文档介绍：GAUDISSART II.
GAUDISSART II.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Clara Bell and others
1
GAUDISSART II.
To know how to sell, to be able to sell, and to sell. People generally do
not suspect how much of the stateliness of Paris is due to these three
aspects of the same problem. The brilliant display of shops as rich as the
salons of the noblesse before 1789; the splendors of cafes which eclipse,
and easily eclipse, the Versailles of our day; the shop-window illusions,
new every morning, nightly destroyed; the grace and elegance of the
young men e in contact with fair customers; the piquant faces and
costumes of young damsels, who cannot fail to attract the masculine
customer; and (and this especially of late) the length, the vast spaces, the
Babylonish luxury of galleries where shopkeepers acquire a monopoly of
the trade in various articles by bringing them all together,--all this is as
nothing. Everything, so far, has been done to appeal to a single sense, and
that the most exacting and jaded human faculty, a faculty developed ever
since the days of the Roman Empire, until, in our own times, thanks to the
efforts of the most fastidious civilization the world has yet seen, its
demands are grown limitless. That faculty resides in the "eyes of Paris."
Those eyes require illuminations costing a hundred thousand francs,
and many-colored glass palaces a couple of miles long and sixty feet high;
they must have a fairyland at some fourteen theatres every night, and a
ession of panoramas and exhibitions of the triumphs of art; for them a
whole world of suffering and pain, and a universe of joy, must resolve
through the boulevards or stray through the streets of Paris; for them
encyclopaedias of carnival frippery and a score of illustrated books are
brought out every year, to say nothing of caricatures by the hundred, and
tes, lithographs, and prints by the thousand. To please those eyes,
fifteen thousand francs' worth of gas must blaze every ni