Part 10 (2/2)
Now had you the power of those magicians, necromancers, clairvoyants and demi-devils, whether of the flesh or the spirit, who, at a glance, can gaze through ma.s.sive walls and peer down the chimneys of a great city, and who, almost without glancing at all, can see through part.i.tions, key-holes and iron doors, your wonder at the cause of these unknown sounds would instantly cease, while it would be yet more excited by those causes themselves, for the vast building all around you, and through which you are pa.s.sing, and which envelops you in its ceaseless hum, like the voice of a great city, would seem to you nothing less than a leviathan of life and action--a t.i.tan--a Frankenstein--a mental and material 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 of nerves, which, having webbed the whole body with network, converge into a focus-tube, and thence pa.s.s down into the vaults, through the ma.s.sive foundations, and beneath, the pavements of the thronged streets of the metropolis, and thence, rising again to the surface, branching on distinct, diverse and solitary routes without the suburbs all over Europe. You would see, too, the mighty heart of this t.i.tan, whose heavy heavings you have felt, heard and wondered at--THE PRESS--in its subterranean tenement, amid smoke and flame. THE PRESS; which, like the animal heart, receives eventually all that the veins convey to it, and flings forth everything in modified form through lungs and arteries.
Tireless and untired in its action, never ceasing, never resting, for as well might a man think to live when his heart had ceased to beat, as a printing office exist when the throbbings of its press were no longer felt; and as well could a man be supposed to live without breath as a printing-office of the nineteenth century without its lungs, the steam engine, or its breath of life, the subtle fluid by which it is moved.
But to drop metaphor. In the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building you would find the press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked, seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal. The press never stops.
On the first floor you would perceive the financial and publis.h.i.+ng department in all its endless ramifications, with the separate bureaus for folding, enveloping, mailing, etc.
On the second floor--but that you will shortly behold, and it will describe itself.
On the third floor you would discover immense magazines of material--paper, ink, of every hue and quality, and type of every known description; and all in quant.i.ties 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 whole army of compositors; while from the long platoons of cases, ”click--click--click” is heard, the sole and unceasing sound which alone in those apartments is ever suffered to fall on the ear. If we add that the entire structure is warmed in winter by heated air, conveyed in tubes from the furnaces of the press, our description will be complete, and we may say such is the printing office of the nineteenth century in Paris. How changed from that of German Guttenberg or English Caxton, three hundred years before! Such is it by daylight. Flood every object and apartment with gaslight, and you have the scene at night--through all the night, for couriers and dispatches never cease to arrive--and the journal issues with the dawn--and the workmen are relieved by constant and continuous relays. Such an office gives employment to hundreds and bread to thousands. It demands twenty editors, exclusive of their chief, twenty reporters, exclusive of the same number in the commercial and mercantile corps; twenty-five clerks and bureau agents, sixty carriers, twenty mechanicians and margers, sixty folders, twenty pressmen, seventy correctors and compositors and five hundred distributors, besides a numberless and nameless army of attaches and employes too numerous to be specified. The aggregate compensation of this army is ten thousand francs per day, the annual income is nine millions of francs, the circulation is ninety thousand copies daily, and each number is read by half a million people, and through their influence by half a million more.
The daily tax of the Government is nine thousand francs. The press has been called the Third Estate of France. It is not! Nor is it the second--nor is it the first! It combines all three. Nay, the power of all three united equals not its t.i.the; and its position--its rank!--royalty itself bows to the press! Ask the history of the past ten years. Point to the man of power or position in the court or State, who owes it not to the press! Where is the statesman who is not, or has not been, a journalist, or the savant, the philosopher, the philanthropist, the poet, the orator, the advocate, the diplomat, even the successful soldier? The sword and the pen are emblems of the power of France--its achievements 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--so dim 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 the editorial department is devoted the second floor of this extensive edifice. The last door in this prolonged series bears the name of the chief journalist. You ring a bell, are bid to enter, and the apartment is before you. Immense windows, rising from the floor to the ceiling, and opening upon a balcony, which overhangs the Rue Lepelletier, afford abundance of light for your eye to detect everything in the room by day, and an immense chandelier with gas-burners and opaque shades, pouring forth its flood of mellow radiance, would facilitate the same investigation yet more at night. Beneath the chandelier is spread the immense oval slab of the table. At it sits a man writing. Well, let him write on, at least for the present. Beside him, pile upon pile, pile upon pile, rise papers, wave after wave, flood upon flood, nothing but papers; 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, while the very walls are lined with papers in all languages, from all climes and governments, and of every age and dimension, deposited in huge folio volumes and arranged in huge closets, along one whole side of the room.
From the four continents, yea, and from the islands of the sea likewise, has this vast army come. In those tall closets extending from floor to ceiling might be found the full files for years of every leading paper in every part of Christendom, affording a treasury of reference, universal, unfailing, exhaustless, of knowledge of every conceivable description, rapidly found by means of exact and copious tables of contents.
Upon the other side of the apartment extend ranges of shelves, from floor to ceiling, filled with ponderous tomes in black substantial binding, seeming to belong to that cla.s.s of standard works chiefly valuable for reference as authorities, and bearing ample testimony in their wear and tear, and their soiled appearance, to having been faithfully fingered. No thin, delicate and perfumed duodecimo is there, resplendent in gold and Russia, with costly engravings on steel, and letter-press in gilt or hot-pressed post. No, the books, the table, the journalist and the whole chamber bear the dark, stern, toil-soiled aspect of labor, the severe air of practical utility. The only ornaments, if such they can be styled, are busts--the busts of the silver-tongued Vergniaud and a few of his political brothers--the victim Girondins of '92 being conspicuous. Here, too, in a prominent niche is the n.o.ble front of Armand Carrel, the brave, the knightly, the chivalric, the true Republican, the true statesman, the true journalist, the true man--Armand Carrel, who, with Adolphe Thiers, his a.s.sociate, sat first in this apartment as its chief--Armand Carrel, who fell years ago before the pistol of emile de Girardin, a brother journalist, the founder of the cheap press, the hero of scores of combats before and since, yet almost unscathed by all.
Such are some of the ornaments of the chief editor's sanctum. At the further extremity of the apartment, the wall is covered with maps and diagrams, as well as charts of the prominent cities and points in Europe; and a large table beneath is heaped with books of travel, geographical views, and historical scenes arranged with no regard to order, and seeming to lie precisely as thrown down after having been used.
In a word, the whole room bears unmistakable evidence of stern, practical thought. In it and about it display is everywhere scrupulously eschewed. Practical utility is the only question of interest as touching the instruments of an editor, as of those of a carpenter; and the workshop of the journalist bears no inconsiderable similarity to that of the artisan in more respects than one. To each a tool is valuable, be that tool a book or a chisel, only for its usefulness, and the facility and rapidity with which it will aid the possessor to accomplish his ends, and not for its beauty of form, or costliness of material or construction.
In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to be perceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying the triumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought, and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus to which ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vast establishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising from his chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room to composing-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 Parisian printing office that the compositor may never have seen the journalist whose leaders he has spent half his life in setting up, for copy, proof and revise glide up or down as if by the agency only of magic, and the real actors rarely meet.
CHAPTER IX.
ARMAND MARRAST.
The journalist who now occupied the editorial chair was seemingly about thirty-five years of age, and one whom the ladies would call ”a fine-looking man.” His stature was about the average, his shoulders broad and his form thick-set. His face was long and thin, his forehead full and capacious, though not high, and was furrowed by thought. His beard, which, like his hair, was black, encircled his chin, and a moustache was suffered to adorn his lip. His dress was black and a plain stock, without a collar, surrounded his throat. His eyes were large, black, and piercing, and the expression of his countenance was contemplative and sad.
Such is a hasty limning of the personal outlines of the first journalist in Paris, the chief editor of the chief organ of the democracy in Europe, Armand Marrast, of ”Le National.”
An air of depression, exhaustion and regret was upon his face as he sat beside the table, with a pen in his hand and paper before him, in a thoughtful mood, as if planning a leader for his journal, of which but a single line was written. Whatever were his reflections, they were evidently far from pleasant; but the single line traced at the head of the paper indicated the source of his uneasiness. It read:
”Again the House of Orleans triumphs!”
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