THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
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man when he poses to a portrait-painter.

"Monsieur," said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key
with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. "Monsieur, if you
were not a man of superior intelligence" (the fool bowed), "I should
content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages
of this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of
time to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not
time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those
anxieties which I call 'pot-boiling'?--a vulgar expression, but it
puts the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up
more time than the inability to give proper security to persons from
whom you seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are
nevertheless rich in hope?"

"Money,--yes, that's right," said Margaritis.

"Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of
bankers and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which
rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently, of
intelligence and productive ability. We have seized the idea of
capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their
survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the
moral qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur,
living forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three,
ten, twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement
onward to a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of
our epoch; a movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you
when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical
co-ordination of the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by