John Gutenberg, First Master Printer

“I did not understand much about commerce, so at least said my comrades; at night when we shared our profits it often appeared to me that they had taken a tithe out of mine. I mentioned my suspicions, for in fact it was necessary that I should get something out of the purse, to enable me to live, and I had plenty of time to meditate on my prospects, and to give myself up to work.

“I had been three days at Aix-la-Chapelle. As I stood one morning at the booth where André Dritzehn exposed his mirrors” – (here, Reader, as he stretched out his hands to touch Claude’s head, you might have seen a faint colour reddening the cheeks of the old man,) – “among the curious who surrounded us, admiring our mirrors polished like steel, was a young girl, who, being suddenly pushed back rudely by the crowd, had only time to cast one rapid glance at our treasures. Her eyes pleased me so much that I said, ‘Try to come forward, little one.’ She did not seem to know that I was addressing her. I repeated my invitation; she did not yet understand me; I tried to take her hand; she drew it quickly away. ‘I am not a German,’ said she, blushing, ‘I am French, from the Faubourg St. Antoine, Paris; if you happen ever to have been there.’ I was obliged to confess, laughing, that I had not. Although I did not understand much of the language spoken by the young girl, I gathered sufficient to be able to answer her. ‘Pretty child,’ I said, ‘wilt thou not buy one of our mirrors?’ ‘Alas! no, sir.’ ‘Thou art in the wrong there, when one has a pretty face like thine, one ought to possess such a piece of furniture.’ Talking in this manner, I placed my hand under her chin, and obliged her to lift up her exquisite face, which till now had been held downwards. She looked at me with her large eyes half supplicating, half reproachfully, then she tried to disengage herself. I held her fast, and placing one of our best mirrors before her, that very one now in your hand – ‘Well,’ I said, ‘look then at yourself, little unbeliever.’ A cry of surprise escaped her finely-cut mouth when she saw her blushing face reflected in the polished metal; never before probably had the view been so complete; her beauty seemed to strike her for the first time. I pressed her to buy the mirror, she hesitated; one saw how much she wished to possess it; but all at once she put it quickly down on the bench, ‘I will not,’ she said, and suddenly disappeared in the crowd. I followed her. Our stall was in the square of the Cathedral; I rejoined the fugitive close to the church. ‘Why wilt thou not have it?’ ‘Sir – ’ ‘Speak to me without fear.’ ‘Because I have no money to pay for your mirror. Look! here is a denier, the only one left; it is destined for the purchase of two ivory hands, which my mother presents to the Virgin full of grace, as a thank-offering for her cure.’

“The filial love of the young girl, which spoke even more eloquently in her eyes than in her words, touched me deeply. I questioned her about her mother, her country, and her name. She told me with simplicity that her name was Gisquette, and that she came from the Faubourg St. Antoine, in the great city of Paris, where I should certainly not have gone in search of this little pure unspotted flower. She added that a vow taken by her mother had brought them to Aix-la-Chapelle, with her brother James, in order to present an offering to the Virgin, in acknowledgment of her old mother’s wonderful cure.

“‘How dost thou expect to reach home?’ I then asked her; ‘how wilt thou make the long journey, thou who art only a poor girl without means, for in that denier which thou hast shown me consists thy whole fortune?’ ‘Sir,’ replied she, with the careless gaiety of her nation, ‘I shall go back as I came. Brother James is very clever; he can relate stories on the road, he will sing tales of the Trouvères, and I shall accompany him on my lute. In this manner we enter the convents, and the houses of hospitality, of which, thank God and his saints, there is no want. Brother James,’ said she, with a sister’s pride, ‘has already sung here in Aix-la-Chapelle before great lords and princes, at home he is well known in all the neighbourhood. Once when a grand mystery was performed in the large Hall he acted the part of Mercury, and had on his shoulders two large wings of gauze, which I made for him myself. I assure you he looked very handsome, and recited his fine verses beautifully.’

“Need I tell you, O my dear companions, how immediately my heart felt attracted towards this young girl? I led her back to our booth, and giving her the mirror which a moment before she had so coveted. – ‘Take it, my child,’ I said, ‘and keep it in remembrance of this hour, as well as of the friend thou hast gained by thy filial piety.’ For some time she refused to accept it, and as André, who kept the stall that day, began reproaching me for giving away our goods, instead of selling them, she returned me the mirror, saying, ‘Thank you, my kind sir! it shall never be said that you were brought into trouble by the vanity of a poor girl.’

