“His paper has twenty-two thousand subscribers,” said Leon de Lora. “He is one of the five great powers of the day, and he hasn’t, in the morning, the time to be polite. Now,” continued Leon, speaking to Bixiou, “if we are going to the Chamber to help him with his lawsuit let us take the longest way round.”
“Words said by great men are like silver-gilt spoons with the gilt washed off; by dint of repetition they lose their brilliancy,” said Bixiou. “Where shall we go?”
“Here, close by, to our hatter?” replied Leon.
“Bravo!” cried Bixiou. “If we keep on in this way, we shall have an amusing day of it.”
“Gazonal,” said Leon, “I shall make the man pose for you; but mind that you keep a serious face, like the king on a five-franc piece, for you are going to see a choice original, a man whose importance has turned his head. In these days, my dear fellow, under our new political dispensation, every human being tries to cover himself with glory, and most of them cover themselves with ridicule; hence a lot of living caricatures quite new to the world.”
“If everybody gets glory, who can be famous?” said Gazonal.
“Fame! none but fools want that,” replied Bixiou. “Your cousin wears the cross, but I’m the better dressed of the two, and it is I whom people are looking at.”
After this remark, which may explain why orators and other great statesmen no longer put the ribbon in their buttonholes when in Paris, Leon showed Gazonal a sign, bearing, in golden letters, the illustrious name of “Vital, successor to Finot, manufacturer of hats” (no longer “hatter” as formerly), whose advertisements brought in more money to the newspapers than those of any half-dozen vendors of pills or sugarplums,—the author, moreover, of an essay on hats.
“My dear fellow,” said Bixiou to Gazonal, pointing to the splendors of the show-window, “Vital has forty thousand francs a year from invested property.”
“And he stays a hatter!” cried the Southerner, with a bound that almost broke the arm which Bixiou had linked in his.