THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.




THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART



CHAPTER I

The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to