Parisians in the Country | Page 6

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