HANS GUTENBERG 127 necessity ot procuring funds obliged him to take partners. The necessity that subsequently arose of getting assistance for the multifarious labor of a great printing establishment obliged him to confide his occupation, and even the secret of his process, to his partners and to a number of workmen. His partners, tired of supplying funds to an enterprise which, for want of perfection, was not then remunerative, refused to persevere in the ungrateful occupation. Gutenberg begged them not to abandon him at the very moment that fortune and glory were wittthi his grasp. They consented to make fresh advances, but only on condition of sharing completely his secret, his profits, his property, and his fame. He sold his fa'me to procure success to his work. The name of Gutenberg disappeared. The firm absorbed the inventor, who soon became a mere work- man in his own workshop. It was a parallel to the case of Christopher Colum- bus brought back in irons on board his own vessel, by a crew to whom he had opened a new world. This was not all. The heirs of one of the partners brought an action against him to contest his invention, his property, and his right of carrying on the work. They compelled him to appear before the judges at Strasburg, to make him sub- mit to some more complete and more legal spoliation than the voluntary aban- donment he had himself acknowledged. His perplexity before the court was extreme. To justify himself, it was necessary to enter into all the technical de- tails of his art, which he did not as yet wish to make completely public, reserving to himself, at least, the secret of his hopes. The judges, being inquisitive, pressed him with insidious questions, the answers to which would have exposed the secret of all his processes. He evaded them, preferring an adverse decision to the publication of his art. To succeed in penetrating the secret of the discov- ery which filled people's imaginations, the judges summoned his most confiden- tial workmen, and required them to give evidence of what they knew. These men, simple-minded, yet faithful and strongly attached to Gutenberg, refused to reveal anything. Their master's secret was safer in their hearts than in the breasts of his more grasping associates. None of the great mysteries of the art transpired. Gutenberg, ruined, condemned, perhaps banished, retired alone and in poverty to Mainz, his native place, to recommence his labors and begin nis life and fame anew. He was still young, and the report of his lawsuit at Strasburg had made his fame known all over Germany, but he returned a workman to a city which he had quitted as a knight. Humiliation, poverty, and glory contended with each other in his fate and in the behavior of his fellow-citizens. Love alone recog- nized him for what he had been, and for what he was one day to become. On his return to Mainz, having been relieved from degradation and ruin by the woman he loved, as Mohammed was by his first wife, Gutenberg gave him- self entirely up to his art, entered into partnership with Faust and Schoeffei, Faust's son-in-law; established offices at Mainz, and published, still under the name of the firm, Bibles and Psalters, of remarkable perfection of type. Schoeffer had for a long time carried on the business of a scrivener, and a
