Two Bills on the Table
The silk merchant laid two bills beside my account book. One named our new company. The other needed my signature. Lyon, 1925: my son and I had put 25,000 francs into that company so its ordinary trade debts would not follow us upstairs. He wanted my name anyway.
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Our dye workshop sat below the rooms where my wife and I slept. At night she could tell which color I had made by the smell rising through the floorboards. For twenty years I had bought silk in my own name. If a customer failed to pay, an unpaid bill could reach everything I owned.
Jean had won an order from a Paris dressmaker: three hundred lengths of blue silk. We knew how to make the color. We needed a larger vat and silk we could buy on credit. A company with shareholders had seemed beyond us. It took seven names, and Jean was the only person I trusted with our accounts.
Then he brought me the new law. The two of us could form a société à responsabilité limitée. We signed the company deed ourselves. Finding the capital was harder: 25,000 francs, with every share paid in full. Jean gave up the savings for a house of his own. I emptied the tin we kept above the stove. Once the papers were complete, some of that money bought a copper vat. We still needed the silk.
The merchant looked at the company’s name on the first bill.
“And if the dressmaker never pays you?”
“The works will owe you.”
“Only the works?”
He pushed the second bill toward me. My name was written above a space for my signature.
I thought of Jean’s savings shining in that new vat. I thought of the rooms above it. Jean said nothing. I set down the pen.
The merchant folded both bills and sold the silk to another dyer. That night the vat held nothing but water. Upstairs, my wife asked whether we could keep our apprentice through winter. I had no answer. The rooms were ours. The order was gone.