“More and more crazy about you,” he replied, flinging his hat upon the sofa.
The next morning Gaudissart, having breakfasted gloriously with Jenny, departed on horseback to work up the chief towns of the district to which he was assigned by the various enterprises in whose interests he was now about to exercise his great talents. After spending forty-five days in beating up the country between Paris and Blois, he remained two weeks at the latter place to write up his correspondence and make short visits to the various market towns of the department. The night before he left Blois for Tours he indited a letter to Mademoiselle Jenny Courand. As the conciseness and charm of this epistle cannot be equalled by any narration of ours, and as, moreover, it proves the legitimacy of the tie which united these two individuals, we produce it here:—
“My dear Jenny,—You will lose your wager. Like Napoleon,
Gaudissart the illustrious has his star, but not his Waterloo. I
triumph everywhere. Life insurance has done well. Between Paris
and Blois I lodged two millions. But as I get to the centre of
France heads become infinitely harder and millions correspondingly
scarce. The article Paris keeps up its own little jog-trot. It is
a ring on the finger. With all my well-known cunning I spit these
shop-keepers like larks. I got off one hundred and sixty-two
Ternaux shawls at Orleans. I am sure I don’t know what they will
do with them, unless they return them to the backs of the sheep.
“As to the article journal—the devil! that’s a horse of another
color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach
these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two ‘Movements’:
exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one
town. Those republican rogues! they won’t subscribe. They talk,
they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all
agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure
your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three
feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to
slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated
property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,—a whole lot of stuff, and
I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It’s a bad
business! Candidly, the ‘Movement’ does not move. I have written
to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it—on account
of my political opinions.
“As for the ‘Globe,’ that’s another breed altogether. Just set to
work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough
to believe such lies,—why, they think you want to burn their
houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for
futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon
man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great
providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be
found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
—in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do
you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg
me to go away! Are not they fools? geese? The ‘Globe’ is smashed.
I said to the proprietors, ‘You are too advanced, you go ahead too
fast: you ought to get a few results; the provinces like results.’
However, I have made a hundred ‘Globes,’ and I must say,
considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a
miracle. But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises
that I am sure I don’t know how the globites, globists, globules,
or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them. But
they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better
than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs
for each subscription. There was one farmer who thought the paper
was agricultural because of its name. I Globed him. Bah! he gave
in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting
foreheads are ideologists.
“But the ‘Children’; oh! ah! as to the ‘Children’! I got two
thousand between Paris and Blois. Jolly business! but there is not
much to say. You just show a little vignette to the mother,
pretending to hide it from the child: naturally the child wants to
see, and pulls mamma’s gown and cries for its newspaper, because
‘Papa has dot his.’ Mamma can’t let her brat tear the gown; the
gown costs thirty francs, the subscription six—economy; result,
subscription. It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it
holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the two eternal
necessities of childhood.
“I have had a quarrel here at the table d’hote about the
newspapers and my opinions. I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner
next to a man with a gray hat who was reading the ‘Debats.’ I said
to myself, ‘Now for my rostrum eloquence. He is tied to the
dynasty; I’ll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for
my ministerial talents.’ So I went to work and praised his
‘Debats.’ Hein! if I didn’t lead him along! Thread by thread, I
began to net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases, and the
F-sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff. Everybody
listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his
mustache, just ready to nibble at a ‘Movement.’ Well, I don’t know
how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word ‘blockhead.’
Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
(shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his teeth and was
furiously angry. I put on my grand air—you know—and said to him:
‘Ah, ca! Monsieur, you are remarkably aggressive; if you are not
content, I am ready to give you satisfaction; I fought in July.’
‘Though the father of a family,’ he replied, ‘I am ready—’
‘Father of a family!’ I exclaimed; ‘my dear sir, have you any
children?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Twelve years old?’ ‘Just about.’ ‘Well, then,
the “Children’s Journal” is the very thing for you; six francs a
year, one number a month, double columns, edited by great literary
lights, well got up, good paper, engravings from charming sketches
by our best artists, actual colored drawings of the Indies—will
not fade.’ I fired my broadside ‘feelings of a father, etc.,
etc.,’—in short, a subscription instead of a quarrel. ‘There’s
nobody but Gaudissart who can get out of things like that,’ said
that little cricket Lamard to the big Bulot at the cafe, when he
told him the story.
