GAUDISSART IL;   OR, THE SE LI M SHAWL.
27
GAUDISSART I!.; Or, THE SELIM SHAWL,
To be able to sell, to be willing to sell,
and to sell! The public little suspects how
much grandeur Paris owes to these three
aspects of the same problem. The brill-
iance of ihe shops, as rich as the salons of
the nobility before 1789; the splendor of the
cafés, which often eclipses, and very easily, that
of the Neo-Versailles; the poem of the window
shows demolished every night and built up
again every morning; the elegance and grace
ofthe young men in communication with the
fair purchasers; the seductive physiognomies
and the dresses of the young girls who are to
attract the male buyers; and finally, nowadays,
the depths, the immense space, and the Baby-
lonian luxury of the galleries in which the shop-
keepers monopolize "particular trades by com
bining them—all this is nothing! As yet it is
only a question of pleasing the most insatiable
and the most sated organ which has been devel-
oped in man since the days ot Roman society, aud
whose avidity has become unbounded—thanks
to the efforts of the most refined civilization.
This organ is the eye of the Parisians ! This eye
consumes a hundred thousand francs' worth of
fireworks, variegated glass palaces two kilomè-
tres long by sixty feet high, fairy pieces at
fourteen theaters every evening, ever-changing
panoramas, continual' exhibitions of chefs-
d'œuvre, worlds of grief and universes of joy
walking about on the boulevards or wandering
in the streets, encyclopedias of rags at the car-
naval, twenty illustrated works a year, a thou-
sand caricatures, ten thousand vignettes, litho
graphs, and engravings. This eye burns fifteen
thousand francs' worth of gas every evening;
in short, to satisfy it, the city of Paris annually
expends several millions in fine sites and planta-
tions. And still this is nothing; it is only the
material side of the question. Yes, to us, all
this is a trifle in comparison with the efforts of
skill, the strategems worthy of Molière, em
ployed by the sixty thousand shopmen and the
fifty thousand shopgirls, who fasten on to the
purse of tbe purchasers, like the thousands of
little fishes on to the pieces of bread which float
on the wTaters of the Seine.
The stationary Gaudissart is at least equal in
ability, in art, in mockery, and in philosophy,
to the illustrious bagman who has become the
type of his tribe. Out of his shop and his
business, he is like a balloon without gas. He
derives his faculties only from the goods around
him; like the actor, he is only sublime on the
stage. Although the French shopman is rela-
tively better informed than the other shopmen
of Europe; although he can at least talk about
asphalte, the bal Mabile, the polka, literature,
illustrated books, railways, politics, the Cham-
bers, and revolution, he is excessively stupid
when he leaves the shopboard, his yard meas-
ure, and his graces to order; but there, at the
edge of the counter, the words on his lips, his
eye on the customer, the shawl in his hand, he
eclipses the great Talleyrand. He has more wit
than Desaugiers, more tact than Cleopatra; he
is equal to Monrose multiplied by Molière. At
home. Talleyrand would have imposed on
Gaudissart ; but, in his shop, Gaudissart would
have taken in Talleyrand.
Let us explain this paradox by a fact.
Two lovely duchesses were prattling by the
side of this illustrious Prince. They wanted a
bracelet. They were expecting, from the most
celebrated jeweler's in Paris, a shopman and
some bracelets. A Gaudissart arrives, furnished
with three bracelets—three marvels—between
which the two women hesitate. To choose
there must be a flash of intuition 1 Do you hesi-
tate? All is said. You are mistaken. Taste
never has two inspirations. At last, after ten
minutes, the Prince is consulted. He sees the
two duchesses struggling with the thousand
facets of uncertainty between tbe two most styl-
ish of the jewels—for one of them had been put
aside at first sight. The Prince does not leave
off reading—he does not look at the bracelets;
he examines this shopman. " Which would you
choose for your sweetheart?" he asks him.
young man points out one of the jewels.
The
In
that case, take the other. You will insure the
happiness of two women," says the most astute
of modem diplomatists. " And you, young
man, make your sweetheart happy in my name. "
The two pretty women smile, and the shopman
retires, as much flattered by the present the
Prince has just made him as by the good opin-
ion he entertains of him.
A lady gets out of her brilliant carriage,
stopped in the Rue Vivienne, before one of those
sumptuous shops wdiere they sell shawls. She
is accompanied by another lady. Women almost
always go in couples on this sort of expedition.
They all, in like cases, go through ten shops be-
fore making up their minds; and, in the inter-
vals between one and the other, they laugh at
the little comedy got up for thorn by the shop-
men. Let us examine which plays his or her
part liest, the buyer or the seller—which of the
two gets the best of it in this little vaudeville.
When we have to paint the greatest achieve-
ment of Parisian commerce, the sale, we must
condense the subject and produce a type. Now,
in this respect, a shawl or a châtelain of a
thousand crowns will cause more emotions than
a piece of cambric or a rlress of three hundred
francs. But, O foreigners of the two worlds! if
you happen to read this physiology of the bill
to pay, know that this scene is phayed in all the
drapers' shops over a barege at two francs or a
printed muslin at four.francs a yard.
How should you be on your guard, princesses
or commoners, against the good-looking, rosy,
young man, with downy and peach-colored
cheeks, with truthful eyes, dressed nearly as well
as your—your^-cousin, and endowed with a
voice as soft as the fabric he spreads before
you? There are three or four in that style: one
with black eyes and decided mien, who says,
" There !" with an imperious air; another with
blue eyes and timid ways, with soft speech, of
whom you say, " Poor boy! he was not born for
business;" one, light chestnut, with laughing
yellow eyes, pleasing address, and endowed
"with Southern activity and gayety; another
tawny red, with a fan-shaped beard, stiff as a
Methodist, severe, imposing, with an irresist-
ible necktie, and brief of speech.
