Title: The Illustrious Gaudissart
Author: Balzac, Honoré de
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "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.”

“You!”

“Why shouldn’t I be the Baron Gaudissart, peer of France? Haven’t they
twice elected Monsieur Popinot as deputy from the fourth arrondissement?
He dines with Louis Phillippe. There’s Finot; he is going to be, they
say, a member of the Council. Suppose they send me as ambassador to
London? I tell you I’d nonplus those English! No man ever got the better
of Gaudissart, the illustrious Gaudissart, and nobody ever will. Yes, I
say it! no one ever outwitted me, and no one can--in any walk of life,
politics or impolitics, here or elsewhere. But, for the time being,
I must give myself wholly to the capitalists; to the ‘Globe,’ the
‘Movement,’ the ‘Children,’ and my article Paris.”

“You will be brought up with a round turn, you and your newspapers. I’ll
bet you won’t get further than Poitiers before the police will nab you.”

“What will you bet?”

“A shawl.”

“Done! If I lose that shawl I’ll go back to the article Paris and
the hat business. But as for getting the better of Gaudissart--never!
never!”

And the illustrious traveller threw himself into position before
Jenny, looked at her proudly, one hand in his waistcoat, his head at
three-quarter profile,--an attitude truly Napoleonic.

“Oh, how funny you are! what have you been eating to-night?”

Gaudissart was thirty-eight years of age, of medium height, stout and
fat like men who roll about continually in stage-coaches, with a face as
round as a pumpkin, ruddy cheeks, and regular features of the type which
sculptors of all lands adopt as a model for statues of Abundance, Law,
Force, Commerce, and the like. His protuberant stomach swelled forth in
the shape of a pear; his legs were small, but active and vigorous. He
caught Jenny up in his arms like a baby and kissed her.

“Hold your tongue, young woman!” he said. “What do you know about
Saint-Simonism, antagonism, Fourierism, criticism, heroic enterprise,
or woman’s freedom? I’ll tell you what they are,--ten francs for each
subscription, Madame Gaudissart.”

“On my word of honor, you are going crazy, Gaudissart.”

“More and more crazy about _you_,” he replied, flinging his hat upon the
sofa.

The next morning Gaudissart, having breakfasted gloriously with Jenny,
departed on horseback to work up the chief towns of the district to
which he was assigned by the various enterprises in whose interests he
was now about to exercise his great talents. After spending forty-five
days in beating up the country between Paris and Blois, he remained two
weeks at the latter place to write up his correspondence and make short
visits to the various market towns of the department. The night before
he left Blois for Tours he indited a letter to Mademoiselle Jenny
Courand. As the conciseness and charm of this epistle cannot be equalled
by any narration of ours, and as, moreover, it proves the legitimacy of
the tie which united these two individuals, we produce it here:--

  “My dear Jenny,--You will lose your wager. Like Napoleon,
  Gaudissart the illustrious has his star, but _not_ his Waterloo. I
  triumph everywhere. Life insurance has done well. Between Paris
  and Blois I lodged two millions. But as I get to the centre of
  France heads become infinitely harder and millions correspondingly
  scarce. The article Paris keeps up its own little jog-trot. It is
  a ring on the finger. With all my well-known cunning I spit these
  shop-keepers like larks. I got off one hundred and sixty-two
  Ternaux shawls at Orleans. I am sure I don’t know what they will
  do with them, unless they return them to the backs of the sheep.

  “As to the article journal--the devil! that’s a horse of another
  color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach
  these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two ‘Movements’:
  exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one
  town. Those republican rogues! they won’t subscribe. They talk,
  they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all
  agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure
  your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three
  feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to
  slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated
  property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,--a whole lot of stuff, and
  I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It’s a bad
  business! Candidly, the ‘Movement’ does not move. I have written
  to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it--on account
  of my political opinions.

  “As for the ‘Globe,’ that’s another breed altogether. Just set to
  work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough
  to believe such lies,--why, they think you want to burn their
  houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for
  futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
  for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon
  man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great
  providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be
  found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
  --in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do
  you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
  lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg
  me to go away! Are not they fools? geese? The ‘Globe’ is smashed.
  I said to the proprietors, ‘You are too advanced, you go ahead too
  fast: you ought to get a few results; the provinces like results.’
  However, I have made a hundred ‘Globes,’ and I must say,
  considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a
  miracle. But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises
  that I am sure I don’t know how the globites, globists, globules,
  or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them. But
  they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better
  than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs
  for each subscription. There was one farmer who thought the paper
  was agricultural because of its name. I Globed _him_. Bah! he gave
  in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting
  foreheads are ideologists.

  “But the ‘Children’; oh! ah! as to the ‘Children’! I got two
  thousand between Paris and Blois. Jolly business! but there is not
  much to say. You just show a little vignette to the mother,
  pretending to hide it from the child: naturally the child wants to
  see, and pulls mamma’s gown and cries for its newspaper, because
  ‘Papa has _dot_ his.’ Mamma can’t let her brat tear the gown; the
  gown costs thirty francs, the subscription six--economy; result,
  subscription. It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it
  holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the two eternal
  necessities of childhood.

