THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
Page: 7

Exchange for thought; in fact, even now ideas, good or bad, have their
consols, are bought up, imported, exported, sold, and quoted like
stocks. If ideas are not on hand ready for sale, speculators try to
pass off words in their stead, and actually live upon them as a bird
lives on the seeds of his millet. Pray do not laugh; a word is worth
quite as much as an idea in a land where the ticket on a sack is of
more importance than the contents. Have we not seen libraries working
off the word "picturesque" when literature would have cut the throat
of the word "fantastic"? Fiscal genius has guessed the proper tax on
intellect; it has accurately estimated the profits of advertising; it
has registered a prospectus of the quantity and exact value of the
property, weighing its thought at the intellectual Stamp Office in the
Rue de la Paix.

Having become an article of commerce, intellect and all its products
must naturally obey the laws which bind other manufacturing interests.
Thus it often happens that ideas, conceived in their cups by certain
apparently idle Parisians,--who nevertheless fight many a moral battle
over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their
birth from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to
spread them discreetly, "urbi et orbi," through Paris and the
provinces, seasoned with the fried pork of advertisement and
prospectus, by means of which they catch in their rat-trap the
departmental rodent commonly called subscriber, sometimes stockholder,
occasionally corresponding member or patron, but invariably fool.

"I am a fool!" many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught by
the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
into a gulf.

"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money
than they need for the tour of Europe," say the speculators.

Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who,