The Illustrious Gaudissart

H >> Honore de Balzac >> The Illustrious Gaudissart

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 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 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, 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 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 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
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.



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 friends, enforced as they were by the enormous
premiums offered to him.

* * * * *

"Listen, my little Jenny," he said in a hackney-coach to a pretty
florist.

All truly great men delight in allowing themselves to be tyrannized
over by a feeble being, and Gaudissart had found his tyrant in Jenny.
He was bringing her home at eleven o'clock from the Gymnase, whither
he had taken her, in full dress, to a proscenium box on the first
tier.

"On my return, Jenny, I shall refurnish your room in superior style.
That big Matilda, who pesters you with comparisons and her real India
shawls imported by the suite of the Russian ambassador, and her silver
plate and her Russian prince,--who to my mind is nothing but a humbug,
--won't have a word to say _then_. I consecrate to the adornment of your
room all the 'Children' I shall get in the provinces."

"Well, that's a pretty thing to say!" cried the florist. "Monster of a
man! Do you dare to talk to me of your children? Do you suppose I am
going to stand that sort of thing?"

"Oh, what a goose you are, my Jenny! That's only a figure of speech in
our business."

"A fine business, then!"

"Well, but listen; if you talk all the time you'll always be in the
right."

"I mean to be. Upon my word, you take things easy!"

"You don't let me finish. I have taken under my protection a
superlative idea,--a journal, a newspaper, written for children. In
our profession, when travellers have caught, let us suppose, ten
subscribers to the 'Children's Journal,' they say, 'I've got ten
Children,' just as I say when I get ten subscriptions to a newspaper
called the 'Movement,' 'I've got ten Movements.' Now don't you see?"

"That's all right. Are you going into politics? If you do you'll get
into Saint-Pelagie, and I shall have to trot down there after you. Oh!
if one only knew what one puts one's foot into when we love a man, on
my word of honor we would let you alone to take care of yourselves,
you men! However, if you are going away to-morrow we won't talk of
disagreeable things,--that would be silly."

The coach stopped before a pretty house, newly built in the Rue
d'Artois, where Gaudissart and Jenny climbed to the fourth story. This
was the abode of Mademoiselle Jenny Courand, commonly reported to be
privately married to the illustrious Gaudissart, a rumor which that
individual did not deny. To maintain her supremacy, Jenny kept him to
the performance of innumerable small attentions, and threatened
continually to turn him off if he omitted the least of them. She now
ordered him to write to her from every town, and render a minute
account of all his proceedings.

"How many 'Children' will it take to furnish my chamber?" she asked,
throwing off her shawl and sitting down by a good fire.

"I get five sous for each subscriber."

"Delightful! And is it with five sous that you expect to make me rich?
Perhaps you are like the Wandering Jew with your pockets full of
money."

"But, Jenny, I shall get a thousand 'Children.' Just reflect that
children have never had a newspaper to themselves before. But what a
fool I am to try to explain matters to you,--you can't understand such
things."

"Can't I? Then tell me,--tell me, Gaudissart, if I'm such a goose why
do you love me?"

"Just because you are a goose,--a sublime goose! Listen, Jenny. See
here, I am going to undertake the 'Globe,' the 'Movement,' the
'Children,' the insurance business, and some of my old articles Paris;
instead of earning a miserable eight thousand a year, I'll bring back
twenty thousand at least from each trip."

"Unlace me, Gaudissart, and do it right; don't tighten me."

"Yes, truly," said the traveller, complacently; "I shall become a
shareholder in the newspapers, like Finot, one of my friends, the son
of a hatter, who now has thirty thousand francs income, and is going
to make himself a peer of France. When one thinks of that little
Popinot,--ah, mon Dieu! I forgot to tell you that Monsieur Popinot was
named minister of commerce yesterday. Why shouldn't I be ambitious
too? Ha! ha! I could easily pick up the jargon of those fellows who
talk in the chamber, and bluster with the rest of them. Now, listen to
me:--

"Gentlemen," he said, standing behind a chair, "the Press is neither a
tool nor an article of barter: it is, viewed under its political
aspects, an institution. We are bound, in virtue of our position as
legislators, to consider all things politically, and therefore" (here
he stopped to get breath)--"and therefore we must examine the Press
and ask ourselves if it is useful or noxious, if it should be
encouraged or put down, taxed or free. These are serious questions. I
feel that I do not waste the time, always precious, of this Chamber by
examining this article--the Press--and explaining to you its
qualities. We are on the verge of an abyss. Undoubtedly the laws have
not the nap which they ought to have--Hein?" he said, looking at
Jenny. "All orators put France on the verge of an abyss. They either
say that or they talk about the chariot of state, or convulsions, or
political horizons. Don't I know their dodges? I'm up to all the
tricks of all the trades. Do you know why? Because I was born with a
caul; my mother has got it, but I'll give it to you. You'll see! I
shall soon be in the government."