sing 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