These different species of shopmen, which
correspond with the principal varieties of
women, are the .arms of their master—a big fel-
low, with a broad face, a bald forehead, a min-
isterial deputy's corporation, sometimes deco-
rated with the Legion of Honor for having main-
tained tho superiority of French trade, present-
ing an outline of satisfactory rotundity, having
a wife, children, a country house, and an ac-
count at his banker's. This personage descends
into the arena after the manner of a Deus ex
machina, when the plot becomes too compli-
cated and requires a sudden dénouement. Thus
the women are surrounded with good nature,
with youth, with cajoleries, with smiles, with
jests, 'with everything that civilized humanity
offers most simple and most deceitful, the whole
arranged in shades to suit all tastes.
A word upon the natural effect of optics, ar-
chitecture, and decoration; a word short, sharp,
and terrible; a word which is history written
on the spot. The book in wliich you read this
instructive page is sold at No. 76 Rue do Riche-
lieu, in an elegant shop, white and gold, hung
with red velvets, which possessed à room on
tiie entresol (mezzanine floor) upon whicli the
light came full from the Rue de Menars, and
came as it does to a painter, pure, clear, and al-
ways equal. What flaneur has not admired the
Persian, that Asian king who struts at thc angle
of the Rue de la Bourse and tlie Rue de Riche-
lieu, charged fo tell urbi et orbi, " 1 reign more
quietly here than at Lahore." Jn five hundred
years, this figure at the corner of the streets
might, without this immortal analysis, occupy
the archeologists, and be the subject of volumes
in quarto with engravings, like that of Monsieur
Quatremeuon tho Olympian Jupiter, in which it
was demonstrated that Napoleon had somehow
beeu a Sophi in some Oriental country before
being Emperor of tho French. Well, this rich
warehouse laid siege to this poor little entresol;
and, by force of bank-notes, it got possession of
it. The Comédie Humaine had to give way to '
the Comedy of Cachemires. The Persian sacri-
ficed some of tlie diamonds of his crown to ob-
tain tlie necessary daylight. This ray of sun-
light increased tne sale cent per cent, by its in-
fluence on the effect of color. It brings out in
relief the seductions of the shawls; it is an ir-
resistible light; it is a golden ray. From this
fact, judge of the scenic effect in aU the shops
in Paris!
Let us return to the young men, to the deco-
rated man of forty received b}- the King of the
French at his tabic, to the head shopman with
red beard and autocratic air. These veteran
Gaudissarts have matched themselves against a
thousand caprices a week; they know all the
vibrations of the cachemire chord in the femi-
nine heart. When a lorette, a respectable lady, a
young mother of a family, a lionne, a duchess,
a good housewife, a brazen dancer, an innocent
girl, or a too innocent foreigner present them-
selves, each of them is immediately analyzed by
those seven or eight men who have studied her
the moment she put her hand on the cane han-
dle of the shop door, and who are stationed at
the windows, at the counter, at the door, in a
corner, in the middle of the shop, apparently
contemplating the joys of a festive Sunday. On
looking at them you even ask yourself, What
can they be thinking about? A woman's purse,
her desires, her intentions, her fancies, are more
thoroughly hauled over in a moment than a
suspected carriage is hauled over at the frontier
by the custom-house officer in seven quarters of
an hour. These intelligent fellows, serious as a
heavy father, have seen everything: the details
of the costume an invisible stain of mud on the
boot, an old-fashioned style, a bonnet-string
dirty or in bad taste, the cut and making of the
dress, the newness of the gloves, the dress cut
out by the intelligent scissors of Victorine IV.,
the jewelry of Froment-Meurice, the fashion-
able' bauble — in short, everything about a
woman which could betray her rank, her fort-
une, and her character. Tremble! Never is
this Sanhedrim of Gaudissarts presided over by
the master mistaken. Then the ideas of each
one are transmitted from one to the other with
telegraphic rapidity, by looks, by nervous
twitches, by smiles, by movements of the lips,
whicli, on observing them, you would liken to
the sudden lighting up of the grand avenue of
the Champs Elysées, when the gas flies from
lamp to lamp, just as this idea lights up the eye-
balls from shopman to shopman.
And immediately, if it is an Englishwoman,
the serious Gaudissarts, mysterious and irresist-
ible, advances like a romantic character of Lord
Byron's.
If it is a shopkeeper, they send her the oldest
of the shopmen. He shows lier a hundred
shawls in a quarter of an hour; he bewilders
her with colors aud patterns; he unfolds her as
many shawls as a kilo describes circles over a
rabbit; and, at the end of half an hour, the
worthy woman, thoroughly muddled and not
knowing which to choose, refers it to the shop-
man, who puts her between the two horns of .
this dilemma and the equal attraction of two
shawls; " This one, madame, is very becoming
-it is apple-green, the fashionable color; but
the fashion changes; whilst this one "(the black
or the white, the sale of which is urgent) " you
will never see the end of, and it can be worn
with anv dress."
This is the A B C of tho trade.
" You would never believe how much elo-
quence is required in this beast of a business,"
said tlie first Gaudissart of the establishment,
recently, whilst talking to two of his friends,
Duronceret and Bixiou, who had come to buy
a shawl, leaving the choice to him. " Look
here, you are discreet artists; I can talk to you
about tbe tricks of our principal, who is, cer-
tainly, the cleverest man I ever saw. 1 don't
say as a manufacturer—Monsieur Fritot is the
first—but as a salesman he invented the Selim
shawl, a shawl which is not to be sold, and wdiich
we always sell.    We keep in a cedar box, very