Edmond Dantès by Edmund Flagg
CHAPTER VIII.
A VAST PRINTING HOUSE.
A street somewhat famous in Paris is the Rue Lepelletier, famous not forits length, for its breadth, for the splendid edifices it exhibits, orfor the scenes and events it has witnessed, but famous for the exploitsbeheld by its neighbors, and the magnificent structures by themdisplayed. Not that the Rue Lepelletier can boast no fine edifices, forthe grand opera-house would give the loud lie to such an assertion. Andthen there is the Foreign Office near by, the Hotel of the Minister ofForeign Affairs at the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue desCapucines, and other noted places.
But there is one structure on the Rue Lepelletier not very noticeablesave for its immense size and its ancient and dingy aspect, which haswitnessed more scenes and events, and is more important than all itsmore splendid neighbors put together.
This edifice is of brick, five stories in height, and, as has beenintimated, is time-stained, storm-stained, smoke-stained and stained, itwould seem, by all other conceivable causes of stain, so begrimed anddingy, yet so venerable and imposing, does it seem.
This vast and ancient pile can be said to represent no order ofarchitecture. Architectural elegance appears not to have been thought ofwhen it was designed, and yet the facade of the old building seems tobear the same relation to the building itself as the face of an old manbears to his body, and that face is full of character, as are the facesof some men--sombre, sedate, serious, almost sinister in aspect. Thisold face, too, seemed full of apertures, through which unceasing andsleepless espionage could be kept up on the good citizens of the goodCity of Paris. Doors, and especially windows, numberless, opened andlooked upon the street, and on a cul de sac at one end of the edifice.
One of the doors opening on the cul de sac, at its further extremity,was broad, low, dark and sombre; like the gates of hell, as portrayed bythe English bard, it "stood open night and day." If you entered thisdoor and advanced, you would immediately find yourself ascending anarrow, gloomy and winding flight of stairs. Having with difficultygroped your way to the top, without having broken your neck, by havingfirst reached the point from which you started, to wit, the bottom; oryour shins, by stumbling against the steps--having, I say, accomplishedthe ascent to the first landing, your further passage is effectuallystopped by a massive door, which resists all your efforts to open it;and, as you are contemplating the dangerous descent which you now thinkyou are immediately and inevitably forced to make, an ivory bell-handleagainst the wall, beside the door, arrests your attention, with thewords around it, which, with difficulty, you decipher by the dim light,"Editor's Room--No Admittance," followed by the encouraging, butsomewhat contradictory word, "Ring," which, doubtless, means this: "Ifyou are a particular friend of the editor, or have particular businesswith him as a journalist, ring the bell, and perhaps you may beadmitted." Supposing either of these positions yours, you "ring thebell," and immediately you are startled by the tinkling of a small bellin the darkness close beside you, and the ponderous door, firm as abarricade till then, is now opened by unseen hands--by the same hand,indeed, and by the same action of that hand which caused the bell totinkle.
You enter the door, and find yourself in a corridor or passage, long anddark, for everything in this building is dark, and gaslight is the onlylight eighteen hours in the twenty-four; you find yourself in acorridor, I say, running the entire depth of the building, and bringingyou back again toward the Rue Lepelletier, which you left on enteringthe cul de sac, to seek the low entrance below. As you traverse theendless gallery, your attention is arrested by a deep hum, as of manyvoices at a distance, with which the entire structure seems pervaded,accompanied by a heavier sound, which rises and falls with measuredstroke. This mysterious hum might have been heard when you firstapproached or entered the building; but the silence and solitude of thecorridor have caused you to notice it now for the first time, and towonder at its cause.
Now had you the power of those magicians, necromancers, clairvoyants anddemi-devils, whether of the flesh or the spirit, who, at a glance, cangaze through massive walls and peer down the chimneys of a great city,and who, almost without glancing at all, can see through partitions,key-holes and iron doors, your wonder at the cause of these unknownsounds would instantly cease, while it would be yet more excited bythose causes themselves, for the vast building all around you, andthrough which you are passing, and which envelops you in its ceaselesshum, like the voice of a great city, would seem to you nothing less thana leviathan of life and action--a Titan--a Frankenstein--a mental andmaterial giant, with its acoustic tubes, like veins and arteries,running all over the structure, just beneath the surface of the walls,and uniting in every apartment; with its electric wires, like bundles ofnerves, which, having webbed the whole body with network, converge intoa focus-tube, and thence pass down into the vaults, through the massivefoundations, and beneath, the pavements of the thronged streets of themetropolis, and thence, rising again to the surface, branching ondistinct, diverse and solitary routes without the suburbs all overEurope. You would see, too, the mighty heart of this Titan, whose heavyheavings you have felt, heard and wondered at--THE PRESS--in itssubterranean tenement, amid smoke and flame. THE PRESS; which, like theanimal heart, receives eventually all that the veins convey to it, andflings forth everything in modified form through lungs and arteries.Tireless and untired in its action, never ceasing, never resting, for aswell might a man think to live when his heart had ceased to beat, as aprinting office exist when the throbbings of its press were no longerfelt; and as well could a man be supposed to live without breath as aprinting-office of the nineteenth century without its lungs, the steamengine, or its breath of life, the subtle fluid by which it is moved.
