t rub it out--how many divers personalities we come across!
In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what a battery,
all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid
mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six
thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians
who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise
to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets and
gentlest persuasions. The traveller's business is to extract the gold
in country caches by a purely intellectual operation, and to extract
it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think without a shudder of the
flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades
the length and breadth of sunny France?

You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual.

There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the
paragon of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the
qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is
vitriol and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and
make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads, close
fists, and closer calculations. His line was once the _hat_; but his
talents and the art with which he snared the wariest provincial had
brought him such commercial celebrity that all vendors of the "article
Paris"[*] paid court to him, and humbly begged that he would deign to
take their commissions.

[*] "Article Paris" means anything--especially articles of
wearing apparel--which originates or is made in Paris.
The name is supposed to give to the thing a special value in
the provinces.

Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals of his triumphant
progress through France, he lived a life of perpetual festivity in
the shape of weddings and suppers. When he was in the provinces, the
correspondents in the smaller towns made much of him; in Paris, the
great houses feted and caressed him. Welcomed, flattered, and fed
wherever he went, it came to pass that to breakfast or to dine alone was
a novelty, an event. He lived the life of a sovereign, or, better still,
of a journalist; in fact, he was the perambulating "feuilleton" of
Parisian commerce.

His name was Gaudissart; and his renown, his vogue, the flatteries
showered upon him, were such as to win for him the surname of
Illustrious. Wherever the