Gaudissart II | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

GAUDISSART II.
by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Clara Bell and others

DEDICATION
To Madame la Princesse Cristina de Belgiojoso, nee Trivulzio.

GAUDISSART II.

To know how to sell, to be able to sell, and to sell. People generally do

not suspect how much of the stateliness of Paris is due to these three
aspects of the same problem. The brilliant display of shops as rich as
the salons of the noblesse before 1789; the splendors of cafes which
eclipse, and easily eclipse, the Versailles of our day; the shop-window
illusions, new every morning, nightly destroyed; the grace and elegance
of the young men that come in contact with fair customers; the piquant
faces and costumes of young damsels, who cannot fail to attract the
masculine customer; and (and this especially of late) the length, the
vast spaces, the Babylonish luxury of galleries where shopkeepers
acquire a monopoly of the trade in various articles by bringing them all
together,--all this is as nothing. Everything, so far, has been done to
appeal to a single sense, and that the most exacting and jaded human
faculty, a faculty developed ever since the days of the Roman Empire,
until, in our own times, thanks to the efforts of the most fastidious
civilization the world has yet seen, its demands are grown limitless.
That faculty resides in the "eyes of Paris."
Those eyes require illuminations costing a hundred thousand francs,
and many-colored glass palaces a couple of miles long and sixty feet
high; they must have a fairyland at some fourteen theatres every night,
and a succession of panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs of art;
for them a whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe of joy,
must resolve through the boulevards or stray through the streets of
Paris; for them encyclopaedias of carnival frippery and a score of
illustrated books are brought out every year, to say nothing of
caricatures by the hundred, and vignettes, lithographs, and prints by the
thousand. To please those eyes, fifteen thousand francs' worth of gas
must blaze every night; and, to conclude, for their delectation the great
city yearly spends several millions of francs in opening up views and
planting trees. And even yet this is as nothing--it is only the material
side of the question; in truth, a mere trifle compared with the
expenditure of brain power on the shifts, worthy of Moliere, invented
by some sixty thousand assistants and forty thousand damsels of the
counter, who fasten upon the customer's purse, much as myriads of
Seine whitebait fall upon a chance crust floating down the river.
Gaudissart in the mart is at least the equal of his illustrious namesake,
now become the typical commercial traveler. Take him away from his
shop and his line of business, he is like a collapsed balloon; only

among his bales of merchandise do his faculties return, much as an
actor is sublime only upon the boards. A French shopman is better
educated than his fellows in other European countries; he can at need
talk asphalt, Bal Mabille, polkas, literature, illustrated books, railways,
politics, parliament, and revolution; transplant him, take away his stage,
his yardstick, his artificial graces; he is foolish beyond belief; but on
his own boards, on the tight-rope of the counter, as he displays a shawl
with a speech at his tongue's end, and his eye on his customer, he puts
the great Talleyrand into the shade; he is a match for a Monrose and a
Moliere to boot. Talleyrand in his own house would have outwitted
Gaudissart, but in the shop the parts would have been reversed.
An incident will illustrate the paradox.
Two charming duchesses were chatting with the above-mentioned great
diplomatist. The ladies wished for a bracelet; they were waiting for the
arrival of a man from a great Parisian jeweler. A Gaudissart
accordingly appeared with three bracelets of marvelous workmanship.
The