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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1475 ***
+
+GAUDISSART II.
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+Translated by Clara Bell and Others
+
+
+
+                             DEDICATION
+
+    To Madame la Princesse Cristina de Belgiojoso, nee Trivulzio.
+
+
+
+
+
+GAUDISSART II.
+
+
+To know how to sell, to be able to sell, and to sell. People generally
+do not suspect how much of the stateliness of Paris is due to these
+three aspects of the same problem. The brilliant display of shops as
+rich as the salons of the noblesse before 1789; the splendors of cafes
+which eclipse, and easily eclipse, the Versailles of our day; the
+shop-window illusions, new every morning, nightly destroyed; the grace
+and elegance of the young men that come in contact with fair customers;
+the piquant faces and costumes of young damsels, who cannot fail to
+attract the masculine customer; and (and this especially of late)
+the length, the vast spaces, the Babylonish luxury of galleries where
+shopkeepers acquire a monopoly of the trade in various articles by
+bringing them all together,--all this is as nothing. Everything, so far,
+has been done to appeal to a single sense, and that the most exacting
+and jaded human faculty, a faculty developed ever since the days of the
+Roman Empire, until, in our own times, thanks to the efforts of the most
+fastidious civilization the world has yet seen, its demands are grown
+limitless. That faculty resides in the "eyes of Paris."
+
+Those eyes require illuminations costing a hundred thousand francs, and
+many-colored glass palaces a couple of miles long and sixty feet high;
+they must have a fairyland at some fourteen theatres every night, and a
+succession of panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs of art; for them
+a whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe of joy, must resolve
+through the boulevards or stray through the streets of Paris; for them
+encyclopaedias of carnival frippery and a score of illustrated books are
+brought out every year, to say nothing of caricatures by the hundred,
+and vignettes, lithographs, and prints by the thousand. To please those
+eyes, fifteen thousand francs' worth of gas must blaze every night; and,
+to conclude, for their delectation the great city yearly spends several
+millions of francs in opening up views and planting trees. And even yet
+this is as nothing--it is only the material side of the question; in
+truth, a mere trifle compared with the expenditure of brain power on the
+shifts, worthy of Moliere, invented by some sixty thousand assistants
+and forty thousand damsels of the counter, who fasten upon the
+customer's purse, much as myriads of Seine whitebait fall upon a chance
+crust floating down the river.
+
+Gaudissart in the mart is at least the equal of his illustrious
+namesake, now become the typical commercial traveler. Take him away from
+his shop and his line of business, he is like a collapsed balloon; only
+among his bales of merchandise do his faculties return, much as an actor
+is sublime only upon the boards. A French shopman is better educated
+than his fellows in other European countries; he can at need talk
+asphalt, Bal Mabille, polkas, literature, illustrated books, railways,
+politics, parliament, and revolution; transplant him, take away his
+stage, his yardstick, his artificial graces; he is foolish beyond
+belief; but on his own boards, on the tight-rope of the counter, as he
+displays a shawl with a speech at his tongue's end, and his eye on his
+customer, he puts the great Talleyrand into the shade; he is a match for
+a Monrose and a Moliere to boot. Talleyrand in his own house would
+have outwitted Gaudissart, but in the shop the parts would have been
+reversed.
+
+An incident will illustrate the paradox.
+
+Two charming duchesses were chatting with the above-mentioned great
+diplomatist. The ladies wished for a bracelet; they were waiting for the
+arrival of a man from a great Parisian jeweler. A Gaudissart accordingly
+appeared with three bracelets of marvelous workmanship. The great ladies
+hesitated. Choice is a mental lightning flash; hesitate--there is no
+more to be said, you are at fault. Inspiration in matters of taste will
+not come twice. At last, after about ten minutes the Prince was called
+in. He saw the two duchesses confronting doubt with its thousand facets,
+unable to decide between the transcendent merits of two of the trinkets,
+for the third had been set aside at once. Without leaving his book,
+without a glance at the bracelets, the Prince looked at the jeweler's
+assistant.
+
+"Which would you choose for your sweetheart?" asked he.
+
+The young man indicated one of the pair.
+
+"In that case, take the other, you will make two women happy," said the
+subtlest of modern diplomatists, "and make your sweetheart happy too, in
+my name."
+
+The two fair ladies smiled, and the young shopman took his departure,
+delighted with the Prince's present and the implied compliment to his
+taste.
