Parisians in the Country | Page 4

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