Chapter 8: Ah, Let’s Do Business—Let’s Make a Living
Chapter 8: Ah, Let’s Do Business—Let’s Make a Living
“Hey, Guillaume! Read this! This time I really poured my heart into it!”
“Come on. I can already see it—the male lead gets dumped and the ending is him shooting himself with a pistol. What heart? Stop writing that crap and go to sleep on time!”
“No! This time he really doesn’t kill himself! Just read it one more time!”
“Ugh. Then what’s the ending this time?”
“This time, the protagonist gets shot by the person who dumped him.”
“How is that any different, you pistol-obsessed maniac?!”
By December 1784, it had been almost six months since I started spending time with Napoleon, and we were doing fine.
Everything except the part where this guy occasionally brought me the disaster of a novel he wrote and forced me to read it.
How was it that every single ending involved the protagonist getting dumped and shooting himself, and the “different” ending he ranted about was the protagonist getting dumped and getting shot to death?
Did he have some kind of fetish for shooting people with pistols?
This was all because of that gloomy book he always carried under his arm—whether it was called The Sorrows of Young Werther or The Joys of Werther or whatever.
Goethe poisoned Hyung Napoleon’s brain.
Just as I started seriously wondering whether my friend Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte might actually get aroused by a pistol muzzle…
Napoleon-hyung and I arrived at my boarding house.
Maybe because the temperature had dropped below freezing lately, the doorknob was stiff; we yanked it hard and went inside.
“Madame Pluie! We’re back!”
“Oh, Guillaume, you’re back. And you brought the little marshal again today. Hoho.”
“Auntie! Could you stop with that ‘little marshal’ thing already?”
“How could I stop? It’s too funny. I can’t forget the way Napoleon said it six months ago—those blazing eyes, all serious: ‘I will become a marshal in the future and return in glory!’ Hohoho.”
“Ggh…”
Madame Pluie was the owner of this fifteen-room boarding house where I lived.
After losing her husband at thirty and becoming a widow, she sold off her assets, bought this house near our school, and ran it as a boarding house.
Everyone who knew her circumstances said she ran a student boarding house to endure loneliness.
But that didn’t mean she used students as emotional crutches.
She personally prepared three meals a day from morning to night for every student in the house, and even cleaned the rooms of the ten boarders—her care wasn’t half-hearted.
I was honestly lucky, because the owner of the boarding house where Napoleon-hyung stayed was vicious.
That owner seemed to hate everything about him; every time she saw him, she fired up her nagging machine.
“Napeleon! What’s with your clothes? They’re old and torn—this is unbearable!”
“Napeleon! When are you paying this month’s rent?!”
“Napeleon!”
It was so bad that one day even Hyung—who didn’t flinch when punks mocked him—grabbed my shoulders, shook me, and yelled,
“Hey, Guillaume! If I stay there one more month, I’m seriously going to lose my mind! I’m going to lose it! I’m going to lose it!”
Maybe Madame Pluie knew, because lately she kept telling me—behind Napoleon-hyung’s back—to bring him over to eat together.
I didn’t hate the noisy atmosphere either, so I kept telling Hyung to eat at our place.
“Wow. For real, Auntie—you know I can’t lie, right? Your cooking is the best in all of France!”
“Hoho. Even if it’s just talk, thank you. Now eat.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Well, he liked it, she liked it, and I didn’t mind—maybe not a perfect win-win-win, but at least a win-win-and-a-half.
I finished eating early and made coffee, thinking: France in 1784 was peaceful.
And that was my biggest worry.
Someday, the revolution would begin.
The rage and resentment that would fuel it had to be piling up all over society already.
And once that revolutionary fire started, it would definitely sweep away even this boarding house where I stood now.
Napoleon-hyung eating Madame Pluie’s pumpkin pie with a grin like it was the best thing in the world, Madame Pluie smiling warmly at him, and me quietly drinking coffee with them.
