Parisians in the Country | Page 5

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