“If the avaricious speech and sentiment of Heilmann had sent the colour to my cheeks, this sad refusal on the part of Gisquette put the climax to my irritation. Unloosing my purse angrily from my waistband, I threw down on the bench the value of the mirror, which I laid hold of with one hand, while with the other I forced my way through the crowd with the young girl, and drew her to some distance from the place.

“Claude, we spent seven days together, Gisquette and I, in Aix-la-Chapelle, seven whole days, days of happiness, which will never be effaced from my memory. I followed Gisquette like her shadow; she, poor child, out of her pure simple heart vowed to me, unworthy as I was, her first love. At the end of that time we parted … never to meet again … and to-day…”

John Gutenberg was silent. Again he pressed to his heart the son of Gisquette, that son whom he had just found. Claude had but little to add to complete his father’s story. He told him of the sorrowful life led by Gisquette, of her unbroken faith to him, and how on her death-bed it had been her consolation to bequeath Claude as a last pledge of affection to her absent friend.

When the young man had ceased speaking, there was a solemn silence in the hut. The faithful Beildech feasted his looks on them both. The old man, his eyes struck with blindness, his hair falling in white curls, his long venerable beard resting on that bosom, oppressed by the memory of the past, and agitated by the emotion of the present… Ah! whoever had seen Gutenberg at this moment could not have failed to liken him to Œdipus in the arms of Antigone; he was bent, infirm, and weakened by age; it was, nevertheless, the head of a king and the heart of a father.

“I tell you in truth,” it was thus that Gutenberg spoke, with trembling lips, “yes, I tell you truly, death, which is now approaching, will be for me a haven full of blessedness. Love is guiding me here below, it will also receive me on the other side; it is of the best works that it is written, they shall not forsake the just, but shall follow them. The arts and sciences which we pursue without relaxation, the fame and glory which shall carry our names to posterity, are but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals in comparison with the words of love, pure, divine, and human love. Yes, I think that my life will not have been entirely useless to others, that the seed which I have sown will bear fruit and become a tree, under whose branches the generations to come may find rest and shelter. My endeavour has been to give freedom to thought, to give wings to words; the one and the other, thanks to my discovery, will one day overrun the metamorphosed earth; full of independence and of liberty they will immortalize my name. But, nevertheless, I should have gone down to the tomb without consolation, and without peace, if I had possessed only the light of reason to enlighten my darkened way.1 A son has been given to me, and I shall no more wander through desert paths solitary and alone. Man will ever remain man. His heart cannot feed eternally on glory and on hope. Love will always be the best part of his being, and that is why I would have given the labour of my whole life in exchange for thee, Claude, who art even more to me than my invention; thou art my son, the messenger sent by Gisquette, who speaks to me from eternal blessedness!”

Gutenberg died neglected and in destitution. His death excited no interest among his careless and ungrateful contemporaries. It is only on the faith of a dusty old parchment, which does not even make direct mention of the inventor of printing, that we learn that John Gutenberg must have been gathered to his fathers about the 24th of February, 1468. In what place? That remains uncertain, and even to this day we should be ignorant on that point had not an inscription written in his honour by Adam Gelthuss, a relation of the printer, fallen accidentally into our hands. It is in Latin, and says that the bones of Gutenberg repose in the Church of St. François at Maïence.

So much for history. As for us, it is with a sensation of pain, and a blush on our forehead, that we close this page of our book, in which we have narrated the acts and discourses worthy of admiration, and the death of him who discovered the most remarkable, the most wonderful of all the arts, that which is destined to re-model the world.

Poetry in composing a picture, of which the plot has been gathered thread by thread from the dark abyss of archives, has taken upon herself to throw a ray of light on the last days of the great inventor, to cast on his tomb a palm-branch of peace and of hope. Was that not her right? And has she any occasion to justify herself? In our opinion the noblest duty of intelligence, as well as its most glorious appanage, is to enlighten, to reconcile, to restore to light, especially when life has only left behind it a few vague shadows, and an unknown tomb!

1

I will not, says the author of the Death of Gutenberg, let the authority for the blindness of my hero rest on fiction alone. My readers will permit me to cite the testimony of a man who was contemporary with Gutenberg, Wimphelin of Schlestadt, who at the age of fifteen came to Strasburg, in the year 1465. He says distinctly, in speaking of Gutenberg, in his catalogue of the Bishops of Strasburg written in 1508: “ductu cujusdam Johannis Gensfleisch, ex senio cæci.”