Thinking that all of this might vanish made my stomach feel tight.
I wanted to protect this place.
“Then what can I do right now?”
After endless worrying, I reached one conclusion.
By the time the revolution came, I wouldn’t be anything.
A soldier? What could a mere second lieutenant even do?
A bureaucrat? By the time I entered university, graduated, and passed the high-official examination, wouldn’t the revolution have already happened? Even if I became a high official, could I avoid getting my head chopped off by revolutionaries?
A clergyman? That was nonsense. I’d be ordained at twenty-five, then bounce between assignments—how would I affect a revolution?
There was only one answer.
Business.
The very thing I’d ruined in my previous life.
The only thing I could do—the only thing I’d actually done.
I had to make a fuckton of money.
Make a fuckton of money, then—like certain rich people in the 21st century—whether through social movements or charity, somehow earn a pardon from the people and make at least my surroundings safe from citizens enraged by the revolution.
“Revolution—go ahead and come. I’ll drown you with money.”
But then—
What would I do business with?
This was always where I got stuck.
Think, Guillaume! No—Im Gichan! You bastard, you still got a top grade on the CSAT at least once, didn’t you?
Gichan, your opponent is a great revolution! A great revolution that’ll kill this everyday life! Think! Think!
“But Auntie. There’s something I’ve been curious about lately. Is there anything you can eat while working—something simple like that?”
“Why? You don’t have time to write a novel where the protagonist gets shot by a pistol again?”
“N-no! Auntie, if even you say that, what am I supposed to do?! Anyway—something you can eat while holding a pen in one hand.”
“Well… there are biscuits.”
“Not that—something that actually fills you up. Like… what? What is it?”
“Hyung! I love you! You’re a genius!”
“Hey—hey! What are you doing?! Why are you clinging to me all of a sudden! Get off!”
Found it.
My business item.
“Th-that… will it really work, Guillaume?”
“Auntie’s right. Will that really work?”
“These people, seriously. Have you only lived getting fooled? This is guaranteed to work!”
I was presenting my grand plan—tentatively titled the “Lunch Substitute Convenience Meal Business”—to Napoleon and Madame Pluie.
It had been a while since I’d presented in front of investors. My hands were shaking. It reminded me of the mock startup competition I did in my first year of university. Hell, I even won first place.
Thinking back, it was brutal. They gave us only five hours and told us to do everything—from the business concept to projected customers, partners, and sales.
Compared to that, this was nothing. Child’s play.
“I… I don’t really get it. Why would people not eat at home and buy what you sell? Even people with servants at home?”
“Hyung. Our main customers are laborers. Not nobles.”
“Th-then, Guillaume… can you tell me why laborers would eat that ‘lunch substitute convenience meal’ we make?”
“Of course. Hyung. Madame Pluie. Let’s assume you’re laborers. You get up at 5 a.m., eat a simple breakfast, then work hard until 1 p.m. At 1 p.m., what do you feel?”
“‘Obviously… hunger…’”
They answered in unison.
“Good. But the factory boss says you finish break at 1:20 and go back to work. A meal in twenty minutes—can you do it?”
“‘That’s… hard.’”
“Great. Then if, in front of you—tired and hungry—there’s warm, freshly baked bread, with a little meat and vegetables inside, and you can hold it in one or two hands and eat it quickly… what do you do?”
“Wait—if it has that many ingredients, can people even afford it?”
“Right. Guillaume. Meat and vegetables aren’t things laborers can easily spend money on.”
“No. They can.”
The two of them couldn’t understand how something impossible could be possible.
“I’ll show you with my own hands why it works.”
“Please pack 100 grams of oats.”
“Do you have that cut—? Thank you.”
“How long by carriage to the nearest vegetable plot outside Paris? An hour? Got it.”
In weather this cold, is that kid not even cold? He’s lively as hell. Napoleon and Madame Pluie thought.
