the coming struggle with the
Cointets would be fought out by his son and not by himself.

"I should have gone to the wall," he thought, "but a young fellow from
the Didots will pull through."

The septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at ease in
his own fashion. If his knowledge of the higher branches of the craft
of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past
master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an
art held in high esteem by the divine author of _Pantagruel_; though of
late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance,
the cult has fallen, day by day, into disuse.

Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, bound by the laws of etymology to be a dry
subject, suffered from an inextinguishable thirst. His wife, during her
lifetime, managed to control within reasonable bounds the passion
for the juice of the grape, a taste so natural to the bear that M. de
Chateaubriand remarked it among the ursine tribes of the New World. But
philosophers inform us that old age is apt to revert to the habits of
youth, and Sechard senior is a case in point--the older he grew, the
better he loved to drink. The master-passion had given a stamp of
originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it
reached the proportions of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks
looked like vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches
of purple, madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the
countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine
tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick eyebrows
like bushes covered with snow, were agleam with the cunning of avarice
that had extinguished everything else in the man, down to the very
instinct of fatherhood. Those eyes never lost their cunning even when
disguised in drink. Sechard put you in mind of one of La Fontaine's
Franciscan friars, with the fringe of grizzled hair still curling about
his bald pate. He was short and corpulent, like one of the old-fashioned
lamps for illumination, that burn a vast deal of oil to a very small
piece of wick; for excess of any sort confirms the habit of body, and
drunkenness, like much study, makes the fat man stouter, and the lean
man leaner still.

For thirty years Jerome-Nicolas-Sechard had worn the famous municipal
three-cornered hat, which you may still see here and there on the head
of the towncrier in out-of-the-way places. H