“You want something more of me?” cried Cérizet.
“Well, here it is,” said Petit-Claud. “Follow me carefully. You will be a master printer in Angoulême in two months’ time … but you will not have paid for your business—you will not pay for it in ten years. You will work a long while yet for those that have lent you the money, and you will be the cat’s-paw of the Liberal party. … Now I shall draw up your agreement with Gannerac, and I can draw it up in such a way that you will have the business in your own hands one of these days. But—if the Liberals start a paper, if you bring it out, and if I am deputy public prosecutor, then you will come to an understanding with the Cointets and publish articles of such a nature that they will have the paper suppressed. … The Cointets will pay you handsomely for that service. … I know, of course, that you will be a hero, a victim of persecution; you will be a personage among the Liberals—a Sergeant Mercier, a Paul-Louis Courier, a Manual on a small scale. I will take care that they leave you your license. In fact, on the day when the newspaper is suppressed, I will burn this letter before your eyes. … Your fortune will not cost you much.”
A working man has the haziest notions as to the law with regard to forgery; and Cérizet, who beheld himself already in the dock, breathed again.
“In three years’ time,” continued Petit-Claud, “I shall be public prosecutor in Angoulême. You may have need of me some day; bear that in mind.”
“It’s agreed,” said Cérizet, “but you don’t know me. Burn that letter now and trust to my gratitude.”
Petit-Claud looked Cérizet in the face. It was a duel in which one man’s gaze is a scalpel with which he essays to probe the soul of another, and the eyes of that other are a theatre, as it were, to which all his virtue is summoned for display.
Petit-Claud did not utter a word. He lighted a taper and burned the letter. “He has his way to make,” he said to himself.
“Here is one that will go through fire and water for you,” said Cérizet.
David awaited the interview with the Cointets with a vague feeling of uneasiness; not, however, on account of the proposed partnership, nor for his own interests—he felt nervous as to their opinion of his work. He was in something the same position as a dramatic author before his judges. The inventor’s pride in the discovery so nearly completed left no room for any other feelings.
At seven o’clock that evening, while Mme. du Châtelet, pleading a sick headache, had gone to her room in her unhappiness over the rumors of Lucien’s departure; while M. de Comte, left to himself, was entertaining his guests at dinner—the tall Cointet and his stout brother, accompanied by Petit-Claud, opened negotiations with the competitor who had delivered himself up, bound hand and foot.
A difficulty awaited them at the outset. How was it possible to draw up a deed of partnership unless they knew David’s secret? And if David divulged his secret, he would be at the mercy of the Cointets. Petit-Claud arranged that the deed of partnership should be the first drawn up. Thereupon the tall Cointet asked to see some specimens of David’s work, and David brought out the last sheet that he had made, guaranteeing the price of production.
“Well,” said Petit-Claud, “there you have the basis of the agreement ready made. You can go into partnership on the strength of those samples, inserting a clause to protect yourselves in case the conditions of the patent are not fulfilled in the manufacturing process.”
“It is one thing to make samples of paper on a small scale in your own room with a small mould, monsieur, and another to turn out a quantity,” said the tall Cointet, addressing David. “Quite another thing, as you may judge from this single fact. We manufacture colored papers. We buy parcels of coloring absolutely identical. Every cake of indigo used for ‘blueing’ our post-demy is taken from a batch supplied by the same maker. Well, we have never yet been able to obtain two batches of precisely the same shade. There are variations in the material which we cannot detect. The quantity and the quality of the pulp modify every question at once. Suppose that you have in a cauldron a quantity of ingredients of some kind (I don’t ask to know what they are), you can do as you like with them, the treatment can be uniformly applied, you can manipulate, knead, and pestle the mass at your pleasure until you have a homogeneous substance. But who will guarantee that it will be the same with a batch of five hundred reams, and that your plan will succeed in bulk?”
David, Eve, and Petit-Claud looked at one another; their eyes said many things.
“Take a somewhat similar case,” continued the tall Cointet after a pause. “You cut two or three trusses of meadow hay, and store it in a loft before ‘the heat is out of the grass,’ as the peasants say; the hay ferments, but no harm comes of it. You follow up your experiment by storing a couple of thousand trusses in a wooden barn—and, of course, the hay smoulders, and the barn blazes up like a lighted match. You are an educated man,” continued Cointet; “you can see the application for yourself. So far, you have only cut your two trusses of hay; we are afraid of setting fire to our paper mill by bringing in a couple of thousand trusses. In other words, we may spoil more than one batch, make heavy losses, and find ourselves none the better for laying out a good deal of
