Free The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval Page A

It was an abbé from the south of France who, with the help of his monks, managed to carry out this hare-brained scheme. — Except that the idea was not exactly new.
    The Romans had long been familiar with this technique of printing names and legends onto the painted frescoes of temple cupolas. The heated punch would mark the letters on the painted surface. Fragments of these inscriptions have been conserved.
    While I was recently visiting the museum of Naples, I recognized the bronze punches that had been found in the ruins of Pompeii, — and which contained in relief inscriptions of several lines intended to mark pieces of textile. — And you want to speak about the invention of xylographic printing!

    Nobody has ever invented anything: — one simply rediscovers. — If you pass through Harlem, the land of tulips, you will see in its central square a statue of Laurent Coster, before whom I stopped in order to pay my respects and to write a sonnet, which I certainly don’t want to inflict on my readers but which contains a line alluding to the three inventors whose medallion portraits grace the title pages of our stereotype editions:
    Laurent Coster! Their master ... or rival.
I salute thee!
    All the Dutch believe that the image-maker and print-seller Laurent Coster is the true inventor of xylographic printing — to the extent that he came up with a technique to carve into relief on wood the names of Alexander, Caesar, Pallas, and Hector — these blocks of wood in turn being used to print up maps.
    But the Dutch are deluding themselves, — and I have no compunctions whatsoever about making this claim, even if they were to attend Techener’s auction on November 20th with the express purpose of hiking up to an impossible price the edition of the History of the escapes from prison of the abbé de Bucquoy which is scheduled to be put up for sale!
    A certain tyrant of Sparta by the name of Agis was in the habit of consulting the entrails of victims before launching into battle. He himself was only half-convinced about the validity of these practices, but one had to go with the spirit of the times.
    The auguries had been quite discouraging on a number of occasions, perhaps on account of some hocuspocus on the part of the priests ... The tyrant came up with an idea: he would write the word NIKH (victory) on his left palm with a greasy, black substance. He would even write it backwards. — Here, it seems to me, we have an early conception of typography.
    In his role as sovereign, it was his duty to rip open the skin of the victims in order to reveal the whitish membrane covering their entrails. Carefully placing his greased left palm on this surface, he printed the word NIKH on it. The Spartans, encouraged by this message from the gods, went on to victoriously wage their battle.
    This was a very astute tyrant, — and without rereading his history, I imagine that he probably remained on the throne of Sparta for quite a long time, — a city that was republican only in name, a republic governed by kings! ...
    As you see, there is nothing new under the sun.
    I have deliberately avoided mentioning the Chinese: a nation that locates the antiquity of its race some seventy-two thousand years in the past clearly has no real value for us as historians. I have seen examples of their typography that only predate our era by one thousand years. It is perhaps correct to maintain that they don’t seem to have invented movable type: — their printing involved strips of wood which were pressed on paper, just as in engraving.
    Let’s return via an obvious transition to the abbé de Bucquoy, — whose elusive book might well have been produced by a phantom printing press. Nonetheless Techener will be selling it the 20th. — Until then, let’s try to fill up this feuilleton which is being published under his auspices.
    In the neighborhood of Sparta there was another town