  “I have had a quarrel here at the table d’hote about the
  newspapers and my opinions. I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner
  next to a man with a gray hat who was reading the ‘Debats.’ I said
  to myself, ‘Now for my rostrum eloquence. He is tied to the
  dynasty; I’ll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for
  my ministerial talents.’ So I went to work and praised his
  ‘Debats.’ Hein! if I didn’t lead him along! Thread by thread, I
  began to net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases, and the
  F-sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff. Everybody
  listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his
  mustache, just ready to nibble at a ‘Movement.’ Well, I don’t know
  how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word ‘blockhead.’
  Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
  (shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his teeth and was
  furiously angry. I put on my grand air--you know--and said to him:
  ‘Ah, ca! Monsieur, you are remarkably aggressive; if you are not
  content, I am ready to give you satisfaction; I fought in July.’
  ‘Though the father of a family,’ he replied, ‘I am ready--’
  ‘Father of a family!’ I exclaimed; ‘my dear sir, have you any
  children?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Twelve years old?’ ‘Just about.’ ‘Well, then,
  the “Children’s Journal” is the very thing for you; six francs a
  year, one number a month, double columns, edited by great literary
  lights, well got up, good paper, engravings from charming sketches
  by our best artists, actual colored drawings of the Indies--will
  not fade.’ I fired my broadside ‘feelings of a father, etc.,
  etc.,’--in short, a subscription instead of a quarrel. ‘There’s
  nobody but Gaudissart who can get out of things like that,’ said
  that little cricket Lamard to the big Bulot at the cafe, when he
  told him the story.

  “I leave to-morrow for Amboise. I shall do up Amboise in two days,
  and I will write next from Tours, where I shall measure swords
  with the inhabitants of that colorless region; colorless, I mean,
  from the intellectual and speculative point of view. But, on the
  word of a Gaudissart, they shall be toppled over, toppled down
  --floored, I say.

  “Adieu, my kitten. Love me always; be faithful; fidelity through
  thick and thin is one of the attributes of the Free Woman. Who is
  kissing you on the eyelids?

  “Thy Felix Forever.”



CHAPTER III

Five days later Gaudissart started from the Hotel des Faisans, at
which he had put up in Tours, and went to Vouvray, a rich and populous
district where the public mind seemed to him susceptible of cultivation.
Mounted upon his horse, he trotted along the embankment thinking no more
of his phrases than an actor thinks of his part which he has played for
a hundred times. It was thus that the illustrious Gaudissart went his
cheerful way, admiring the landscape, and little dreaming that in the
happy valleys of Vouvray his commercial infallibility was about to
perish.

Here a few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to our
story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit stamped
on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the Tourangian
mind,--a mind polished and refined as it should be in a land where
the kings of France long held their court; ardent, artistic, poetic,
voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside quickly. The softness of
the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a certain ease of life and
joviality of manners, smother before long the sentiment of art, narrow
the widest heart, and enervate the strongest will. Transplant the
Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and lead to great results, as
we may see in many spheres of action: look at Rabelais and Semblancay,
Plantin the printer and Descartes, Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day,
and Pinaigrier, who painted most of the colored glass in our cathedrals;
also Verville and Courier. But the Tourangian, distinguished though he
may be in other regions, sits in his own home like an Indian on his mat
or a Turk on his divan. He employs his wit in laughing at his neighbor
and in making merry all his days; and when at last he reaches the end
of his life, he is still a happy man. Touraine is like the Abbaye of
Theleme, so vaunted in the history of Gargantua. There we may find the
complying sisterhoods of that famous tale, and there the good cheer
celebrated by Rabelais reigns in glory.

As to the do-nothingness of that blessed land it is sublime and well
expressed in a certain popular legend: “Tourangian, are you hungry,
do you want some soup?” “Yes.” “Bring your porringer.” “Then I am not
hungry.” Is it to the joys of the vineyard and the harmonious loveliness
of this garden land of France, is it to the peace and tranquillity of a
region where the step of an invader has never trodden, that we owe
the soft compliance of these unconstrained and easy manners? To such
questions no answer. Enter this Turkey of sunny France, and you will
stay there,--lazy, idle, happy. You may be as ambitious as Napoleon, as
poetic as Lord Byron, and yet a power unknown, invisible, will compel
you to bury your poetry within your soul and turn your projects into
dreams.

The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one of
those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely because
they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or wrong, the
Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents. Consequently the
doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and villified among them.
In Touraine hatred and villification take the form of superb disdain
and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical
jokes,--a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other
spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as “English cant.”

For his sins, after getting down at the Soleil d’Or, an inn kept by a
former grenadier of the imperial guard named Mitouflet, married to a
rich widow, the illustrious traveller, after a brief consultation
with the landlord, betook himself to the knave of Vouvray, the jovial
merry-maker, the comic man of the neighborhood, compelled by fame and
nature to supply the town with merriment. This country Figaro was once
a dyer, and now possessed about seven or eight thousand francs a year,
a pretty house on the slope of the hill, a plump little wife, and robust
health. For ten years he had had nothing to do but take care of his wife
and his garden, marry his daughter, play whist in the evenings, keep the
run of all the gossip in the neighborhood, meddle with the elections,
squabble with the large proprietors, and order good dinners; or else
trot along the embankment to find out what was going on in Tours,
torment the cure, and finally, by way of dramatic entertainment, assist
at the sale of lands in the neighborhood of his vineyards. In short, he
led the true Tourangian life,--the life of a little country-townsman. He
was, moreover, an important member of the bourgeoisie,--a leader among
the small proprietors, all of them envious, jealous, delighted to catch
up and retail gossip and calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging
things down to their own level; and at war with all kinds of
superiority, which they deposited with the fine composure of ignorance.
Monsieur Vernier--such was the name of this great little man--was just
finishing his breakfast, with his wife and daughter on either side of
him, when Gaudissart entered the room through a window that looked out
on the Loire and the Cher, and lighted one of the gayest dining-rooms of
that gay land.

“Is this Monsieur Vernier himself?” said the traveller, bending his
vertebral column with such grace that it seemed to be elastic.

“Yes, Monsieur,” said the mischievous ex-dyer, with a scrutinizing look
which took in the style of man he had to deal with.

“I come, Monsieur,” resumed Gaudissart, “to solicit the aid of your
knowledge and insight to guide my efforts in this district, where
Mitouflet tells me you have the greatest influence. Monsieur, I am sent
into the provinces on an enterprise of the utmost importance, undertaken
by bankers who--”

“Who mean to win our tricks,” said Vernier, long used to the ways of
commercial travellers and to their periodical visits.

