The Illustrious Gaudissart
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 en ...