The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honoré de Balzac
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page 6 of 58 (10%)
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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 fellow went,--behind a counter or before a bar, into a salon or to the top of a stage-coach, up to a garret or to dine with a banker,--every one said, the moment they saw him, "Ah! here comes the illustrious Gaudissart!"[*] No name was ever so in |
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