David Séchard’s visit to Old Séchard at Marsac turns a papermaking demonstration into a test of family loyalty—and ends with proof of the invention but no assistance. David can make fine paper from plant matter in a locked room with improvised equipment; what he cannot obtain is the support of a father who judges him by his commercial results and fears being the one exploited. The episode makes the contrast tangible: thirty finished sheets on one side, a refusal to help his son’s struggling household on the other.

Background and Stakes

David sets out for Marsac with Kolb after his wife, Ève Séchard, looks into his room and learns that the men have gone. When Kolb asks where they are headed, David explains that, since Kolb has put him on this road, he will make one final attempt to reach his father’s heart. The journey is therefore not simply a search for materials or a prospective business partner. David is asking the man who sold him the printing business at an exorbitant price to help him survive and put a new discovery to use.

The narrator presents the father and son as divided by more than money. Old Séchard considers David’s troubled circumstances evidence that his son has failed despite having received the same kind of opportunity that once served him. He cannot understand David’s abilities, and reassures himself that he has at least left him a living. David, by contrast, understands his father well enough to excuse him. The difference matters: David arrives with a generous interpretation of their history, while Old Séchard approaches the invention through suspicion and self-protection.

They reach Marsac at eight in the evening, finding Old Séchard near the end of his dinner. Kolb is indignant at the old man’s reception, but David sends him to put the horse at Courtois Mill so it will not inconvenience his father. He tells Kolb that fathers are always right. That conciliatory gesture sets the terms of the appeal: David continues to protect his father from embarrassment even as he needs money from him.

The Demonstration in the Distillery

David does not disclose the details of his secret. Instead, he offers Old Séchard an interest in the enterprise in exchange for the sums he needs, either to free himself from immediate pressure or to begin exploiting the discovery. His father asks how he can make fine paper at no cost. David answers with a proposal rather than a claim: lock him away somewhere no one can watch his operations, and let him work.

The arrangement converts the father’s suspicion into an experiment. David and Kolb are shut in a small tiled room adjoining the cellar, used for the equipment involved in distilling the local wine into Cognac brandy. Old Séchard agrees to provide a cauldron and to gather artichoke and asparagus stalks, stinging nettles, and reeds from beside a small river. He promises as much as twenty-five thousand francs, but only on the condition that David can earn him an equal sum every year. The offer is conditional and calculating from the outset: the discovery is to be judged by the return it can produce for the father.

Kolb rides to Mansle for a large horsehair sieve and glue, while Old Séchard brings bread, cold meat, wine, and the green plant material David needs. Around eleven, he locks the two men inside, says he will let his dogs loose, and insists that no one will bring them paper. David recognizes that the room contains the tools of a little factory: wood, basins, and a fire. He and Kolb spend about two hours breaking and preparing the stalks with two beams while the water boils.

At about two in the morning, Kolb hears a sound like a drunkard’s hiccup and investigates with one of their two candles. Through a small square opening above the door, concealed by empty casks, he sees Old Séchard’s purplish face. The old man has used an interior passage to spy on their work. When challenged, he claims he came to see whether they needed anything; David asks him to go back to bed and leave Kolb on watch. The attempted demonstration is thus also a contest over secrecy: Old Séchard demands proof but cannot resist trying to see the process he agreed to keep hidden.

Proof, Qualification, and Refusal

At four the next morning, David emerges from the distillery having removed the traces of his operations. He brings his father about thirty sheets. Their fineness, whiteness, firmness, and strength leave nothing to be desired, and the horsehair sieve has left visible marks where its strands are thicker. Old Séchard tests the samples with the practiced palate and hands of a former printer: he moistens them with his tongue, handles, crumples, and folds them, subjecting them to the ordinary tests used to judge printing paper.

The sheets give him no obvious defect to name, but he refuses to admit that the demonstration has defeated his doubts. He says that what matters is how the paper will behave under the press. His composure conceals a staged hesitation, and the narrator links his coldness to the humiliation he felt during the night. Rather than reward David for succeeding, he shifts the standard of proof. When David asks for help, Old Séchard tells him to perfect the sizing in the vat first; then he will provide money. The initial promise of investment has become a further condition.

David sends Kolb away and speaks plainly about their history. He says he never blamed his father for valuing the printing business at an exorbitant price and selling it at his own valuation; he had chosen to see a father in him, and to let an old man enjoy the fruits of his labor. David also reminds him that he yielded his mother’s property and accepted the burdened life the sale left him. He had hoped to make his fortune without troubling his father, but now he has found the secret while hungry, with his strength exhausted and debts that are not his own weighing on him.

His request finally turns from himself to Ève and their young child: he asks his father to protect them. David’s tears mark the extremity of a man who usually keeps his suffering from those he loves. Old Séchard misreads that distress as the self-pity of a son trying to extract money. He rejects the appeal, insists that he is a winegrower rather than a banker, and treats a father-son business arrangement as a danger to himself. The successful sheets have established David’s technical capacity, but they cannot make his father trust him.

Aftermath and Significance

Father and son part on bad terms. Around midnight, David and Kolb return to Angoulême on foot, taking precautions as if they were thieves. David is brought, without witnesses, to Basine Clerget’s safe lodging, prepared for him by Ève. A supply of raw materials is stored in Basine’s cellar so that Kolb, Marion, Madame Séchard mère, and her mother can avoid contact with Basine. Kolb tells people a different story, claiming that he helped David escape on horseback and left him in a carriage bound for the region near Limoges.

Old Séchard’s refusal does not end his interest in the discovery. Two days after the confrontation, he visits his daughter-in-law because avarice has made him anxious to know whether the invention offers a chance of fortune. He moves into one of the attic rooms he had reserved above her apartment and remains there, ignoring the household’s lack of money. His conduct sharpens the episode’s central irony: he will not finance his son when David needs help, but he wants to remain close to the prospect of profit. The father has seen the paper, handled it, and tested it; his refusal is not a failure to witness the result. It is the consequence of a relationship in which affection is repeatedly subordinated to calculation.