+
+A woman alights from her splendid carriage before one of the expensive
+shops where shawls are sold in the Rue Vivienne. She is not alone; women
+almost always go in pairs on these expeditions; always make the round
+of half a score of shops before they make up their minds, and laugh
+together in the intervals over the little comedies played for their
+benefit. Let us see which of the two acts most in character--the fair
+customer or the seller, and which has the best of it in such miniature
+vaudevilles?
+
+If you attempt to describe a sale, the central fact of Parisian trade,
+you are in duty bound, if you attempt to give the gist of the matter,
+to produce a type, and for this purpose a shawl or a chatelaine costing
+some three thousand francs is a more exacting purchase than a length of
+lawn or dress that costs three hundred. But know, oh foreign visitors
+from the Old World and the New (if ever this study of the physiology
+of the Invoice should be by you perused), that this selfsame comedy is
+played in haberdashers' shops over a barege at two francs or a printed
+muslin at four francs the yard.
+
+And you, princess, or simple citizen's wife, whichever you may be, how
+should you distrust that good-looking, very young man, with those frank,
+innocent eyes, and a cheek like a peach covered with down? He is dressed
+almost as well as your--cousin, let us say. His tones are soft as the
+woolen stuffs which he spreads before you. There are three or four more
+of his like. One has dark eyes, a decided expression, and an imperial
+manner of saying, "This is what you wish"; another, that blue-eyed
+youth, diffident of manner and meek of speech, prompts the remark, "Poor
+boy! he was not born for business"; a third, with light auburn hair, and
+laughing tawny eyes, has all the lively humor, and activity, and gaiety
+of the South; while the fourth, he of the tawny red hair and fan-shaped
+beard, is rough as a communist, with his portentous cravat, his
+sternness, his dignity, and curt speech.
+
+These varieties of shopmen, corresponding to the principal types of
+feminine customers, are arms, as it were, directed by the head, a stout
+personage with a full-blown countenance, a partially bald forehead, and
+a chest measure befitting a Ministerialist deputy. Occasionally this
+person wears the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in recognition of the
+manner in which he supports the dignity of the French drapers' wand.
+From the comfortable curves of his figure you can see that he has a wife
+and family, a country house, and an account with the Bank of France. He
+descends like a _deus ex machina_, whenever a tangled problem demands a
+swift solution. The feminine purchasers are surrounded on all sides
+with urbanity, youth, pleasant manners, smiles, and jests; the most
+seeming-simple human products of civilization are here, all sorted in
+shades to suit all tastes.
+
+Just one word as to the natural effects of architecture, optical
+science, and house decoration; one short, decisive, terrible word, of
+history made on the spot. The work which contains this instructive page
+is sold at number 76 Rue de Richelieu, where above an elegant shop, all
+white and gold and crimson velvet, there is an entresol into which
+the light pours straight from the Rue de Menars, as into a painter's
+studio--clean, clear, even daylight. What idler in the streets has not
+beheld the Persian, that Asiatic potentate, ruffling it above the door
+at the corner of the Rue de la Bourse and the Rue de Richelieu, with a
+message to deliver _urbi et orbi_, "Here I reign more tranquilly than at
+Lahore"? Perhaps but for this immortal analytical study, archaeologists
+might begin to puzzle their heads about him five hundred years hence,
+and set about writing quartos with plates (like M. Quatremere's work
+on Olympian Jove) to prove that Napoleon was something of a Sofi in the
+East before he became "Emperor of the French." Well, the wealthy shop
+laid siege to the poor little entresol; and after a bombardment with
+banknotes, entered and took possession. The Human Comedy gave way before
+the comedy of cashmeres. The Persian sacrificed a diamond or two from
+his crown to buy that so necessary daylight; for a ray of sunlight shows
+the play of the colors, brings out the charms of a shawl, and doubles
+its value; 'tis an irresistible light; literally, a golden ray. From
+this fact you may judge how far Paris shops are arranged with a view to
+effect.
