THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
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THE ILLUSTRIOUS
GAUDIS SART
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.
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CHAPTER I
The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period of
material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our century will
bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius,
to the realm of universal but levelling might; equalizing all products,
spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by
the principle of unity,--the final expression of all societies. Do we not find
the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought
and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the
treasures of the world in one direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes from
the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among the
drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is a
scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving
priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds all the better for his
want of faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything,
and is up in all the ways of the world. Soaked in the vices of Paris, he
affects to be the fellow-well- met of the provinces. He is the link which
connects the village with the capital; though essentially he is neither
Parisian nor provincial, --he is a traveller. He sees nothing to the core: men
and places he knows by their names; as for things, he looks merely at their
surface, and he has his own little tape-line with which to measure them.
His glance shoots over all things and penetrates none. He occupies himself
with a great deal, yet nothing occupies him.
Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms with all political
opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom of his soul. A capital mimic, he
knows how to put on, turn and turn about, the smiles of persuasion,
satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop them for the normal expression of
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his natural man. He is compelled to be an observer of a certain sort in the
interests of his trade. He must probe men with a glance and guess their
habits, wants, and above all their solvency. To economize time he must
come to quick decisions as to his chances of success,--a practice that
makes him more or less a man of judgment; on the strength of which he
sets up as a judge of theatres, and discourses about those of Paris and the
provinces.
He knows all the good and bad haunts in France, "de actu et visu." He
can pilot you, on occasion, to vice or virtue with equal assurance. Blest
with the eloquence of a hot-water spigot turned on at will, he can check or
let run, without floundering, the collection of phrases which he keeps on
tap, and which produce upon his victims the effect of a moral shower-bath.
Loquacious as a cricket, he smokes, drinks, wears a profusion of trinkets,
overawes the common people, passes for a lord in the villages, and never
permits himself to be "stumped,"--a slang expression all his own. He
knows how to slap his pockets at the right time, and make his money
jingle if he thinks the servants of the second-class houses which he wants
to enter (always eminently suspicious) are likely to take him for a thief.
Activity is not the least surprising quality of this human machine. Not the
hawk swooping upon its prey, not the stag doubling before the huntsman
and the hounds, nor the hounds themselves catching scent of the game, can
be compared with him for the rapidity of his dart when he spies a
"commission," for the agility with which he trips up a rival and gets ahead
of him, for the keenness of his scent as he noses a customer and discovers
the sport where he can get off his wares.
How many great qualities must such a man possess! You will find in
all countries many such diplomats of low degree; consummate negotiators
arguing in the interests of calico, jewels, frippery, wines; and often
displaying more true diplomacy than ambassadors themselves, who, for
the most part, know only the forms of it. No one in France can doubt the
powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares all, and
boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern inventions of Paris
into a struggle with the plain commonsense of remote villages, and the
ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial ways. Can we ever forget the
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skilful manoeuvres by which he worms himself into the minds of the
populace, bringing a volume of words to bear upon the refractory,
reminding us of the indefatigable worker in marbles whose file eats slowly
into a block of porphyry? Would you seek to know the utmost power of
language, or the strongest pressure that a phrase can bring to bear against
rebellious lucre, against the miserly proprietor squatting in the recesses of
his country lair?-- listen to one of these great ambassadors of Parisian
industry as he revolves and works and sucks like an intelligent piston of
the steam- engine called Speculation.
"Monsieur," said a wise political economist, the director-cashier-
manager and secretary-general of a celebrated fire-insurance company,
"out of every five hundred thousand francs of policies to be renewed in the
provinces, not more than fifty thousand are paid up voluntarily. The other
four hundred and fifty thousand are got in by the activity of our agents,
who go about among those who are in arrears and worry them with stories
of horrible incendiaries until they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus
you see that eloquence, the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and
means of our business."
To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself. A
nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon lost.
Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact which
began, and may end, with the world itself.
"A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man," said a
retired lawyer.
Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well.
Don't forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco
collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so original
that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we come across!
In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what a battery, all in one,
is the man himself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid mariner, he
plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six thousand francs
in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians who inhabit the interior
of France. The provincial fish will not rise to harpoons and torches; it can
only be taken with seines and nets and gentlest persuasions. The traveller's
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business is to extract the gold in country caches by a purely intellectual
operation, and to extract it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think
without a shudder of the flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed each
dawn, leaps in cascades the length and breadth of sunny France?
You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual.
