You will be my tributaries,” said David, “and all other consumers of papers besides.”
“Then what are you investigating?” asked the hypocritical Boniface Cointet.
Boniface’s question slipped out smoothly and insinuatingly, and again Eve’s eyes implored her husband to give an answer that was no answer, or to say nothing at all.
“I am trying to produce paper at fifty percent less than the present cost price,” and he went. He did not see the glances exchanged between the brothers. “That is an inventor, a man of his build cannot sit with his hands
