Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (39 page)

When Saccard returned, he found Madame Caroline buried in her work, finishing, in her firm hand, a page of the report on the Oriental railways. She raised her head and gave him a tranquil smile, while he touched with his lips her beautiful, radiant white hair.

‘You’ve been very busy, my dear?’

‘Oh, just one thing after another! I saw the Minister of Public Works, met up with Huret again, then I had to go back to see the minister, but there was only a secretary there… In the end I did get his promise for our overseas concerns.’

In fact, since leaving Baroness Sandorff, he had hardly stopped for breath, entirely occupied with business affairs, and carried away by his customary zeal. She passed him Hamelin’s letter, which delighted him; and she watched as he exulted over the coming triumph, telling herself that she would henceforth keep a close eye on him, to try to
prevent the follies he was certain to commit. However, she couldn’t manage to be severe.

‘Your son came with an invitation for you from Madame de Jeumont.’

He protested.

‘But she wrote to me!… I forgot to tell you I was going there this evening… That really is a chore, when I’m so tired!’

And he left, after once more kissing her white hair. She went back to her work, with her friendly smile, full of indulgence. Wasn’t she simply a friend, who gave herself to him? Her jealousy made her feel ashamed, as if she had somehow further sullied their relationship. She intended to be above any anguish at sharing, quite free of the carnal selfishness of love. Belonging to him, knowing he belonged to others, was of no importance. And yet she loved him, with all her brave and charitable heart. It was a triumph of love that this Saccard, this bandit of the financial streets, should be loved so absolutely by this adorable woman, because she saw him as brave and dynamic, creating a world, creating life.

I
T
was on 1 April that the Universal Exhibition of 1867 opened,
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with great celebrations and ostentatious splendour. It was the start of the grand season of the Empire, a season of supreme festivity that would turn Paris into the hostelry of the world, a gaily beflagged hostelry, full of music and song, with feasting and fornication in every room. Never had any regime at the height of its power summoned the nations of the world to so colossal a spree. The long procession of emperors, kings, and princes from the four corners of the earth set forth for the Tuileries, which blazed with light like the finale of a theatrical extravaganza.

It was just then, a fortnight after the opening of the Exhibition, that Saccard opened the monumental mansion he had always wanted as the majestic new home of the Universal Bank. It had only taken six months to build, for work had gone on day and night, never wasting an hour, achieving a miracle only possible in Paris; and the façade now stood there in all its flowery ornamentation, like a cross between a temple and a music-hall, with such a lavish display of opulence that passers-by stopped on the pavement to gaze at it. Inside, it was utterly sumptuous, as if the millions in the coffers were streaming out along the walls. A grand staircase led up to the boardroom, resplendent in red and gold, like the auditorium of an opera house.
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There were carpets and hangings everywhere, and offices equipped with furniture of dazzling wealth. In the basement, where the share offices were, huge safes were fixed, showing gullets deep as ovens behind plate-glass that allowed the public to see them lined up there like the barrels in storybooks, full of countless fairy treasures. And the nations and their kings on their way to the Exhibition, could come and file past: it was all ready, the new building was waiting to dazzle them and catch them, one after another, in that irresistible snare of gold, blazing in the sun.

Saccard was enthroned in the most sumptuous of the offices, with Louis-Quatorze furniture in gilded wood, covered in Genoese velvet. The staff had just been increased again: there were now more than four hundred employees. This was the army that Saccard commanded, with all the pomp of a tyrant who was both adored and obeyed, for he
was very generous with his rewards. In reality, in spite of being nominally just the manager, it was he who ruled, above the chairman of the board, indeed even above the board itself, which merely ratified his orders. Madame Caroline was now constantly on the alert, busily finding out about his decisions, in order to try to counter them if necessary. She disapproved of this new establishment, which was far too magnificent, and yet could not entirely condemn it in principle, for in the happy days of her tender confidence in Saccard, she had recognized the need for a larger building, and had joshed her brother for being worried about it. The fear that she acknowledged, and her argument against all this luxury, was that the bank was losing its air of respectable integrity and lofty, religious gravity. What would customers, used to the monkish restraint and sober half-light of the ground-floor in the Rue Saint-Lazare, make of this palace in the Rue de Londres,
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with its many floors, all so lively and noisy, and flooded with light? Saccard had replied that they would be struck with admiration and respect, and those who were bringing in five francs, once they were filled with self-esteem and intoxicating confidence, would produce ten from their pockets. And it was he, with his brutal flashiness, who was proved right. The success of the building was prodigious, creating a stir more effective than even the most extraordinary of Jantrou’s advertisements. Well-off, pious people from the quiet parts of the city, and needy country priests just off the train that morning, all gaped in beatitude at the door, and came out flushed with pleasure at having funds in such a building.

