Parisians in the Country | Page 3

Honoré de Balzac
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
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