“Precisely,” replied Gaudissart, with native impudence. “But with your
fine tact, Monsieur, you must be aware that we can’t win tricks from
people unless it is their interest to play at cards. I beg you not to
confound me with the vulgar herd of travellers who succeed by humbug
or importunity. I am no longer a commercial traveller. I was one, and I
glory in it; but to-day my mission is of higher importance, and should
place me, in the minds of superior people, among those who devote
themselves to the enlightenment of their country. The most distinguished
bankers in Paris take part in this affair; not fictitiously, as in some
shameful speculations which I call rat-traps. No, no, nothing of
the kind! I should never condescend--never!--to hawk about such
_catch-fools_. No, Monsieur; the most respectable houses in Paris are
concerned in this enterprise; and their interests guarantee--”

Hereupon Gaudissart drew forth his whole string of phrases, and Monsieur
Vernier let him go the length of his tether, listening with apparent
interest which completely deceived him. But after the word “guarantee”
 Vernier paid no further attention to our traveller’s rhetoric, and
turned over in his mind how to play him some malicious trick and deliver
a land, justly considered half-savage by speculators unable to get a
bite of it, from the inroads of these Parisian caterpillars.

At the head of an enchanting valley, called the Valley Coquette because
of its windings and the curves which return upon each other at every
step, and seem more and more lovely as we advance, whether we ascend or
descend them, there lived, in a little house surrounded by vineyards, a
half-insane man named Margaritis. He was of Italian origin, married,
but childless; and his wife took care of him with a courage fully
appreciated by the neighborhood. Madame Margaritis was undoubtedly in
real danger from a man who, among other fancies, persisted in carrying
about with him two long-bladed knives with which he sometimes threatened
her. Who has not seen the wonderful self-devotion shown by provincials
who consecrate their lives to the care of sufferers, possibly because
of the disgrace heaped upon a bourgeoise if she allows her husband or
children to be taken to a public hospital? Moreover, who does not know
the repugnance which these people feel to the payment of the two or
three thousand francs required at Charenton or in the private lunatic
asylums? If any one had spoken to Madame Margaritis of Doctors
Dubuisson, Esquirol, Blanche, and others, she would have preferred, with
noble indignation, to keep her thousands and take care of the “good-man”
 at home.

As the incomprehensible whims of this lunatic are connected with the
current of our story, we are compelled to exhibit the most striking
of them. Margaritis went out as soon as it rained, and walked about
bare-headed in his vineyard. At home he made incessant inquiries for
newspapers; to satisfy him his wife and the maid-servant used to give
him an old journal called the “Indre-et-Loire,” and for seven years he
had never yet perceived that he was reading the same number over and
over again. Perhaps a doctor would have observed with interest the
connection that evidently existed between the recurring and spasmodic
demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the weather.

Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every evening,
for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently come to play
at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a corner and never
stirred. But the moment ten o’clock began to strike on a clock which he
kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at the stroke with the
mechanical precision of the figures which are made to move by springs in
the German toys. He would then advance slowly towards the players, give
them a glance like the automatic gaze of the Greeks and Turks exhibited
on the Boulevard du Temple, and say sternly, “Go away!” There were days
when he had lucid intervals and could give his wife excellent advice
as to the sale of their wines; but at such times he became extremely
annoying, and would ransack her closets and steal her delicacies, which
he devoured in secret. Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their
appearance he would treat them with civility; but as a general thing
his remarks and replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked
him, “How do you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?” “I have grown
a beard,” he replied, “have you?” “Are you better?” asked another.
“Jerusalem! Jerusalem!” was the answer. But the greater part of the time
he gazed stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his
wife would say, “The good-man does not hear anything to-day.”

On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy; he
flourished his knives and shouted, “That joke dishonors me!”

As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men in
sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the same
respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture. Among
his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet discovered the
object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the community had
learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries. He insisted on
keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in the cellar of his
house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on them. But then the
month of June came round he grew uneasy with the restless anxiety of a
madman about the sale of the sack and the puncheons. Madame Margaritis
could nearly always persuade him that the wine had been sold at
an enormous price, which she paid over to him, and which he hid so
cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant who watched him had
ever been able to discover its hiding-place.

The evening before Gaudissart reached Vouvray Madame Margaritis had had
more difficulty than usual in deceiving her husband, whose mind happened
to be uncommonly lucid.

“I really don’t know how I shall get through to-morrow,” she had said to
Madame Vernier. “Would you believe it, the good-man insists on watching
his two casks of wine. He has worried me so this whole day, that I
had to show him two full puncheons. Our neighbor, Pierre Champlain,
fortunately had two which he had not sold. I asked him to kindly let me
have them rolled into our cellar; and oh, dear! now that the good-man
has seen them he insists on bottling them off himself!”

Madame Vernier had related the poor woman’s trouble to her husband just
before the entrance of Gaudissart, and at the first words of the famous
traveller Vernier determined that he should be made to grapple with
Margaritis.

“Monsieur,” said the ex-dyer, as soon as the illustrious Gaudissart
had fired his first broadside, “I will not hide from you the great
difficulties which my native place offers to your enterprise. This part
of the country goes along, as it were, in the rough,--‘suo modo.’ It is
a country where new ideas don’t take hold. We live as our fathers lived,
we amuse ourselves with four meals a day, and we cultivate our vineyards
and sell our wines to the best advantage. Our business principle is to
sell things for more than they cost us; we shall stick in that rut, and
neither God nor the devil can get us out of it. I will, however, give
you some advice, and good advice is an egg in the hand. There is in
this town a retired banker in whose wisdom I have--I, particularly--the
greatest confidence. If you can obtain his support, I will add mine. If
your proposals have real merit, if we are convinced of the advantage of
your enterprise, the approval of Monsieur Margaritis (which carries with
it mine) will open to you at least twenty rich houses in Vouvray who
will be glad to try your specifics.”

When Madame Vernier heard the name of the lunatic she raised her head
and looked at her husband.