From the mill to the butcher shop and now here at the carriage stand, Guillaume kept asking coachmen questions nonstop.
Watching him made them wonder whether, in this freezing winter, the child truly wasn’t cold.
Of course, for Guillaume—no, Im Gichan—who had served in the army near Cheorwon in Korea, this level of cold didn’t even qualify as “cold.”
If you wanted to call it cold, it needed to hit at least minus twenty.
This is only around minus five and you’re acting like that. Tsk.
Ah—right. I need to pick up a rock too. Almost forgot.
“All right, I think we’ve got everything. Now let’s make it!”
With no idea what Guillaume was trying to do, Napoleon and Madame Pluie went home with him.
“How is it?”
I asked confidently.
“This is… incredible…”
“Yeah. I still can’t quite believe how this even works.”
In front of them, on a plate, was the “lunch substitute convenience meal” I’d gathered ingredients for and Madame Pluie had made—steam rising in soft curls.
“Hyung. Pick it up and eat it with your hands.”
As soon as I finished speaking, Napoleon picked it up with both hands and took a bite.
“This… wow, it’s good. No—more importantly, what price did you say you’d sell it for?”
“1.5 sou.”
1.5 sou.
Converted to modern Korean money, maybe around 3,000 won.
A laborer usually earned about 20 sou a day, so it was absolutely a price one could pay for a meal.
How was this possible?
In France, people didn’t eat oats.
Oats were considered cattle or horse feed.
Over the last few decades, France’s population had steadily increased, so the prices of “people food” grains like wheat and rye nearly doubled.
But livestock numbers stayed roughly the same, so oat prices didn’t rise like other grains.
They were still close to what they had been decades ago.
And it wasn’t like you couldn’t make bread with oats.
It just tasted noticeably worse than wheat or barley bread, so it got pushed out in gourmet-obsessed France.
Across the sea in Scotland, people even cooked porridge with oats—oatmeal.
Meat?
I used a cut nobody in Western Europe ate.
You think that doesn’t exist?
Of course it does.
Have you ever seen pork belly? You’ll die, seriously.
Praise the king of pork belly.
It wasn’t even 5 sou per kilogram.
Even if I cut a generous 100 grams per serving, that’s only 0.5 sou.
For laborers who could barely afford meat at all, 100 grams of meat was beyond a feast—they’d cry.
For vegetables, I used lettuce.
It didn’t look exactly like the lettuce used for wrapping meat in Korea, but lettuce is lettuce.
One head cost about 3 sou, and broken down into ten leaves, that’s 0.3 sou per leaf.
If I could, I’d add soybean paste sauce, but there wasn’t any, so I seasoned it with salt and pepper.
Wrap the meat in lettuce and eat it with bread. Love you, grilled-meat relay.
Total cost:
1 sou.
That left a 33% net profit.
“Huh… how is this even possible…”
Napoleon and Madame Pluie just stood there, staring blankly.
Makes sense. What Frenchman eats pork belly like that?
But I wasn’t done yet.
“Labor costs—if we pay about 2 sou for two hours from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., people will line up. Each person cooks at least 100 servings. Once cooking is done, they stop by the factory on the way home and deliver it to exhausted laborers. We’ll make more money, not less.”
In an era where an unskilled laborer earned a little over 5 sou for half a day’s work, two hours for 2 sou?
No one would turn that down.
Soon, all the aunties in Paris who could cook would come knocking themselves.
And—
“Madame Pluie.”
“Yes, Guillaume?”
“People like warm food, right?”
“Of course.”
“While we deliver this ‘simple meal,’ it’ll cool down. That can’t be helped. But if we solve that, what will our customers do?”
“They’ll choose our warm food over the cold lunch they brought from home.”
As I said that, I took out a rock I’d preheated in the oven and dropped it into the cookie basket Madame Pluie usually used.
“Then our customers will get addicted to our ‘convenience meal.’”
Of course.
Everyone.