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