“Ah, precisely; my wife intends to call on Madame Margaritis with one
of our neighbors. Wait a moment, and you can accompany these ladies--You
can pick up Madame Fontanieu on your way,” said the wily dyer, winking
at his wife.

To pick out the greatest gossip, the sharpest tongue, the most
inveterate cackler of the neighborhood! It meant that Madame Vernier
was to take a witness to the scene between the traveller and the lunatic
which should keep the town in laughter for a month. Monsieur and Madame
Vernier played their part so well that Gaudissart had no suspicions, and
straightway fell into the trap. He gallantly offered his arm to Madame
Vernier, and believed that he made, as they went along, the conquest
of both ladies, for those benefit he sparkled with wit and humor and
undetected puns.

The house of the pretended banker stood at the entrance to the Valley
Coquette. The place, called La Fuye, had nothing remarkable about it. On
the ground floor was a large wainscoted salon, on either side of which
opened the bedroom of the good-man and that of his wife. The salon
was entered from an ante-chamber, which served as the dining-room and
communicated with the kitchen. This lower door, which was wholly without
the external charm usually seen even in the humblest dwellings in
Touraine, was covered by a mansard story, reached by a stairway built
on the outside of the house against the gable end and protected by
a shed-roof. A little garden, full of marigolds, syringas, and
elder-bushes, separated the house from the fields; and all around the
courtyard were detached buildings which were used in the vintage season
for the various processes of making wine.



CHAPTER IV

Margaritis was seated in an arm-chair covered with yellow Utrecht
velvet, near the window of the salon, and he did not stir as the two
ladies entered with Gaudissart. His thoughts were running on the casks
of wine. He was a spare man, and his bald head, garnished with a few
spare locks at the back of it, was pear-shaped in conformation.
His sunken eyes, overtopped by heavy black brows and surrounded by
discolored circles, his nose, thin and sharp like the blade of a knife,
the strongly marked jawbone, the hollow cheeks, and the oblong tendency
of all these lines, together with his unnaturally long and flat chin,
contributed to give a peculiar expression to his countenance,--something
between that of a retired professor of rhetoric and a rag-picker.

“Monsieur Margaritis,” cried Madame Vernier, addressing him, “come, stir
about! Here is a gentleman whom my husband sends to you, and you must
listen to him with great attention. Put away your mathematics and talk
to him.”

On hearing these words the lunatic rose, looked at Gaudissart, made him
a sign to sit down, and said, “Let us converse, Monsieur.”

The two women went into Madame Margaritis’ bedroom, leaving the
door open so as to hear the conversation, and interpose if it became
necessary. They were hardly installed before Monsieur Vernier crept
softly up through the field and, opening a window, got into the bedroom
without noise.

“Monsieur has doubtless been in business--?” began Gaudissart.

“Public business,” answered Margaritis, interrupting him. “I pacificated
Calabria under the reign of King Murat.”

“Bless me! if he hasn’t gone to Calabria!” whispered Monsieur Vernier.

“In that case,” said Gaudissart, “we shall quickly understand each
other.”

“I am listening,” said Margaritis, striking the attitude taken by a man
when he poses to a portrait-painter.

“Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key
with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. “Monsieur, if you
were not a man of superior intelligence” (the fool bowed), “I should
content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages of
this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of time
to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not
time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those
anxieties which I call ‘pot-boiling’?--a vulgar expression, but it puts
the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up more
time than the inability to give proper security to persons from whom you
seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are nevertheless rich
in hope?”

“Money,--yes, that’s right,” said Margaritis.

“Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of bankers
and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which
rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently,
of intelligence and productive ability. We have seized the idea of
capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
talents by discounting--what? _time_; securing the value of it to their
survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the moral
qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur, living
forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three, ten,
twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement onward to
a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of our epoch; a
movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you when we come
to consider the principles involved in the logical co-ordination of
the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by literal examples,
leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I call the
mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a proprietor
living upon your income, let us suppose that you are painter, a
musician, an artist, or a poet--”

“I am a painter,” said the lunatic.

“Well, so be it. I see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you have
a glorious future, a rich future before you. But I go still farther--”

At these words the madman looked anxiously at Gaudissart, thinking he
meant to go away; but was reassured when he saw that he kept his seat.

“You may even be nothing at all,” said Gaudissart, going on with his
phrases, “but you are conscious of yourself; you feel yourself--”

“I feel myself,” said the lunatic.

“--you feel yourself a great man; you say to yourself, ‘I will be a
minister of state.’ Well, then, you--painter, artist, man of letters,
statesman of the future--you reckon upon your talents, you estimate
their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred thousand crowns--”

“Do you give me a hundred thousand crowns?”

“Yes, Monsieur, as you will see. Either your heirs and assigns will
receive them if you die, for the company contemplates that event, or
you will receive them in the long run through your works of art, your
writings, or your fortunate speculations during your lifetime. But, as
I have already had the honor to tell you, when you have once fixed
upon the value of your intellectual capital,--for it is intellectual
capital,--seize that idea firmly,--intellectual--”

“I understand,” said the fool.

“You sign a policy of insurance with a company which recognizes in you a
value of a hundred thousand crowns; in you, poet--”

“I am a painter,” said the lunatic.

“Yes,” resumed Gaudissart,--“painter, poet, musician, statesman--and
binds itself to pay them over to your family, your heirs, if, by reason
of your death, the hopes foundered on your intellectual capital should
be overthrown for you personally. The payment of the premium is all that
is required to protect--”

“The money-box,” said the lunatic, sharply interrupting him.

“Ah! naturally; yes. I see that Monsieur understands business.”

“Yes,” said the madman. “I established the Territorial Bank in the Rue
des Fosses-Montmartre at Paris in 1798.”

“For,” resumed Gaudissart, going back to his premium, “in order to meet
the payments on the intellectual capital which each man recognizes and
esteems in himself, it is of course necessary that each should pay a
certain premium, three per cent; an annual due of three per cent. Thus,
by the payment of this trifling sum, a mere nothing, you protect your
family from disastrous results at your death--”

“But I live,” said the fool.