In truth, what was especially worrying Madame Caroline was that she was no longer able to be constantly there in the Bank, carrying on her supervision. She could scarcely do more now than go to the Rue de Londres at infrequent intervals, on some pretext or other. She was living alone in the workroom, hardly seeing Saccard except in the evenings. He had kept his apartment, but the whole of the ground floor was closed up, as were the first-floor offices; and the Princess d’Orviedo, with her deliberate indifference to any even legitimate gain, was not even trying to find a new tenant, glad in fact to be relieved of her nagging remorse about having that banking-house, that money-shop, installed in her building. The empty house, echoing to the sound of every passing carriage, was like a tomb. All Madame Caroline could hear now was the vibrant silence rising through the ceilings from the closed counters, from which, for two
years, she had heard the faint, incessant tinkling of gold. The days seemed all the more heavy and long. She was, however, doing a lot of work, still kept busy by her brother who, from the East, was sending her various bookkeeping tasks. But sometimes she would pause in her work and listen, with instinctive anxiety, needing to know what was happening down below; and there was nothing, not so much as a whisper, just the desolation of the cleared rooms, now empty, dark and securely locked. Then she would feel a little cold shiver, and stay uneasily lost in thought for a few minutes. What was happening in the Rue de Londres? Was it perhaps at this very second that the crack was appearing, the crack that would bring the whole edifice down?

There was a rumour, quite vague and insubstantial as yet, that Saccard was preparing a further increase in the bank’s capital. He wanted to raise it from a hundred million to a hundred-and-fifty million. And this was a moment of special excitement, the inevitable moment when all the prosperity of the reign, the vast works that had transformed the city, the frenzied circulation of money and the wild extravagances of luxury, were bound to end in a frantic fever of speculation. Everybody wanted a share in it, risking their fortune on the gaming-table, hoping to see it increased tenfold so they could enjoy themselves like so many others suddenly made rich overnight. The banners of the Exhibition flapping in the sunshine, the illuminations, the bands playing on the Champ-de-Mars, crowds from the entire world flowing along the streets, all completed the intoxication of Paris in a dream of inexhaustible wealth and sovereign domination. During the long evenings, from this huge, festive city, dining out in exotic restaurants, and changed into a colossal fairground, with pleasure everywhere for sale beneath the stars, there rose an ultimate spasm of madness, the blithe and voracious frenzy that grips great capital cities on the edge of destruction. And Saccard, with his cutpurse flair, had so well recognized this general craze, this urge to throw money to the winds, to empty one’s pockets and one’s body, that he had just doubled the funds destined for advertising, urging Jantrou to make the most deafening din. Ever since the opening of the Exhibition, the Universal had been getting paeans of praise every day in the press. Every morning there was a new clashing of cymbals to attract the attention of the public: some extraordinary news item, the story of a woman who had lost a hundred shares in a cab; an extract from a journey in Asia Minor, claiming that Napoleon I had
predicted the bank in the Rue de Londres; a big leading article in which the political role of the bank was considered in relation to the impending solution of the Orient question;
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and there were continual notes in the financial journals, all under orders and marching together in a solid phalanx. Jantrou had set up yearly contracts with the minor financial papers, by which he had a column in each issue, and he used this column with an amazingly fertile and varied imagination, sometimes going so far as to launch an attack on the bank in order to enjoy the triumph of winning the day in the end. The famous pamphlet he’d been planning had just been launched on the world, in a million copies. His new agency had also been created, and under the pretext of sending a financial news bulletin to the provincial newspapers, it was making itself absolute master of the market in all the important towns. And finally
L’Espérance
, under his skilful management, was daily acquiring more and more political importance. Particular interest had been aroused by the series of articles that followed the decree of 19 January in which the address was replaced by the right to interpellation,
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a further concession from the Emperor in his move towards greater liberty. Saccard, who inspired the articles, did not yet have them openly attack his brother, who had after all remained a minister of state, resigned, in his passionate attachment to power, to defending today what he had condemned the day before; but Saccard was clearly watching, keeping a close eye on the false position of Rougon, caught as he was in the Chamber between the Third Party,
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hungrily waiting to take over from him, and the clericals who had allied themselves with the authoritarian Bonapartists against the liberalization of the Empire; insinuations were already beginning; the paper was again supporting militant Catholicism, and remarking sourly on each one of the minister’s acts. Now that
L’Espérance
had gone over to the Opposition, its popularity was assured, as the expression of a spirit of revolt that would end up carrying the name of the Universal to the four corners of France and the world.

