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La Comédie Humaine of Honoré De Balzac (5); Scenes From Private Life. 1. Father Goriot. 2. the Unconscious Humorists. 3. Gaudissart the Great
La Comdie Humaine of Honor De Balzac Scenes From Private Life 1 Father Goriot 2 the Unconscious Humorists 3 Gaudissart the Great - 5 Author:Honoré de Balzac Volume: 5 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1909 Original Publisher: Century Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you ... more »can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PARISIANS IN THE COUNTRY GAUDlSSART THE GREAT To Madame la Duchesse de Castries. Is not the commercial traveler -- a being unknown in earlier times -- one of the most curious types produced by the manners and customs of this age ? And is it not his peculiar function to carry out in a certain class of things the immense transition which connects the age of material development with that of intellectual development ? Our epoch will be the link between the age of isolated forces rich in original crea- tiveness, and that of the uniform but leveling force which gives monotony to its products, casting them in masses, and following out an unifying idea -- the ultimate expression of social communities. After the Saturnalia of intellectual communism, after the last struggles of many civilizations concentrating all the treasures of the world on a single spot, must not the darkness of barbarism invariably supervene? The commercial traveler is to ideas what coaches are to men and things. He carts them about, he sets them moving, brings them into impact. He loads himself at the centre of enlightenment with a supply of beams which he scatters among torpid communities. This human pyrophoros is an ignorant instructor, mystified and mystifying, a disbelieving priest who talks all the more glibly of arcana and dogmas. A strange figure! The man has seen everything, he knows everything, he is acquainted with everybody. Saturated in Parisian vice, he can assume the rusticity of the countryman. Is he not the link that joins the village to the capital, though himself not essentiall...« less