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Title: The Illustrious Gaudissart

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: September, 1998 [Etext #1474]
Posting Date: February 25, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART

By Honore De Balzac

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART

CHAPTER I

The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does
in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and
being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression
of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding
the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those
civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one
direction?

The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes from
the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among
the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is
a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving
priest of mysteries and dogmas, 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