Eve launches the Almanac des Bergers venture

Ève Séchard’s launch of an Almanac des Bergers business is a resourceful attempt to make the family’s depleted printing shop earn money from the materials and equipment still at hand. It briefly transforms a marginal workshop into a joint enterprise with David Séchard, but the venture’s elaborate production costs and competition from the Cointet brothers expose how little room the family has to compete.

From leftover stock to a new market

The idea grew out of Ève’s efforts to keep the Séchard printing shop viable. After taking charge, she inventoried what remained and first used the leftover paper to print popular illustrated legends for rural homes: stories of the Wandering Jew, Robert the Devil, and Belle Maguelonne, along with accounts of miracles. Cérizet composed the pages and their crude ornaments, Marion worked the press, Ève colored the illustrations, and Kolb carried the sheets out to sell.

In two months, Kolb’s activity and honesty helped Ève sell three thousand sheets within twelve leagues of Angoulême. They cost thirty francs to make and sold for two sous each, bringing in three hundred francs. Once the cottages and taverns in that local market were covered with the images, however, the trade needed a new product; Kolb could not travel beyond the department. Ève found among the shop’s materials the blocks needed for the Almanac des Bergers, a familiar illustrated book designed for people who could not read.

The plan and its arithmetic

The almanac’s form made it a distinctive provincial product: a single sheet folded sixty-four times into a small volume of 128 pages, with information conveyed through signs, pictures, and red, black, or blue engravings. It sold for one sou. Ève committed the profits from her first venture to producing it on a much larger scale. At about four francs per ream of paper, with five hundred sheets to a ream, she planned an initial run of one hundred reams—fifty thousand copies—and calculated that sales could yield two thousand francs in profit.

That calculation depended on production on a scale the shop had not recently attempted. Ève’s plan was not merely to print another small batch of popular sheets: she was committing the family’s accumulated earnings to a substantial run of a cheap book with a broad potential market. The almanac’s low selling price and visual appeal offered a way to turn basic equipment and labor into income, but the same low price made production costs decisive.

David joins the enterprise

David, absorbed in his own work, was surprised to find a press running and Cérizet still composing under Ève’s direction. Once he examined the project, he concluded that the almanac should have been composed in eight days. Learning that the Cointet brothers were preparing a competing edition, he moved from adviser to active collaborator: he halted Kolb’s sale of the illustrated sheets, reorganized work in the shop, and personally directed the printing.

The process made the limits of the enterprise plain. Kolb and Marion worked one press under David’s direction, while David and Cérizet handled the other. Each color required a separate impression; four inks meant four passes through the press for each sheet. The almanac’s crude appearance did not mean it was simple or cheap to manufacture. Its fourfold printing made it economically suited to provincial shops, where labor and the cost of capital tied up in printing equipment were low, rather than to establishments devoted to finer books. For the first time since Père Séchard’s retirement, two presses ran at once in the old workshop. David also offered to remake the rollers himself and advise Ève on the different inks required by the illustrations.

Competition, betrayal, and failure

Even as a technical achievement, the almanac could not win on price. The Cointet brothers supplied their own edition to colporteurs for three centimes, while Ève was forced to sell hers for two liards. She covered costs through the colportage trade and made money on copies Kolb sold directly, but the speculation as a whole failed. The contrast between David’s carefully managed, labor-intensive production and the rival’s lower wholesale price turned the family’s practical ingenuity into an insufficient defense against better-positioned competition.

The failure also sharpened suspicion inside the shop. Feeling that Ève distrusted him, Cérizet resolved to retaliate. He accepted unusually generous payments from the Cointet brothers for reading proofs, and his conversations with them led him to see the possibility of escaping military service. Rather than being recruited only after the fact, he was the first to raise the possibility of spying on David and exploiting the secret he was pursuing. His employment had made him part of the almanac’s production; his betrayal helped make the shop’s continued independence precarious.

Ève could see that she could not rely on Cérizet and could not find another worker like Kolb. Dismissing the only compositor would effectively end the printing shop, so she instead arranged to advertise the active business, its equipment, and its patent for sale through Métivier. The almanac venture thus stands at a turning point: it demonstrates Ève’s commercial initiative and draws David back into the workshop, while its defeat by price competition and the erosion of trust push the family toward disposing of the enterprise.