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pubOne.info present you this new edition. 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?

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819932550
Langue	English

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THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
By Honore De Balzac
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.
THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
CHAPTER I
The commercial traveller, a personage unknown toantiquity, is one of the striking figures created by the mannersand customs of our present epoch. May he not, in some conceivableorder of things, be destined to mark for coming philosophers thegreat transition which welds a period of material enterprise to theperiod of intellectual strength? Our century will bind the realm ofisolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to therealm of universal but levelling might; equalizing all products,spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itselfcontrolled by the principle of unity, — the final expression of allsocieties. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeedingthe saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of thosecivilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in onedirection?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm ofideas what our stage-coaches are to men and things? He is theirvehicle; he sets them going, carries them along, rubs them up withone another. He takes from the luminous centre a handful of light,and scatters it broadcast among the drowsy populations of theduller regions. This human pyrotechnic is a scholar withoutlearning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving priest ofmysteries and dogmas, which he expounds all the better for his wantof faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything,and is up in all the ways of the world. Soaked in the vices ofParis, he affects to be the fellow-well-met of the provinces. He isthe link which connects the village with the capital; thoughessentially he is neither Parisian nor provincial, — he is atraveller. He sees nothing to the core: men and places he knows bytheir names; as for things, he looks merely at their surface, andhe has his own little tape-line with which to measure them. Hisglance shoots over all things and penetrates none. He occupieshimself with a great deal, yet nothing occupies him.
Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms withall political opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom of his soul.A capital mimic, he knows how to put on, turn and turn about, thesmiles of persuasion, satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop themfor the normal expression of his natural man. He is compelled to bean observer of a certain sort in the interests of his trade. Hemust probe men with a glance and guess their habits, wants, andabove all their solvency. To economize time he must come to quickdecisions as to his chances of success, — a practice that makes himmore or less a man of judgment; on the strength of which he sets upas a judge of theatres, and discourses about those of Paris and theprovinces.
He knows all the good and bad haunts in France, “deactu et visu. ” He can pilot you, on occasion, to vice or virtuewith equal assurance. Blest with the eloquence of a hot-waterspigot turned on at will, he can check or let run, withoutfloundering, the collection of phrases which he keeps on tap, andwhich produce upon his victims the effect of a moral shower-bath.Loquacious as a cricket, he smokes, drinks, wears a profusion oftrinkets, overawes the common people, passes for a lord in thevillages, and never permits himself to be “stumped, ”— a slangexpression all his own. He knows how to slap his pockets at theright time, and make his money jingle if he thinks the servants ofthe second-class houses which he wants to enter (always eminentlysuspicious) are likely to take him for a thief. Activity is not theleast surprising quality of this human machine. Not the hawkswooping upon its prey, not the stag doubling before the huntsmanand the hounds, nor the hounds themselves catching scent of thegame, can be compared with him for the rapidity of his dart when hespies a “commission, ” for the agility with which he trips up arival and gets ahead of him, for the keenness of his scent as henoses a customer and discovers the sport where he can get off hiswares.
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 thanambassadors themselves, who, for the most part, know only the formsof it. No one in France can doubt the powers of the commercialtraveller; that intrepid soul who dares all, and boldly brings thegenius of civilization and the modern inventions of Paris into astruggle with the plain commonsense of remote villages, and theignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial ways. Can we everforget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms himself into theminds of the populace, bringing a volume of words to bear upon therefractory, reminding us of the indefatigable worker in marbleswhose file eats slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you seek toknow the utmost power of language, or the strongest pressure that aphrase can bring to bear against rebellious lucre, against themiserly proprietor squatting in the recesses of his country lair? —listen to one of these great ambassadors of Parisian industry as herevolves and works and sucks like an intelligent piston of thesteam-engine called Speculation.
“Monsieur, ” said a wise political economist, thedirector-cashier-manager and secretary-general of a celebratedfire-insurance company, “out of every five hundred thousand francsof policies to be renewed in the provinces, not more than fiftythousand are paid up voluntarily. The other four hundred and fiftythousand are got in by the activity of our agents, who go aboutamong those who are in arrears and worry them with stories ofhorrible incendiaries until they are driven to sign the newpolicies. Thus you see that eloquence, the labial flux, is ninetenths of the ways and means of our business. ”
To talk, to make people listen to you, — that isseduction in itself. A nation that has two Chambers, a woman wholends both ears, are soon lost. Eve and her serpent are theeverlasting myth of an hourly fact which began, and may end, withthe world itself.
“A conversation of two hours ought to capture yourman, ” said a retired lawyer.
Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and lookat him well. Don't forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloakwith its morocco collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In thisqueer figure— so original that we cannot rub it out— how manydivers personalities we come across! In the first place, what anacrobat, what a circus, what a battery, all in one, is the manhimself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid mariner, he plungesin, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six thousand francsin the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians who inhabitthe interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise toharpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets andgentlest persuasions. The traveller's business is to extract thegold in country caches by a purely intellectual operation, and toextract it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think without ashudder of the flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed eachdawn, leaps in cascades the length and breadth of sunny France?
You know the species; let us now take a look at theindividual.
There lives in Paris an incomparable commercialtraveller, the paragon of his race, a man who possesses in thehighest degree all the qualifications necessary to the nature ofhis success. His speech is vitriol and likewise glue, — glue tocatch and entangle his victim and make him sticky and easy to grip;vitriol to dissolve hard heads, close fists, and closercalculations. His line was once the hat ; but his talents andthe art with which he snared the wariest provincial had brought himsuch commercial celebrity that all vendors of the “articleParis” [*] paid court to him, and humbly begged thathe would deign to take their commissions.
[*] “Article Paris” means anything—especially articles of
wearing apparel— which originates or is made inParis.
The name is supposed to give to the thing a specialvalue in
the provinces.
Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals ofhis triumphant progress through France, he lived a life ofperpetual festivity in the shape of weddings and suppers. When hewas in the provinces, the correspondents in the smaller towns mademuch of him; in Paris, the great houses feted and caressed him.Welcomed, flattered, and fed wherever he went, it came to pass thatto breakfast or to dine alone was a novelty, an event. He lived thelife of a sovereign, or, better still, of a journalist; in fact, hewas 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 thesurname of Illustrious. Wherever the fellow went, — behind acounter or before a bar, into a salon or to the top of astage-coach, up to a garret or to dine with a banker, — every onesaid, the moment they saw him, “Ah! here comes the illustriousGaudissart! ” [*] No name was ever so in keeping withthe style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the language,of any man. All things smiled upon our traveller, and the travellersmiled back in return. “Similia similibus, ”— he believed inhomoeopathy. Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face, skin of a friar, trueRabelaisian exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features, allpulled together to put a devil-may-care jollity into every inch ofhis person. Free-handed and easy-going, he might be recognized atonce as the favorite of grisettes, the man who jumps lightly to thetop of a stage-coach, gives a hand to the timid lady who fears tostep down, jokes with the postillion about his neckerchief andcontrives to sell him a cap, smiles at the maid and catches herround the waist or by the heart; gurgles at dinner like a bottle ofwine and pretends to draw