nly 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 Matilda, who pesters you with comparisons and her real India
shawls imported by the suite of the Russian ambassador, and her
silver plate and her Russian prince,--who to my mind is nothing but a
humbug,--won't have a word to say _then_. I consecrate to the adornment
of your room all the 'Children' I shall get in the provinces."

"Well, that's a pretty thing to say!" cried the florist. "Monster of
a man! Do you dare to talk to me of your children? Do you suppose I am
going to stand that sort of thing?"

"Oh, what a goose you are, my Jenny! That's only a figure of speech in
our business."

"A fine business, then!"

"Well, but listen; if you talk all the time you'll always be in the
right."

"I mean to be. Upon my word, you take things easy!"

"You don't let me finish. I have taken under my protection a superlative
idea,--a journal, a newspaper, written for children. In our profession,
when travellers have caught, let us suppose, ten subscribers to the
'Children's Journal,' they say, 'I've got ten Children,' just as I say
when I get ten subscriptions to a newspaper called the 'Mo