“Ah! yes; you mean if you should live long? That is the usual
objection,--a vulgar prejudice. I fully agree that if we had
not foreseen and demolished it we might feel we were unworthy of
being--what? What are we, after all? Book-keepers in the great Bureau of
Intellect. Monsieur, I don’t apply these remarks to you, but I meet on
all sides men who make it a business to teach new ideas and disclose
chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my
word of honor, it is pitiable! But that’s the way of the world, and I
don’t pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really sheer
nonsense.”

“Why?” asked the lunatic.

“Why?--this is why: because, if you live and possess the qualities which
are estimated in your policy against the chances of death,--now, attend
to this--”

“I am attending.”

“Well, then, you have succeeded in life; and you have succeeded because
of the said insurance. You doubled your chances of success by getting
rid of the anxieties you were dragging about with you in the shape of
wife and children who might otherwise be left destitute at your death.
If you attain this certainty, you have touched the value of your
intellectual capital, on which the cost of insurance is but a trifle,--a
mere trifle, a bagatelle.”

“That’s a fine idea!”

“Ah! is it not, Monsieur?” cried Gaudissart. “I call this enterprise the
exchequer of beneficence; a mutual insurance against poverty; or, if
you like it better, the discounting, the cashing, of talent. For talent,
Monsieur, is a bill of exchange which Nature gives to the man of genius,
and which often has a long time to run before it falls due.”

“That is usury!” cried Margaritis.

“The devil! he’s keen, the old fellow! I’ve made a mistake,” thought
Gaudissart, “I must catch him with other chaff. I’ll try humbug No. 1.
Not at all,” he said aloud, “for you who--”

“Will you take a glass of wine?” asked Margaritis.

“With pleasure,” replied Gaudissart.

“Wife, give us a bottle of the wine that is in the puncheons. You are
here at the very head of Vouvray,” he continued, with a gesture of the
hand, “the vineyard of Margaritis.”

The maid-servant brought glasses and a bottle of wine of the vintage of
1819. The good-man filled a glass with circumspection and offered it to
Gaudissart, who drank it up.

“Ah, you are joking, Monsieur!” exclaimed the commercial traveller.
“Surely this is Madeira, true Madeira?”

“So you think,” said the fool. “The trouble with our Vouvray wine is
that it is neither a common wine, nor a wine that can be drunk with the
entremets. It is too generous, too strong. It is often sold in Paris
adulterated with brandy and called Madeira. The wine-merchants buy it
up, when our vintage has not been good enough for the Dutch and Belgian
markets, to mix it with wines grown in the neighborhood of Paris, and
call it Bordeaux. But what you are drinking just now, my good Monsieur,
is a wine for kings, the pure Head of Vouvray,--that’s it’s name. I
have two puncheons, only two puncheons of it left. People who like fine
wines, high-class wines, who furnish their table with qualities that
can’t be bought in the regular trade,--and there are many persons in
Paris who have that vanity,--well, such people send direct to us for
this wine. Do you know any one who--?”

“Let us go on with what we were saying,” interposed Gaudissart.

“We are going on,” said the fool. “My wine is capital; you are capital,
capitalist, intellectual capital, capital wine,--all the same etymology,
don’t you see? hein? Capital, ‘caput,’ head, Head of Vouvray, that’s my
wine,--it’s all one thing.”

“So that you have realized your intellectual capital through your wines?
Ah, I see!” said Gaudissart.

“I have realized,” said the lunatic. “Would you like to buy my
puncheons? you shall have them on good terms.”

“No, I was merely speaking,” said the illustrious Gaudissart, “of the
results of insurance and the employment of intellectual capital. I will
resume my argument.”

The lunatic calmed down, and fell once more into position.

“I remarked, Monsieur, that if you die the capital will be paid to your
family without discussion.”

“Without discussion?”

“Yes, unless there were suicide.”

“That’s quibbling.”

“No, Monsieur; you are aware that suicide is one of those acts which are
easy to prove--”

“In France,” said the fool; “but--”

“But in other countries?” said Gaudissart. “Well, Monsieur, to cut
short discussion on this point, I will say, once for all, that death in
foreign countries or on the field of battle is outside of our--”

“Then what are you insuring? Nothing at all!” cried Margaritis. “My
bank, my Territorial Bank, rested upon--”

“Nothing at all?” exclaimed Gaudissart, interrupting the good-man.
“Nothing at all? What do you call sickness, and afflictions, and
poverty, and passions? Don’t go off on exceptional points.”

“No, no! no points,” said the lunatic.

“Now, what’s the result of all this?” cried Gaudissart. “To you, a
banker, I can sum up the profits in a few words. Listen. A man lives;
he has a future; he appears well; he lives, let us say, by his art; he
wants money; he tries to get it,--he fails. Civilization withholds cash
from this man whose thought could master civilization, and ought to
master it, and will master it some day with a brush, a chisel, with
words, ideas, theories, systems. Civilization is atrocious! It denies
bread to the men who give it luxury. It starves them on sneers and
curses, the beggarly rascal! My words may be strong, but I shall
not retract them. Well, this great but neglected man comes to us; we
recognize his greatness; we salute him with respect; we listen to him.
He says to us: ‘Gentlemen, my life and talents are worth so much; on my
productions I will pay you such or such percentage.’ Very good; what
do we do? Instantly, without reserve or hesitation, we admit him to the
great festivals of civilization as an honored guest--”

“You need wine for that,” interposed the madman.

