“Monsieur,” said a wise political economist, the director-cashier-manager and secretary-general of a celebrated fire-insurance company, “out of every five hundred thousand francs of policies to be renewed in the provinces, not more than fifty thousand are paid up voluntarily. The other four hundred and fifty thousand are got in by the activity of our agents, who go about among those who are in arrears and worry them with stories of horrible incendiaries until they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus you see that eloquence, the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and means of our business.” To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself. A nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon lost. Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact which began, and may end, with the world itself. “A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man,” said a retired lawyer. Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well. Don’t forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so original that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we come across! In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what a battery, all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets and gentlest persuasions. The traveller’s business is to extract the gold in country caches by a purely intellectual operation, and to extract it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think without a shudder of the flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades the length and breadth of sunny France? You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual. There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the paragon of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is vitriol and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads, close fists, and closer calculations. His line was once the _hat_; but his talents and the art with which he snared the wariest provincial had brought him such commercial celebrity that all vendors of the “article Paris”[*] paid court to him, and humbly begged that he would deign to take their commissions. [*] “Article Paris” means anything--especially articles of wearing apparel--which originates or is made in Paris. The name is supposed to give to the thing a special value in the provinces.