But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find thepress-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its darkdemi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping orflitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked,seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as ifa punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danaein the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.
On the first floor you would perceive the financial and publishingdepartment in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureausfor folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.
On the second floor--but that you will shortly behold, and it willdescribe itself.
On the third floor you would discover immense magazines ofmaterial--paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every knowndescription; and all in quantities seemingly as useless as incalculable.
On the fourth and fifth floors you would find the composition rooms,whence fly the winged words all over the world, peopled by its wholearmy of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases,"click--click--click" is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alonein those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add thatthe entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed intubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete,and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century inParis. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton,three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every objectand apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night--throughall the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive--andthe journal issues with the dawn--and the workmen are relieved byconstant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment tohundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusiveof their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in thecommercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents,sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twentypressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundreddistributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attaches andemployes too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation ofthis army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is ninemillions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand
The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press hasbeen called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it thesecond--nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power ofall three united equals not its tithe; and its position--itsrank!--royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past tenyears. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, whoowes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has notbeen, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist,the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successfulsoldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France--itsachievements and its continuance; Sir Bulwer Lytton says,
"The pen is mightier than the sword!"
But I have left you, dear reader, perambulating the dim corridor--sodim that your eyes can hardly decipher, although it is now high noon,the various signs upon the series of doors in the wall on your left,designating the various rooms of the editorial corps, for to theeditorial department is devoted the second floor of this extensiveedifice. The last door in this prolonged series bears the name of thechief journalist. You ring a bell, are bid to enter, and the apartmentis before you. Immense windows, rising from the floor to the ceiling,and opening upon a balcony, which overhangs the Rue Lepelletier, affordabundance of light for your eye to detect everything in the room by day,and an immense chandelier with gas-burners and opaque shades, pouringforth its flood of mellow radiance, would facilitate the sameinvestigation yet more at night. Beneath the chandelier is spread theimmense oval slab of the table. At it sits a man writing. Well, let himwrite on, at least for the present. Beside him, pile upon pile, pileupon pile, rise papers, wave after wave, flood upon flood, nothing butpapers; on the floor beneath his feet, on the table and under the table,before him, behind him, and all around him, naught but papers, papers,rising, rising, as if in wrathful might and stormy indignation, whilethe very walls are lined with papers in all languages, from all climesand governments, and of every age and dimension, deposited in huge foliovolumes and arranged in huge closets, along one whole side of the room.From the four continents, yea, and from the islands of the sealikewise, has this vast army come. In those tall closets extending fromfloor to ceiling might be found the full files for years of everyleading paper in every part of Christendom, affording a treasury ofreference, universal, unfailing, exhaustless, of knowledge of everyconceivable description, rapidly found by means of exact and copioustables of contents.
Upon the other side of the apartment extend ranges of shelves, fromfloor to ceiling, filled with ponderous tomes in black substantialbinding, seeming to belong to that class of standard works chieflyvaluable for reference as authorities, and bearing ample testimony intheir wear and tear, and their soiled appearance, to having beenfaithfully fingered. No thin, delicate and perfumed duodecimo is there,resplendent in gold and Russia, with costly engravings on steel, andletter-press in gilt or hot-pressed post. No, the books, the table, thejournalist and the whole chamber bear the dark, stern, toil-soiledaspect of labor, the severe air of practical utility. The onlyornaments, if such they can be styled, are busts--the busts of thesilver-tongued Vergniaud and a few of his political brothers--the victimGirondins of '92 being conspicuous. Here, too, in a prominent niche isthe noble front of Armand Carrel, the brave, the knightly, thechivalric, the true Republican, the true statesman, the true journalist,the true man--Armand Carrel, who, with Adolphe Thiers, his associate,sat first in this apartment as its chief--Armand Carrel, who fell yearsago before the pistol of Emile de Girardin, a brother journalist, thefounder of the cheap press, the hero of scores of combats before andsince, yet almost unscathed by all.
Such are some of the ornaments of the chief editor's sanctum. At thefurther extremity of the apartment, the wall is covered with maps anddiagrams, as well as charts of the prominent cities and points inEurope; and a large table beneath is heaped with books of travel,geographical views, and historical scenes arranged with no regard toorder, and seeming to lie precisely as thrown down after having beenused.
In a word, the whole room bears unmistakable evidence of stern,practical thought. In it and about it display is everywhere scrupulouslyeschewed. Practical utility is the only question of interest as touchingthe instruments of an editor, as of those of a carpenter; and theworkshop of the journalist bears no inconsiderable similarity to that ofthe artisan in more respects than one. To each a tool is valuable, bethat tool a book or a chisel, only for its usefulness, and the facilityand rapidity with which it will aid the possessor to accomplish hisends, and not for its beauty of form, or costliness of material orconstruction.
In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to beperceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying thetriumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought,and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus towhich ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vastestablishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising fromhis chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room tocomposing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile,everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind.Indeed, to such an extent is labor-saving carried in the Parisianprinting office that the compositor may never have seen the journalistwhose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proofand revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and thereal actors rarely meet.