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 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 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 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 intelligentpiston 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 business is

to extract the gold in country caches by a purelyintellectual
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 incomparablecommercial 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 commercialcelebrity 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 perpetualfestivity 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.