“--as an honored guest. He signs the insurance policy; he takes our bits
of paper,--scraps, rags, miserable rags!--which, nevertheless, have more
power in the world than his unaided genius. Then, if he wants money,
every one will lend it to him on those rags. At the Bourse, among
bankers, wherever he goes, even at the usurers, he will find money
because he can give security. Well, Monsieur, is not that a great gulf
to bridge over in our social system? But that is only one aspect of our
work. We insure debtors by another scheme of policies and premiums. We
offer annuities at rates graduated according to ages, on a sliding-scale
infinitely more advantageous than what are called tontines, which are
based on tables of mortality that are notoriously false. Our company
deals with large masses of men; consequently the annuitants are
secure from those distressing fears which sadden old age,--too sad
already!--fears which pursue those who receive annuities from private
sources. You see, Monsieur, that we have estimated life under all its
aspects.”

“Sucked it at both ends,” said the lunatic. “Take another glass of wine.
You’ve earned it. You must line your inside with velvet if you are going
to pump at it like that every day. Monsieur, the wine of Vouvray, if
well kept, is downright velvet.”

“Now, what do you think of it all?” said Gaudissart, emptying his glass.

“It is very fine, very new, very useful; but I like the discounts I get
at my Territorial Bank, Rue des Fosses-Montmartre.”

“You are quite right, Monsieur,” answered Gaudissart; “but that sort of
thing is taken and retaken, made and remade, every day. You have also
hypothecating banks which lend upon landed property and redeem it on
a large scale. But that is a narrow idea compared to our system of
consolidating hopes,--consolidating hopes! coagulating, so to speak,
the aspirations born in every soul, and insuring the realization of
our dreams. It needed our epoch, Monsieur, the epoch of
transition--transition and progress--”

“Yes, progress,” muttered the lunatic, with his glass at his lips. “I
like progress. That is what I’ve told them many times--”

“The ‘Times’!” cried Gaudissart, who did not catch the whole sentence.
“The ‘Times’ is a bad newspaper. If you read that, I am sorry for you.”

“The newspaper!” cried Margaritis. “Of course! Wife! wife! where is the
newspaper?” he cried, going towards the next room.

“If you are interested in newspapers,” said Gaudissart, changing his
attack, “we are sure to understand each other.”

“Yes; but before we say anything about that, tell me what you think of
this wine.”

“Delicious!”

“Then let us finish the bottle.” The lunatic poured out a thimbleful
for himself and filled Gaudissart’s glass. “Well, Monsieur, I have two
puncheons left of the same wine; if you find it good we can come to
terms.”

“Exactly,” said Gaudissart. “The fathers of the Saint-Simonian faith
have authorized me to send them all the commodities I--But allow me to
tell you about their noble newspaper. You, who have understood the whole
question of insurance so thoroughly, and who are willing to assist my
work in this district--”

“Yes,” said Margaritis, “if--”

“If I take your wine; I understand perfectly. Your wine is very good,
Monsieur; it puts the stomach in a glow.”

“They make champagne out of it; there is a man from Paris who comes here
and makes it in Tours.”

“I have no doubt of it, Monsieur. The ‘Globe,’ of which we were
speaking--”

“Yes, I’ve gone over it,” said Margaritis.

“I was sure of it!” exclaimed Gaudissart. “Monsieur, you have a fine
frontal development; a pate--excuse the word--which our gentlemen call
‘horse-head.’ There’s a horse element in the head of every great man.
Genius will make itself known; but sometimes it happens that great men,
in spite of their gifts, remain obscure. Such was very nearly the case
with Saint-Simon; also with Monsieur Vico,--a strong man just beginning
to shoot up; I am proud of Vico. Now, here we enter upon the new theory
and formula of humanity. Attention, if you please.”

“Attention!” said the fool, falling into position.

“Man’s spoliation of man--by which I mean bodies of men living upon the
labor of other men--ought to have ceased with the coming of Christ, I
say _Christ_, who was sent to proclaim the equality of man in the sight
of God. But what is the fact? Equality up to our day has been an ‘ignus
fatuus,’ a chimera. Saint-Simon has arisen as the complement of Christ;
as the modern exponent of the doctrine of equality, or rather of its
practice, for theory has served its time--”

“Is he liberated?” asked the lunatic.

“Like liberalism, it has had its day. There is a nobler future before
us: a new faith, free labor, free growth, free production, individual
progress, a social co-ordination in which each man shall receive the
full worth of his individual labor, in which no man shall be preyed upon
by other men who, without capacity of their own, compel _all_ to work
for the profit of _one_. From this comes the doctrine of--”

“How about servants?” demanded the lunatic.

“They will remain servants if they have no capacity beyond it.”

“Then what’s the good of your doctrine?”

“To judge of this doctrine, Monsieur, you must consider it from a higher
point of view: you must take a general survey of humanity. Here we come
to the theories of Ballance: do you know his Palingenesis?”

“I am fond of them,” said the fool, who thought he said “ices.”

“Good!” returned Gaudissart. “Well, then, if the palingenistic aspects
of the successive transformations of the spiritualized globe
have struck, stirred, roused you, then, my dear sir, the ‘Globe’
newspaper,--noble name which proclaims its mission,--the ‘Globe’ is an
organ, a guide, who will explain to you with the coming of each day
the conditions under which this vast political and moral change will be
effected. The gentlemen who--”

“Do they drink wine?”

“Yes, Monsieur; their houses are kept up in the highest style; I may
say, in prophetic style. Superb salons, large receptions, the apex of
social life--”

“Well,” remarked the lunatic, “the workmen who pull things down want
wine as much as those who put things up.”

“True,” said the illustrious Gaudissart, “and all the more, Monsieur,
when they pull down with one hand and build up with the other, like the
apostles of the ‘Globe.’”

“They want good wine; Head of Vouvray, two puncheons, three hundred
bottles, only one hundred francs,--a trifle.”

“How much is that a bottle?” said Gaudissart, calculating. “Let me see;
there’s the freight and the duty,--it will come to about seven sous.
Why, it wouldn’t be a bad thing: they give more for worse wines--(Good!
I’ve got him!” thought Gaudissart, “he wants to sell me wine which I
want; I’ll master him)--Well, Monsieur,” he continued, “those who argue
usually come to an agreement. Let us be frank with each other. You have
great influence in this district--”

“I should think so!” said the madman; “I am the Head of Vouvray!”

