



Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART


By Honore De Balzac



Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley




                             DEDICATION

                 To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.





THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART



CHAPTER I

The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does
in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and
being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression
