The Illustrious Gaudissart

By De Balzac, Honore

Book Id: WPLBN0000677145
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.2 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Illustrious Gaudissart
Author:	De Balzac, Honore
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Literature & drama
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection, Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics


Citation APA MLA Chicago De Balzac, B. H. (n.d.). The Illustrious Gaudissart. Retrieved from http://www.self.gutenberg.org/

Excerpt
Excerpt: The commercial traveler, 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 leveling 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?