“Well, I see that you thoroughly comprehend the insurance of
intellectual capital--”

“Thoroughly.”

“--and that you have measured the full importance of the ‘Globe’--”

“Twice; on foot.”

Gaudissart was listening to himself and not to the replies of his
hearer.

“Therefore, in view of your circumstances and of your age, I quite
understand that you have no need of insurance for yourself; but,
Monsieur, you might induce others to insure, either because of their
inherent qualities which need development, or for the protection of
their families against a precarious future. Now, if you will subscribe
to the ‘Globe,’ and give me your personal assistance in this district
on behalf of insurance, especially life-annuity,--for the provinces are
much attached to annuities--Well, if you will do this, then we can come
to an understanding about the wine. Will you take the ‘Globe’?”

“I stand on the globe.”

“Will you advance its interests in this district?”

“I advance.”

“And?”

“And--”

“And I--but you do subscribe, don’t you, to the ‘Globe’?”

“The globe, good thing, for life,” said the lunatic.

“For life, Monsieur?--ah, I see! yes, you are right: it is full of
life, vigor, intellect, science,--absolutely crammed with science,--well
printed, clear type, well set up; what I call ‘good nap.’ None of your
botched stuff, cotton and wool, trumpery; flimsy rubbish that rips
if you look at it. It is deep; it states questions on which you can
meditate at your leisure; it is the very thing to make time pass
agreeably in the country.”

“That suits me,” said the lunatic.

“It only costs a trifle,--eighty francs.”

“That won’t suit me,” said the lunatic.

“Monsieur!” cried Gaudissart, “of course you have got grandchildren?
There’s the ‘Children’s Journal’; that only costs seven francs a year.”

“Very good; take my wine, and I will subscribe to the children. That
suits me very well: a fine idea! intellectual product, child. That’s man
living upon man, hein?”

“You’ve hit it, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart.

“I’ve hit it!”

“You consent to push me in the district?”

“In the district.”

“I have your approbation?”

“You have it.”

“Well, then, Monsieur, I take your wine at a hundred francs--”

“No, no! hundred and ten--”

“Monsieur! A hundred and ten for the company, but a hundred to me. I
enable you to make a sale; you owe me a commission.”

“Charge ‘em a hundred and twenty,”--“cent vingt” (“sans vin,” without
wine).

“Capital pun that!”

“No, puncheons. About that wine--”

“Better and better! why, you are a wit.”

“Yes, I’m that,” said the fool. “Come out and see my vineyards.”

“Willingly, the wine is getting into my head,” said the illustrious
Gaudissart, following Monsieur Margaritis, who marched him from row
to row and hillock to hillock among the vines. The three ladies and
Monsieur Vernier, left to themselves, went off into fits of laughter as
they watched the traveller and the lunatic discussing, gesticulating,
stopping short, resuming their walk, and talking vehemently.

“I wish the good-man hadn’t carried him off,” said Vernier.

Finally the pair returned, walking with the eager step of men who were
in haste to finish up a matter of business.

“He has got the better of the Parisian, damn him!” cried Vernier.

And so it was. To the huge delight of the lunatic our illustrious
Gaudissart sat down at a card-table and wrote an order for the delivery
of the two casks of wine. Margaritis, having carefully read it over,
counted out seven francs for his subscription to the “Children’s
Journal” and gave them to the traveller.

“Adieu until to-morrow, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, twisting his
watch-key. “I shall have the honor to call for you to-morrow. Meantime,
send the wine at once to Paris to the address I have given you, and the
price will be remitted immediately.”

Gaudissart, however, was a Norman, and he had no idea of making any
agreement which was not reciprocal. He therefore required his promised
supporter to sign a bond (which the lunatic carefully read over) to
deliver two puncheons of the wine called “Head of Vouvray,” vineyard of
Margaritis.

This done, the illustrious Gaudissart departed in high feather, humming,
as he skipped along,--

  “The King of the South,
  He burned his mouth,” etc.



CHAPTER V

The illustrious Gaudissart returned to the Soleil d’Or, where he
naturally conversed with the landlord while waiting for dinner.
Mitouflet was an old soldier, guilelessly crafty, like the peasantry of
the Loire; he never laughed at a jest, but took it with the gravity of
a man accustomed to the roar of cannon and to make his own jokes under
arms.

“You have some very strong-minded people here,” said Gaudissart, leaning
against the door-post and lighting his cigar at Mitouflet’s pipe.

“How do you mean?” asked Mitouflet.

“I mean people who are rough-shod on political and financial ideas.”

“Whom have you seen? if I may ask without indiscretion,” said the
landlord innocently, expectorating after the adroit and periodical
fashion of smokers.

“A fine, energetic fellow named Margaritis.”

Mitouflet cast two glances in succession at his guest which were
expressive of chilling irony.

“May be; the good-man knows a deal. He knows too much for other folks,
who can’t always understand him.”

“I can believe it, for he thoroughly comprehends the abstruse principles
of finance.”

“Yes,” said the innkeeper, “and for my part, I am sorry he is a
lunatic.”

“A lunatic! What do you mean?”

“Well, crazy,--cracked, as people are when they are insane,” answered
Mitouflet. “But he is not dangerous; his wife takes care of him. Have
you been arguing with him?” added the pitiless landlord; “that must have
been funny!”

“Funny!” cried Gaudissart. “Funny! Then your Monsieur Vernier has been
making fun of me!”

“Did he send you there?”

“Yes.”

“Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn’t take it
into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!”

“What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?”
 said the wife. “Why, he’s crazy!”

“He sold me two casks of wine.”

“Did you buy them?”

“Yes.”

“But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn’t
any.”

“Ha!” snorted the traveller, “then I’ll go straight to Monsieur Vernier
and thank him.”

And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer,
whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom
he had already recounted the tale.

