The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gaudissart II, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Gaudissart II

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Clara Bell and Others

Release Date: September, 1998 [Etext #1475]
Posting Date: February 25, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GAUDISSART II ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

GAUDISSART II.

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell and Others

DEDICATION

To Madame la Princesse Cristina de Belgiojoso, nee Trivulzio.

GAUDISSART II.

To know how to sell, to be able to sell, and to sell. People generally
do not suspect how much of the stateliness of Paris is due to these
three aspects of the same problem. The brilliant display of shops as
rich as the salons of the noblesse before 1789; the splendors of cafes
which eclipse, and easily eclipse, the Versailles of our day; the
shop-window illusions, new every morning, nightly destroyed; the grace
and elegance of the young men that come in contact with fair customers;
the piquant faces and costumes of young damsels, who cannot fail to
attract the masculine customer; and (and this especially of late)
the length, the vast spaces, the Babylonish luxury of galleries where
shopkeepers acquire a monopoly of the trade in various articles by
bringing them all together,--all this is as nothing. Everything, so far,
has been done to appeal to a single sense, and that the most exacting
and jaded human faculty, a faculty developed ever since the days of the
Roman Empire, until, in our own times, thanks to the efforts of the most
fastidious civilization the world has yet seen, its demands are grown
limitless. That faculty resides in the "eyes of Paris."

Those eyes require illuminations costing a hundred thousand francs, and
many-colored glass palaces a couple of miles long and sixty feet high;
they must have a fairyland at some fourteen theatres every night, and a
succession of panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs of art; for them
a whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe of joy, must resolve
through the boulevards or stray through the stre