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
keeping with the style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the
language, of any man.
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