A MAN OF BUSINESS

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by Clara Bell and others



DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Baron James de Rothschild, Banker and
Austrian Consul-General at Paris.



A MAN OF BUSINESS



The word _lorette_ is a euphemism invented to describe the status of a
personage, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to
speak; the French Academie, in its modesty, having omitted to supply a
definition out of regard for the age of its forty members. Whenever a
new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its
fortune is assured; the word _lorette_ has passed into the language of
every class of society, even where the lorette herself will never gain