There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the paragon
of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the
qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is vitriol
and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and make him
sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads, close fists, and
closer calculations. His line was once the HAT; but his talents and the art
with which he snared the wariest provincial had brought him such
commercial celebrity that all vendors of the "article Paris"[*] paid court to
him, and humbly begged that he would deign to take their commissions.
[*] "Article Paris" means anything--especially articles of wearing
apparel--which originates or is made in Paris. The name is supposed
to give to the thing a special value in the provinces.
Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals of his triumphant
progress through France, he lived a life of perpetual festivity in the shape
of weddings and suppers. When he was in the provinces, the
correspondents in the smaller towns made much of him; in Paris, the great
houses feted and caressed him. Welcomed, flattered, and fed wherever he
went, it came to pass that to breakfast or to dine alone was a novelty, an
event. He lived the life of a sovereign, or, better still, of a journalist; in fact,
he was the perambulating "feuilleton" of Parisian commerce.
His name was Gaudissart; and his renown, his vogue, the flatteries
showered upon him, were such as to win for him the surname of Illustrious.
Wherever the fellow went,--behind a counter or before a bar, into a salon
or to the top of a stage-coach, up to a garret or to dine with a banker,--
every one said, the moment they saw him, "Ah! here comes the illustrious
Gaudissart!"[*] No name was ever so in keeping with the style, the
manners, the countenance, the voice, the language, of any man. All things
smiled upon our traveller, and the traveller smiled back in return. "Similia
similibus,"--he believed in homoeopathy. Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face,
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skin of a friar, true Rabelaisian exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features,
all pulled together to put a devil-may-care jollity into every inch of his
person. Free-handed and easy-going, he might be recognized at once as
the favorite of grisettes, the man who jumps lightly to the top of a stage-
coach, gives a hand to the timid lady who fears to step down, jokes with
the postillion about his neckerchief and contrives to sell him a cap, smiles
at the maid and catches her round the waist or by the heart; gurgles at
dinner like a bottle of wine and pretends to draw the cork by sounding a
filip on his distended cheek; plays a tune with his knife on the champagne
glasses without breaking them, and says to the company, "Let me see you
do THAT"; chaffs the timid traveller, contradicts the knowing one, lords it
over a dinner-table and manages to get the titbits for himself. A strong
fellow, nevertheless, he can throw aside all this nonsense and mean
business when he flings away the stump of his cigar and says, with a
glance at some town, "I'll go and see what those people have got in their
stomachs."
[*] "Se gaudir," to enjoy, to make fun. "Gaudriole," gay discourse,
rather free.--Littre.
When buckled down to his work he became the slyest and cleverest of
diplomats. All things to all men, he knew how to accost a banker like a
capitalist, a magistrate like a functionary, a royalist with pious and
monarchical sentiments, a bourgeois as one of themselves. In short,
wherever he was he was just what he ought to be; he left Gaudissart at the
door when he went in, and picked him up when he came out.
Until 1830 the illustrious Gaudissart was faithful to the article Paris. In
his close relation to the caprices of humanity, the varied paths of
commerce had enabled him to observe the windings of the heart of man.
He had learned the secret of persuasive eloquence, the knack of loosening
the tightest purse-strings, the art of rousing desire in the souls of husbands,
wives, children, and servants; and what is more, he knew how to satisfy it.
No one had greater faculty than he for inveigling a merchant by the
charms of a bargain, and disappearing at the instant when desire had
reached its crisis. Full of gratitude to the hat-making trade, he always
declared that it was his efforts in behalf of the exterior of the human head
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which had enabled him to understand its interior: he had capped and
crowned so many people, he was always flinging himself at their heads,
etc. His jokes about hats and heads were irrepressible, though perhaps not
dazzling.
Nevertheless, after August and October, 1830, he abandoned the hat
trade and the article Paris, and tore himself from things mechanical and
visible to mount into the higher spheres of Parisian speculation. "He
forsook," to use his own words, "matter for mind; manufactured products
for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence." This requires
some explanation.
The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a
number of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new
bodies. After 1830 ideas became property. A writer, too wise to publish his
writings, once remarked that "more ideas are stolen than pocket-
handkerchiefs." Perhaps in course of time we may have an Exchange for
thought; in fact, even now ideas, good or bad, have their consols, are
bought up, imported, exported, sold, and quoted like stocks. If ideas are
not on hand ready for sale, speculators try to pass off words in their stead,
and actually live upon them as a bird lives on the seeds of his millet. Pray
do not laugh; a word is worth quite as much as an idea in a land where the
ticket on a sack is of more importance than the contents. Have we not seen
libraries working off the word "picturesque" when literature would have
cut the throat of the word "fantastic"? Fiscal genius has guessed the proper
tax on intellect; it has accurately estimated the profits of advertising; it has
registered a prospectus of the quantity and exact value of the property,
weighing its thought at the intellectual Stamp Office in the Rue de la Paix.