Then, after the formidable surge of publicity, in that over-excited atmosphere, ripe for every kind of folly, the probable increase of the bank’s capital and the rumour of a new issue of fifty millions, stirred even the most sensible to fever-pitch. From humble dwelling to aristocratic mansion, from the concierge’s lodge to the drawing-rooms of duchesses, heads were set afire and infatuation became blind faith, heroic and ready for battle. People reeled off the great things the
Universal had already achieved, the first dazzling successes, the unhoped-for dividends, such as no company had ever distributed in its early days. They recalled the excellent idea of the United Steamship Company, so quick to yield magnificent results, its shares already carrying a premium of a hundred francs; the Carmel Silver Mines with its miraculous product, mentioned during Lent at Notre-Dame by a revered preacher, who called it a gift from God to faithful Christians; another company created for the exploitation of immense coalfields, and yet another which was going to carry out periodic felling in the vast forests of Lebanon, and lastly, the establishment of the unshakeably solid Turkish National Bank in Constantinople. Without a single failure, this constantly increasing success that turned everything the bank touched into gold, along with a large number of prosperous companies already providing a sure base for future operations, justified the rapid increase of capital. Then there was the future, opening out in overheated imaginations, a future so full of even greater enterprises that it necessitated the call for the fifty millions, the mere announcement of which was sufficient to wreak havoc in people’s brains. So the scope for rumours, from Stock Exchange or drawing-rooms, was limitless, but the next great undertaking, the Oriental Railway Company, stood out from the other projects, and was the subject of every conversation, derided by some and exalted by others. Women especially were passionate about it, generating enthusiastic propaganda in favour of the idea. In boudoirs and at gala dinners, behind potted plants in bloom, at the late tea-hour,
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and even in the bedroom, charming creatures could be found catechizing their menfolk: ‘Really? You have no Universals? But they’re the thing! Hurry up and buy Universals if you want to be loved!’ It was the new Crusade they said, the conquest of Asia which the crusaders, Peter the Hermit and Saint Louis,
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had been unable to achieve, but which these ladies were now taking under their wing, with their little gold purses. They all claimed to be well informed, speaking in technical terms of the main line which was going to be opened first, running from Broussa to Beirut, via Angora and Aleppo. Later there would be the branch line from Smyrna to Angora, through Erzerum and Sivas, and later still, a line from Damascus to Beirut. And they smiled and winked and whispered that there would perhaps be another, in the distant future, from Beirut to Jerusalem through the ancient coastal cities of Sidon, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Jaffa, and then—Heavens! Who
could say?—There might be a line from Jerusalem to Port Said and Alexandria. Not to mention the fact that Baghdad was not far from Damascus, and if a railway line got that far, then one day would see Persia, India, and China, all acquired for the West. It seemed that with just one word from their pretty lips, the rediscovered treasures of the Caliphs shone once more, as in a wonderful tale from the
Arabian Nights
. The dream jewels and gems rained down into the coffers of the Rue de Londres, while the incense from Carmel gave off the vague and delicate atmosphere of biblical legend, lending a touch of the divine to the eager appetites for profit. Was this not Eden Regained, the Holy Land delivered, and religion triumphant in the very cradle of humanity? And they would stop, refusing to say any more, their eyes shining with what had to be kept hidden—what could not even be whispered. Many of them did not know what it was, but pretended to know. It was the mystery, it was what would perhaps never happen, or what would one day burst upon the world like a thunderbolt: Jerusalem bought back from the Sultan and given to the Pope, with Syria as his kingdom; the Papacy with a budget provided by a Catholic bank, the Treasury of the Holy Sepulchre which would keep it safe from political disturbances, and finally Catholicism rejuvenated, freed from all compromise, finding a new authority and ruling the world from the summit of the mountain on which Christ died.