+
+But to return to the young assistants, to the beribboned man of forty
+whom the King of the French receives at his table, to the red-bearded
+head of the department with his autocrat's air. Week by week these
+meritus Gaudissarts are brought in contact with whims past counting;
+they know every vibration of the cashmere chord in the heart of
+woman. No one, be she lady or lorette, a young mother of a family, a
+respectable tradesman's wife, a woman of easy virtue, a duchess or a
+brazen-fronted ballet-dancer, an innocent young girl or a too innocent
+foreigner, can appear in the shop, but she is watched from the moment
+when she first lays her fingers upon the door-handle. Her measure is
+taken at a glance by seven or eight men that stand, in the windows,
+at the counter, by the door, in a corner, in the middle of the shop,
+meditating, to all appearance, on the joys of a bacchanalian Sunday
+holiday. As you look at them, you ask yourself involuntarily, "What can
+they be thinking about?" Well, in the space of one second, a woman's
+purse, wishes, intentions, and whims are ransacked more thoroughly
+than a traveling carriage at a frontier in an hour and three-quarters.
+Nothing is lost on these intelligent rogues. As they stand, solemn
+as noble fathers on the stage, they take in all the details of a
+fair customer's dress; an invisible speck of mud on a little shoe, an
+antiquated hat-brim, soiled or ill-judged bonnet-strings, the fashion of
+the dress, the age of a pair of gloves. They can tell whether the gown
+was cut by the intelligent scissors of a Victorine IV.; they know a
+modish gewgaw or a trinket from Froment-Meurice. Nothing, in short,
+which can reveal a woman's quality, fortune, or character passes
+unremarked.
+
+Tremble before them. Never was the Sanhedrim of Gaudissarts, with
+their chief at their head, known to make a mistake. And, moreover, they
+communicate their conclusions to one another with telegraphic speed, in
+a glance, a smile, the movement of a muscle, a twitch of the lip. If you
+watch them, you are reminded of the sudden outbreak of light along
+the Champs-Elysees at dusk; one gas-jet does not succeed another more
+swiftly than an idea flashes from one shopman's eyes to the next.
+
+At once, if the lady is English, the dark, mysterious, portentous
+Gaudissart advances like a romantic character out of one of Byron's
+poems.
+
+If she is a city madam, the oldest is put forward. He brings out a
+hundred shawls in fifteen minutes; he turns her head with colors and
+patterns; every shawl that he shows her is like a circle described by a
+kite wheeling round a hapless rabbit, till at the end of half an hour,
+when her head is swimming and she is utterly incapable of making a
+decision for herself, the good lady, meeting with a flattering response
+to all her ideas, refers the question to the assistant, who promptly
+leaves her on the horns of a dilemma between two equally irresistible
+shawls.
+
+"This, madame, is very becoming--apple-green, the color of the season;
+still, fashions change; while as for this other black-and-white shawl
+(an opportunity not to be missed), you will never see the end of it, and
+it will go with any dress."
+
+This is the A B C of the trade.
+
+"You would not believe how much eloquence is wanted in that beastly
+line," the head Gaudissart of this particular establishment remarked
+quite lately to two acquaintances (Duronceret and Bixiou) who had come
+trusting in his judgment to buy a shawl. "Look here; you are artists and
+discreet, I can tell you about the governor's tricks, and of all the men
+I ever saw, he is the cleverest. I do not mean as a manufacturer, there
+M. Fritot is first; but as a salesman. He discovered the 'Selim shawl,'
+_an absolutely unsalable_ article, yet we never bring it out but we
+sell it. We keep always a shawl worth five or six hundred francs in a
+cedar-wood box, perfectly plain outside, but lined with satin. It is
+one of the shawls that Selim sent to the Emperor Napoleon. It is our
+Imperial Guard; it is brought to the front whenever the day is almost
+lost; _il se vend et ne meurt pas_--it sells its life dearly time after
+time."
+
+As he spoke, an Englishwoman stepped from her jobbed carriage and
+appeared in all the glory of that phlegmatic humor peculiar to
+Britain and to all its products which make believe they are alive. The
+apparition put you in mind of the Commandant's statue in Don Juan, it
+walked along, jerkily by fits and starts, in an awkward fashion invented
+in London, and cultivated in every family with patriotic care.
+
+"An Englishwoman!" he continued for Bixiou's ear. "An Englishwoman is
+our Waterloo. There are women who slip through our fingers like eels; we
+catch them on the staircase. There are lorettes who chaff us, we join
+in the laugh, we have a hold on them because we give credit. There
+are sphinx-like foreign ladies; we take a quantity of shawls to
+their houses, and arrive at an understanding by flattery; but an
+Englishwoman!--you might as well attack the bronze statue of Louis
+Quatorze! That sort of woman turns shopping into an occupation, an
+amusement. She quizzes us, forsooth!"
