But I cannot think the scene of the Parisians _blaguing_ the Sancerrois is a very happy one. That it is in exceedingly bad taste might not matter so very much; Balzac would reply, and justly, that he had not intended to represent it as anything else. That the fun is not very funny may be a matter of definition and appreciation. But what scarcely admits of denial or discussion is that it is tyrannously too long. The citations of _Olympia_ are pushed beyond measure, beyond what is comic, almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments, which remind one rather of the heavy jesting on critics in _Un Prince de la Boheme_ and the short-lived _Revue Parisienne_, are labored to the last degree. The part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate exactly, and altogether the book does not seem to me a _reussite_. The history of _L’Illustre Gaudissart_ is, for a story of Balzac’s, almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance in the first edition of _Scenes de la Vie de Province_ in 1833, and entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the _Comedie_, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared with _La Muse du Departement_, of _Les Parisiens en Province_ was given to it. _La Muse du Departement_ has a rather more complicated record than its companion piece in _Les Parisiens en Province_, _L’Illustre Gaudissart_. It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the title of _Dinah Piedefer_, in _Le Messager_ during March and April 1843, and was almost immediately published as a book, with works of other writers, under the general title of _Les Mysteres de Province_, and accompanied by some other work of its own author’s. It had four parts and fifty-two chapters in _Le Messager_, an arrangement which was but slightly altered in the volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives some curious indications of mosaic work in it, and some fragments which do not now appear in the text. George Saintsbury THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley DEDICATION To Madame la Duchesse de Castries. 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 of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one direction?