Cérizet came from the great Foundling Hospital in Paris. He had been apprenticed to the MM. Didot, and between the ages of fourteen and seventeen he was David Séchard’s fanatical worshiper. David put him under one of the cleverest workmen, and took him for his copy-holder, his page. Cérizet’s intelligence naturally interested David; he won the lad’s affection by procuring amusements now and again for him, and comforts from which he was cut off by poverty. Nature had endowed Cérizet with an insignificant, rather pretty little countenance, red hair, and a pair of dull blue eyes; he had come to Angoulême and brought the manners of the Parisian street-boy with him. He was formidable by reason of a quick, sarcastic turn and a spiteful disposition. Perhaps David looked less strictly after him in Angoulême; or, perhaps, as the lad grew older, his mentor put more trust in him, or in the sobering influences of a country town; but be that as it may, Cérizet (all unknown to his sponsor) was going completely to the bad, and the printer’s apprentice was acting the part of a Don Juan among little work girls. His morality, learned in Paris drinking-saloons, laid down the law of self-interest as the sole rule of guidance; he knew, moreover, that next year he would be “drawn for a soldier,” to use the popular expression, saw that he had no prospects, and ran into debt, thinking that soon he should be in the army, and none of his creditors would run after him. David still possessed some ascendency over the young fellow, due not to his position as master, nor yet to the interest that he had taken in his pupil, but to the great intellectual power which the sometime street-boy fully recognized. 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 washer-woman, 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?”