+
+The romantic assistant came to the front.
+
+"Does madame wish for real Indian shawls or French, something expensive
+or----"
+
+"I will see." (_Je veraie_.)
+
+"How much would madame propose----"
+
+"I will see."
+
+The shopman went in quest of shawls to spread upon the mantle-stand,
+giving his colleagues a significant glance. "What a bore!" he said
+plainly, with an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"These are our best quality in Indian red, blue, and pale orange--all at
+ten thousand francs. Here are shawls at five thousand francs, and others
+at three."
+
+The Englishwoman took up her eyeglass and looked round the room with
+gloomy indifference; then she submitted the three stands to the same
+scrutiny, and made no sign.
+
+"Have you any more?" (_Havaivod'hote_?) demanded she.
+
+"Yes, madame. But perhaps madame has not quite decided to take a shawl?"
+
+"Oh, quite decided" (_trei-deycidai_).
+
+The young man went in search of cheaper wares. These he spread out
+solemnly as if they were things of price, saying by his manner, "Pay
+attention to all this magnificence!"
+
+"These are much more expensive," said he. "They have never been worn;
+they have come by courier direct from the manufacturers at Lahore."
+
+"Oh! I see," said she; "they are much more like the thing I want."
+
+The shopman kept his countenance in spite of inward irritation, which
+communicated itself to Duronceret and Bixiou. The Englishwoman, cool as
+a cucumber, appeared to rejoice in her phlegmatic humor.
+
+"What price?" she asked, indicating a sky-blue shawl covered with a
+pattern of birds nestling in pagodas.
+
+"Seven thousand francs."
+
+She took it up, wrapped it about her shoulders, looked in the glass, and
+handed it back again.
+
+"No, I do not like it at all." (_Je n'ame pouinte_.)
+
+A long quarter of an hour went by in trying on other shawls; to no
+purpose.
+
+"This is all we have, madame," said the assistant, glancing at the
+master as he spoke.
+
+"Madame is fastidious, like all persons of taste," said the head of the
+establishment, coming forward with that tradesman's suavity in which
+pomposity is agreeably blended with subservience. The Englishwoman
+took up her eyeglass and scanned the manufacturer from head to foot,
+unwilling to understand that the man before her was eligible for
+Parliament and dined at the Tuileries.
+
+"I have only one shawl left," he continued, "but I never show it. It is
+not to everybody's taste; it is quite out of the common. I was thinking
+of giving it to my wife. We have had it in stock since 1805; it belonged
+to the Empress Josephine."
+
+"Let me see it, monsieur."
+
+"Go for it," said the master, turning to a shopman. "It is at my house."
+
+"I should be very much pleased to see it," said the English lady.
+
+This was a triumph. The splenetic dame was apparently on the point of
+going. She made as though she saw nothing but the shawls; but all
+the while she furtively watched the shopmen and the two customers,
+sheltering her eyes behind the rims of her eyeglasses.
+
+"It cost sixty thousand francs in Turkey, madame."
+
+"Oh!" (_hau_!)
+
+"It is one of seven shawls which Selim sent, before his fall, to the
+Emperor Napoleon. The Empress Josephine, a Creole, as you know, my
+lady, and very capricious in her tastes, exchanged this one for another
+brought by the Turkish ambassador, and purchased by my predecessor;
+but I have never seen the money back. Our ladies in France are not rich
+enough; it is not as it is in England. The shawl is worth seven thousand
+francs; and taking interest and compound interest altogether, it makes
+up fourteen or fifteen thousand by now--"
+
+"How does it make up?" asked the Englishwoman.
+
+"Here it is, madame."
+
+With precautions, which a custodian of the Dresden _Grune Gewolbe_
+might have admired, he took out an infinitesimal key and opened a square
+cedar-wood box. The Englishwoman was much impressed with its shape and
+plainness. From that box, lined with black satin, he drew a shawl worth
+about fifteen hundred francs, a black pattern on a golden-yellow ground,
+of which the startling color was only surpassed by the surprising
+efforts of the Indian imagination.
+
+"Splendid," said the lady, in a mixture of French and English, "it
+is really handsome. Just my ideal" (_ideol_) "of a shawl; it is very
+magnificent." The rest was lost in a madonna's pose assumed for the
+purpose of displaying a pair of frigid eyes which she believed to be
+very fine.
