don't amuse it, will cut off their heads by curtailing the ingots and
emptying their pockets.

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