Old Séchard Transfers the Printing Shop to David at an Inflated Price

Old Séchard’s transfer of the printing shop to David is less a gift than a costly bargain engineered by a father who knows how to price every tool and obligation. He values the business at thirty thousand francs, secures half the profits until David repays him, and contributes no money for the work the shop needs. The arrangement gives David ownership as a future possibility, but leaves him with immediate debt, inadequate working capital, and the humiliation of discovering how completely his father treats their relationship as a commercial negotiation.

The Shop and Its Inventory

The transfer is staged in the shop’s stark domestic rooms. The combined entrance hall and dining room is whitewashed and furnished with only three poor chairs, a round table, and a cupboard; dirty flooring and windows, along with paper that accumulates in the room, convey a household organized around trade rather than comfort. The dinner dishes may sit on bales. In a neighboring room, an older bed and worn furniture contrast with the salon, whose blue-painted woodwork and decorative paper preserve the unfinished ambitions of Old Séchard’s late wife. She had died amid plans to improve the house, but he abandoned the changes because he saw no return in them.

Into this setting Old Séchard brings David and points out an inventory of the printing equipment, prepared under his direction by the foreman. The list is meant to establish that David is receiving a valuable business: it includes three wooden presses held together with iron bars, with cast-iron beds, as well as the assorted implements needed to operate a provincial printing shop. Old Séchard insists that old equipment can be more useful than new, and that local customers prefer familiar designs. He invokes the established habits of provincial buyers to defend the shop’s dated ornaments and type, arguing that a wedding notice without traditional decorative figures might not satisfy its customer. His pitch turns worn or unfashionable stock into an asset by making familiarity, rather than innovation, the measure of value.

The inventory’s thoroughness is part of the pressure. Old Séchard has priced even the smallest paper supplies and workshop materials, including boards, tubs, stones, and washing brushes, as well as the ropes used for drying. The total of thirty thousand francs includes the master printer’s license and the business’s goodwill. David understands that there is little room to negotiate: his father presents the choice as acceptance or refusal, while treating every listed object as grounds for the asking price.

Price and Partnership

David initially sees the transaction as a question of the license, the customer base, and the newspaper, rather than the tools. He knows that Old Séchard acquired the whole business for ten thousand francs in assignats and judges thirty thousand francs exorbitant in its present condition. He therefore objects to the price, but his father answers by emphasizing the income-producing privileges and established local work, including official printing and notices. The disagreement is not simply over the physical condition of the presses. It concerns what should count as the shop’s value: David weighs the enterprise’s actual prospects, while Old Séchard presents its accumulated stock and customary business as assets that his son must pay to inherit.

An agreement of association is attached to the inventory. Old Séchard leases the house to the partnership for twelve hundred francs, although he had bought it for six thousand livres, and reserves one of the two attic rooms for himself. Profits are to be divided equally until David has repaid the thirty thousand francs; after repayment, David is to become sole owner of the printing shop. David accepts, calculating the value of the license, clientele, and newspaper while setting the tools aside in his own reckoning. His quick agreement surprises his father, who suspects either that David has money available or that he has found a way not to pay.

The Refusal of Working Capital

The signed arrangement does not bring David the support he expects from a partner. The next day, Old Séchard has his own furniture moved into an upstairs room and leaves David the three rooms on the first floor bare. He places David in possession of the printing shop but gives him no money to pay the workers. When David asks him, as a fellow partner, to contribute the capital needed to operate the business, Old Séchard denies that the agreement requires him to do so. In his view, transferring the shop has already fulfilled his contribution; he points to his own history of managing without funds as proof that David can do the same.

This refusal changes the practical meaning of the transaction. David has accepted a substantial repayment obligation and a division of future profits, but the business must continue without the cash needed for its immediate operation. Old Séchard treats his son’s education and savings as resources David can now put to use, and dismisses the money David spent on books as evidence of poor commercial judgment. Ownership is therefore offered on terms that place the risks of running the shop on David while protecting the father’s claim to repayment.

David’s Burden

The financial negotiation becomes a moral rupture because David had attributed his father’s hard bargaining to attachment to the old equipment and believed Old Séchard might have good intentions. When he asks about the fortune left by his mother, hoping it might at least support the partnership if it cannot offset the price, his father denies that there was a fortune to account for. David realizes that pursuing a reckoning would require a long, costly, and dishonoring lawsuit. Rather than begin that fight, he accepts the burden and resolves to work, telling himself that the labor will ultimately be for his own benefit.

That decision does not erase the humiliation of finding a speculator in his father. It marks the transfer’s decisive outcome: David gains a route to eventual ownership, but only by accepting the inflated valuation, the father’s reserved room and rent, the repayment conditions, and the absence of operating funds. The shop passes into David’s hands as both an opportunity and an imposed obligation; the inventory that was presented as proof of its worth also measures the weight of the debt he must carry.