+
+"It was a great favorite with the Emperor Napoleon; he took----"
+
+"A great favorite," repeated she with her English accent. Then she
+arranged the shawl about her shoulders and looked at herself in the
+glass. The proprietor took it to the light, gathered it up in his hands,
+smoothed it out, showed the gloss on it, played on it as Liszt plays on
+the pianoforte keys.
+
+"It is very fine; beautiful, sweet!" said the lady, as composedly as
+possible.
+
+Duronceret, Bixiou, and the shopmen exchanged amused glances. "The shawl
+is sold," they thought.
+
+"Well, madame?" inquired the proprietor, as the Englishwoman appeared to
+be absorbed in meditations infinitely prolonged.
+
+"Decidedly," said she; "I would rather have a carriage" (_une voteure_).
+
+All the assistants, listening with silent rapt attention, started as one
+man, as if an electric shock had gone through them.
+
+"I have a very handsome one, madame," said the proprietor with unshaken
+composure; "it belonged to a Russian princess, the Princess Narzicof;
+she left it with me in payment for goods received. If madame would like
+to see it, she would be astonished. It is new; it has not been in use
+altogether for ten days; there is not its like in Paris."
+
+The shopmen's amazement was suppressed by profound admiration.
+
+"I am quite willing."
+
+"If madame will keep the shawl," suggested the proprietor, "she can try
+the effect in the carriage." And he went for his hat and gloves.
+
+"How will this end?" asked the head assistant, as he watched his
+employer offer an arm to the English lady and go down with her to the
+jobbed brougham.
+
+By this time the thing had come to be as exciting as the last chapter of
+a novel for Duronceret and Bixiou, even without the additional interest
+attached to all contests, however trifling, between England and France.
+
+Twenty minutes later the proprietor returned.
+
+"Go to the Hotel Lawson (here is the card, 'Mrs. Noswell'), and take an
+invoice that I will give you. There are six thousand francs to take."
+
+"How did you do it?" asked Duronceret, bowing before the king of
+invoices.
+
+"Oh, I saw what she was, an eccentric woman that loves to be
+conspicuous. As soon as she saw that every one stared at her, she said,
+'Keep your carriage, monsieur, my mind is made up; I will take the
+shawl.' While M. Bigorneau (indicating the romantic-looking assistant)
+was serving, I watched her carefully; she kept one eye on you all the
+time to see what you thought of her; she was thinking more about you
+than of the shawls. Englishwomen are peculiar in their _distaste_ (for
+one cannot call it taste); they do not know what they want; they make up
+their minds to be guided by circumstances at the time, and not by their
+own choice. I saw the kind of woman at once, tired of her husband, tired
+of her brats, regretfully virtuous, craving excitement, always posing as
+a weeping willow...."
+
+These were his very words.
+
+Which proves that in all other countries of the world a shopkeeper is
+a shopkeeper; while in France, and in Paris more particularly, he is a
+student from a College Royal, a well-read man with a taste for art, or
+angling, or the theatre, and consumed, it may be, with a desire to be
+M. Cunin-Gridaine's successor, or a colonel of the National Guard, or
+a member of the General Council of the Seine, or a referee in the
+Commercial Court.
+
+"M. Adolphe," said the mistress of the establishment, addressing the
+slight fair-haired assistant, "go to the joiner and order another
+cedar-wood box."
+
+"And now," remarked the shopman who had assisted Duronceret and Bixiou
+to choose a shawl for Mme. Schontz, "_now_ we will go through our old
+stock to find another Selim shawl."
+
+
+PARIS, November 1844.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+     Bixiou, Jean-Jacques
+       The Purse
+       A Bachelor's Establishment
+       The Government Clerks
+       Modeste Mignon
+       Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+       The Firm of Nucingen
+       The Muse of the Department
+       Cousin Betty
+       The Member for Arcis
+       Beatrix
+       A Man of Business
+       The Unconscious Humorists
+       Cousin Pons
+
+     Ronceret, Fabien-Felicien du (or Duronceret)
+       Jealousies of a Country Town
+       Beatrix
+
+     Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de
+       The Chouans
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       The Thirteen
+       Letters of Two Brides
+
+     Victorine
+       Massimilla Doni
+       Lost Illusions
+       Letters of Two Brides
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gaudissart II, by Honore de Balzac
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1475 ***