“I leave to-morrow for Amboise. I shall do up Amboise in two days,
and I will write next from Tours, where I shall measure swords
with the inhabitants of that colorless region; colorless, I mean,
from the intellectual and speculative point of view. But, on the
word of a Gaudissart, they shall be toppled over, toppled down
—floored, I say.
“Adieu, my kitten. Love me always; be faithful; fidelity through
thick and thin is one of the attributes of the Free Woman. Who is
kissing you on the eyelids?
“Thy Felix Forever.”
CHAPTER III
Five days later Gaudissart started from the Hotel des Faisans, at which he had put up in Tours, and went to Vouvray, a rich and populous district where the public mind seemed to him susceptible of cultivation. Mounted upon his horse, he trotted along the embankment thinking no more of his phrases than an actor thinks of his part which he has played for a hundred times. It was thus that the illustrious Gaudissart went his cheerful way, admiring the landscape, and little dreaming that in the happy valleys of Vouvray his commercial infallibility was about to perish.
Here a few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to our story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit stamped on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the Tourangian mind,—a mind polished and refined as it should be in a land where the kings of France long held their court; ardent, artistic, poetic, voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside quickly. The softness of the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a certain ease of life and joviality of manners, smother before long the sentiment of art, narrow the widest heart, and enervate the strongest will. Transplant the Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and lead to great results, as we may see in many spheres of action: look at Rabelais and Semblancay, Plantin the printer and Descartes, Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day, and Pinaigrier, who painted most of the colored glass in our cathedrals; also Verville and Courier. But the Tourangian, distinguished though he may be in other regions, sits in his own home like an Indian on his mat or a Turk on his divan. He employs his wit in laughing at his neighbor and in making merry all his days; and when at last he reaches the end of his life, he is still a happy man. Touraine is like the Abbaye of Theleme, so vaunted in the history of Gargantua. There we may find the complying sisterhoods of that famous tale, and there the good cheer celebrated by Rabelais reigns in glory.
As to the do-nothingness of that blessed land it is sublime and well expressed in a certain popular legend: “Tourangian, are you hungry, do you want some soup?” “Yes.” “Bring your porringer.” “Then I am not hungry.” Is it to the joys of the vineyard and the harmonious loveliness of this garden land of France, is it to the peace and tranquillity of a region where the step of an invader has never trodden, that we owe the soft compliance of these unconstrained and easy manners? To such questions no answer. Enter this Turkey of sunny France, and you will stay there,—lazy, idle, happy. You may be as ambitious as Napoleon, as poetic as Lord Byron, and yet a power unknown, invisible, will compel you to bury your poetry within your soul and turn your projects into dreams.
The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one of those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely because they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or wrong, the Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents. Consequently the doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and villified among them. In Touraine hatred and villification take the form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical jokes,—a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as “English cant.”
For his sins, after getting down at the Soleil d’Or, an inn kept by a former grenadier of the imperial guard named Mitouflet, married to a rich widow, the illustrious traveller, after a brief consultation with the landlord, betook himself to the knave of Vouvray, the jovial merry-maker, the comic man of the neighborhood, compelled by fame and nature to supply the town with merriment. This country Figaro was once a dyer, and now possessed about seven or eight thousand francs a year, a pretty house on the slope of the hill, a plump little wife, and robust health. For ten years he had had nothing to do but take care of his wife and his garden, marry his daughter, play whist in the evenings, keep the run of all the gossip in the neighborhood, meddle with the elections, squabble with the large proprietors, and order good dinners; or else trot along the embankment to find out what was going on in Tours, torment the cure, and finally, by way of dramatic entertainment, assist at the sale of lands in the neighborhood of his vineyards. In short, he led the true Tourangian life,—the life of a little country-townsman. He was, moreover, an important member of the bourgeoisie,—a leader among the small proprietors, all of them envious, jealous, delighted to catch up and retail gossip and calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging things down to their own level; and at war with all kinds of superiority, which they deposited with the fine composure of ignorance. Monsieur Vernier—such was the name of this great little man—was just finishing his breakfast, with his wife and daughter on either side of him, when Gaudissart entered the room through a window that looked out on the Loire and the Cher, and lighted one of the gayest dining-rooms of that gay land.