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Updated: June 9, 2025
Taking this fact into consideration, therefore, the generous parent consented to abandon his share of the business but not the business premises; and the rental was still maintained at the famous sum of twelve hundred francs per annum. The old man came into town very seldom after the paper was sold to the Cointets.
"I was talking with the Cointets until midnight. They are behind Metivier, as you must have suspected. But how has something worse than our poor David's arrest happened since yesterday evening?" "Here is the awful news that I found when I awoke this morning," she said, holding out Lucien's letter.
"That little woman has a head on her shoulders," they said. "It is time that we took her business under our own control, by giving her enough work to live upon; we might find a real competitor in David's successor; it is in our interest to keep an eye upon that workshop." The Cointets went to speak to David Sechard, moved thereto by this thought.
"Any arrangement that will give us a quiet life will do for me," said David. Petit-Claud called to his servant. "Paul! go and ask M. Segaud, my successor, to come here. He shall go to see the Cointets while we breakfast" said Petit-Claud, addressing his former clients, "and in a few hours' time you will be on your way home to Marsac, ruined, but with minds at rest.
Meanwhile the Cointets grew richer; they had made handsome profits on their devotional books; and now they offered to buy Sechard's paper, to have all the trade and judicial announcements of the department in their own hands.
Cointet the elder did not choose to appear in the affair; but the fat Cointet openly said that he was acting for Metivier, and went to Doublon, taking Cerizet with him. Cerizet was his foreman now, and had promised his co-operation in return for a thousand-franc note. Doublon could reckon upon two of his understrappers, and thus the Cointets had four bloodhounds already on the victim's track.
Before long Cerizet 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. "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.
While Boniface Cointet was in Paris, David made a first experimental batch of unsized paper far superior to that in common use for newspapers. He followed it up with a second batch of magnificent vellum paper for fine printing, and this the Cointets used for a new edition of their diocesan prayer-book.
I put him to composing; anything that he is he owes to me, in fact! You might as well ask a father if he is sure of his child." Upon this, Eve told her husband that Cerizet was reading proofs for the Cointets. "Poor fellow! he must live," said David, humbled by the consciousness that he had not done his duty as a master.
"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 Cerizet. "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 some one else to take my place?"
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