ckets.

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 o