Having become an article of commerce, intellect and all its products
must naturally obey the laws which bind other manufacturing interests.
Thus it often happens that ideas, conceived in their cups by certain
apparently idle Parisians,--who nevertheless fight many a moral battle
over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their birth
from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to spread
them discreetly, "urbi et orbi," through Paris and the provinces, seasoned
with the fried pork of advertisement and prospectus, by means of which
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they catch in their rat-trap the departmental rodent commonly called
subscriber, sometimes stockholder, occasionally corresponding member or
patron, but invariably fool.
"I am a fool!" many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught
by the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he has,
in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs into a
gulf.
"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money than
they need for the tour of Europe," say the speculators.
Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who, living
by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas, turns it on the
spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses (basting all the while
with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with some toothsome sauce in
which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly with a black-lead. Moreover,
since 1830 what honors and emoluments have been scattered throughout
France to stimulate the zeal and self- love of the "progressive and
intelligent masses"! Titles, medals, diplomas, a sort of legion of honor
invented for the army of martyrs, have followed each other with
marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the manufactured products of the
intellect have developed a spice, a ginger, all their own. From this have
come premiums, forestalled dividends, and that conscription of noted
names which is levied without the knowledge of the unfortunate writers
who bear them, and who thus find themselves actual co-operators in more
enterprises than there are days in the year; for the law, we may remark,
takes no account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all is the rape of
ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the slave- merchants of
Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are well matured, and drag
half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead of a sultan, their
Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they don't amuse it, will cut
off their heads by curtailing the ingots and emptying their pockets.
This madness of our epoch reacted upon the illustrious Gaudissart, and
here follows the history of how it happened. A life-insurance company
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having been told of his irresistible eloquence offered him an unheard- of
commission, which he graciously accepted. The bargain concluded and the
treaty signed, our traveller was put in training, or we might say weaned, by
the secretary-general of the enterprise, who freed his mind of its
swaddling-clothes, showed him the dark holes of the business, taught him
its dialect, took the mechanism apart bit by bit, dissected for his
instruction the particular public he was expected to gull, crammed him
with phrases, fed him with impromptu replies, provisioned him with
unanswerable arguments, and, so to speak, sharpened the file of the tongue
which was about to operate upon the life of France.
The puppet amply rewarded the pains bestowed upon him. The heads
of the company boasted of the illustrious Gaudissart, showed him such
attention and proclaimed the great talents of this perambulating prospectus
so loudly in the sphere of exalted banking and commercial diplomacy, that
the financial managers of two newspapers (celebrated at that time but
since defunct) were seized with the idea of employing him to get
subscribers. The proprietors of the "Globe," an organ of Saint-Simonism,
and the "Movement," a republican journal, each invited the illustrious
Gaudissart to a conference, and proposed to give him ten francs a head for
every subscriber, provided he brought in a thousand, but only five francs if
he got no more than five hundred. The cause of political journalism not
interfering with the pre- accepted cause of life insurance, the bargain was
struck; although Gaudissart demanded an indemnity from the Saint-
Simonians for the eight days he was forced to spend in studying the
doctrines of their apostle, asserting that a prodigious effort of memory and
intellect was necessary to get to the bottom of that "article" and to reason
upon it suitably. He asked nothing, however, from the republicans. In the
first place, he inclined in republican ideas,--the only ones, according to
guadissardian philosophy, which could bring about a rational equality.
Besides which he had already dipped into the conspiracies of the French
"carbonari"; he had been arrested, and released for want of proof; and
finally, as he called the newspaper proprietors to observe, he had lately
grown a mustache, and needed only a hat of certain shape and a pair of
spurs to represent, with due propriety, the Republic.
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CHAPTER II
For one whole week this commanding genius went every morning to
be Saint-Simonized at the office of the "Globe," and every afternoon he
betook himself to the life-insurance company, where he learned the
intricacies of financial diplomacy. His aptitude and his memory were
prodigious; so that he was able to start on his peregrinations by the 15th of
April, the date at which he usually opened the spring campaign. Two large
commercial houses, alarmed at the decline of business, implored the
ambitious Gaudissart not to desert the article Paris, and seduced him, it
was said, with large offers, to take their commissions once more. The king
of travellers was amenable to the claims of his old fr