those who are in arrears and worry them with stories of horrible
incendiaries until they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus you
see that eloquence, the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and
means of our business."

To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself. A
nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon
lost. Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact
which began, and may end, with the world itself.

"A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man," said a
retired lawyer.

Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well.
Don't forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco
collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so
original that we cannot 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?