“Monsieur,” said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at
his enemy, “you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain
of being thought a turn-key,--a species of being far below a
galley-slave,--you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared
to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you
hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?”

Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a
tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.

“What!” cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, “do
you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag and
baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because, forsooth,
he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists, poets,--mixing us
up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither house nor home, nor
sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal who comes here
and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a newspaper which
preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if you please, that we
are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers? On my sacred word of
honor, Pere Margaritis said things a great deal more sensible. And now,
what are you complaining about? You and Margaritis seemed to understand
each other. The gentlemen here present can testify that if you had
talked to the whole canton you couldn’t have been as well understood.”

“That’s all very well for you to say; but I have been insulted,
Monsieur, and I demand satisfaction!”

“Very good, Monsieur! consider yourself insulted, if you like. I shall
not give you satisfaction, because there is neither rhyme nor reason nor
satisfaction to be found in the whole business. What an absurd fool he
is, to be sure!”

At these words Gaudissart flew at the dyer to give him a slap on
the face, but the listening crowd rushed between them, so that the
illustrious traveller only contrived to knock off the wig of his enemy,
which fell on the head of Mademoiselle Clara Vernier.

“If you are not satisfied, Monsieur,” he said, “I shall be at the Soleil
d’Or until to-morrow morning, and you will find me ready to show you
what it means to give satisfaction. I fought in July, Monsieur.”

“And you shall fight in Vouvray,” answered the dyer; “and what is more,
you shall stay here longer than you imagine.”

Gaudissart marched off, turning over in his mind this prophetic remark,
which seemed to him full of sinister portent. For the first time in his
life the prince of travellers did not dine jovially. The whole town of
Vouvray was put in a ferment about the “affair” between Monsieur Vernier
and the apostle of Saint-Simonism. Never before had the tragic event of
a duel been so much as heard of in that benign and happy valley.

“Monsieur Mitouflet, I am to fight to-morrow with Monsieur Vernier,”
 said Gaudissart to his landlord. “I know no one here: will you be my
second?”

“Willingly,” said the host.

Gaudissart had scarcely finished his dinner before Madame Fontanieu
and the assistant-mayor of Vouvray came to the Soleil d’Or and took
Mitouflet aside. They told him it would be a painful and injurious thing
to the whole canton if a violent death were the result of this affair;
they represented the pitiable distress of Madame Vernier, and conjured
him to find some way to arrange matters and save the credit of the
district.

“I take it all upon myself,” said the sagacious landlord.

In the evening he went up to the traveller’s room carrying pens, ink,
and paper.

“What have you got there?” asked Gaudissart.

“If you are going to fight to-morrow,” answered Mitouflet, “you had
better make some settlement of your affairs; and perhaps you have
letters to write,--we all have beings who are dear to us. Writing
doesn’t kill, you know. Are you a good swordsman? Would you like to get
your hand in? I have some foils.”

“Yes, gladly.”

Mitouflet returned with foils and masks.

“Now, then, let us see what you can do.”

The pair put themselves on guard. Mitouflet, with his former prowess as
grenadier of the guard, made sixty-two passes at Gaudissart, pushed him
about right and left, and finally pinned him up against the wall.

“The deuce! you are strong,” said Gaudissart, out of breath.

“Monsieur Vernier is stronger than I am.”

“The devil! Damn it, I shall fight with pistols.”

“I advise you to do so; because, if you take large holster pistols and
load them up to their muzzles, you can’t risk anything. They are _sure_
to fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field
with honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! ‘sapristi,’ two brave men
would be arrant fools to kill each other for a joke.”

“Are you sure the pistols will carry _wide enough_? I should be sorry to
kill the man, after all,” said Gaudissart.

“Sleep in peace,” answered Mitouflet, departing.

The next morning the two adversaries, more or less pale, met beside the
bridge of La Cise. The brave Vernier came near shooting a cow which was
peaceably feeding by the roadside.

“Ah, you fired in the air!” cried Gaudissart.

At these words the enemies embraced.

“Monsieur,” said the traveller, “your joke was rather rough, but it was
a good one for all that. I am sorry I apostrophized you: I was excited.
I regard you as a man of honor.”

“Monsieur, we take twenty subscriptions to the ‘Children’s Journal,’”
 replied the dyer, still pale.

“That being so,” said Gaudissart, “why shouldn’t we all breakfast
together? Men who fight are always the ones to come to a good
understanding.”

“Monsieur Mitouflet,” said Gaudissart on his return to the inn, “of
course you have got a sheriff’s officer here?”

“What for?”

“I want to send a summons to my good friend Margaritis to deliver the
two casks of wine.”

“But he has not got them,” said Vernier.

“No matter for that; the affair can be arranged by the payment of an
indemnity. I won’t have it said that Vouvray outwitted the illustrious
Gaudissart.”

Madame Margaritis, alarmed at the prospect of a suit in which the
plaintiff would certainly win his case, brought thirty francs to the
placable traveller, who thereupon considered himself quits with the
happiest region of sunny France,--a region which is also, we must add,
the most recalcitrant to new and progressive ideas.

On returning from his trip through the southern departments, the
illustrious Gaudissart occupied the coupe of a diligence, where he met
a young man to whom, as they journeyed between Angouleme and Paris, he
deigned to explain the enigmas of life, taking him, apparently, for an
infant.

As they passed Vouvray the young man exclaimed, “What a fine site!”

“Yes, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, “but not habitable on account of the
people. You get into duels every day. Why, it is not three months since
I fought one just there,” pointing to the bridge of La Cise, “with a
damned dyer; but I made an end of him,--he bit the dust!”



ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

     Finot, Andoche
       Cesar Birotteau
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Government Clerks
       A Start in Life
       The Firm of Nucingen

     Gaudissart, Felix
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Cousin Pons
       Cesar Birotteau
       Honorine

     Popinot, Anselme
       Cesar Birotteau
       Cousin Pons
       Cousin Betty





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Illustrious Gaudissart" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.