Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (51 page)

‘Tell her to stop bothering me! And if she sells, I’ll strangle her!’

Massias came rushing up at the announcement of the fall of fifteen francs as if answering an alarm-call, feeling he would be needed. Indeed, Saccard, who had prepared a stratagem to make sure of the last quotation—a telegram that was to be sent from the Lyons Stock Exchange, where a rise was certain—was beginning to grow anxious at the non-arrival of the telegram; and this unexpected fall of fifteen francs could bring disaster.

Massias, astutely, did not stop in front of Saccard but nudged him with his elbow and inclined his ear to receive the order:

‘Quick, to Nathansohn, four hundred, five hundred, whatever it takes.’

This was all done so quickly that only Pillerault and Moser noticed. They at once rushed after Massias to find out what was happening.
Since he had been in the pay of the Universal, Massias had acquired enormous importance. People would attempt to sound him out and try to read over his shoulder the orders he was carrying. And he was himself now making splendid gains. With his smiling affability, this unlucky fellow, ill-used by fortune as he had been until now, was quite astonished; he now declared that this dog’s life at the Bourse was after all quite bearable, and he no longer said one had to be a Jew to get on.

At the kerb market, in the freezing air of the peristyle that the pale mid-afternoon sun did little to warm, Universals had fallen less rapidly than on the trading-floor. And Nathansohn, forewarned by his brokers, had just effected the deal that Delarocque had failed to make: buying in the main hall at three thousand and twenty-five, he had sold again under the colonnade for three thousand and thirty-five. This had taken less than three minutes, and he had made sixty thousand francs. The purchase had already made the price rise in the hall to three thousand and thirty, thanks to the levelling effect that the two markets, the official one and the tolerated one, have on each other. There was an endless gallop of clerks, elbowing their way through the throng, from the hall to the peristyle. However, the price in the kerb market was just about to drop, when the order that Massias brought to Nathansohn maintained it at three thousand and thirty-five then raised it to three thousand and forty-five; while in consequence, the stocks on the trading-floor came back to the first quotation. But it was difficult to keep it there, for the strategy of Jacoby and the other agents acting for the bears was to save the really big sales until the end of the session, so that they could use them to crush the market and bring about a collapse in the disarray of the last half-hour. Saccard so clearly understood the danger that with a prearranged signal he alerted Sabatani, standing just a few steps away, smoking a cigarette with the unconcerned and languid air of a ladies’ man; he at once, with serpentine suppleness, made his way to the guitar, where, while listening intently to all the prices, he went on sending orders to Mazaud on the green cards of which he had a considerable stock. In spite of all this, the attack by the bears was so fierce that Universals once again went down five francs.

The clock struck the third quarter; there was only a quarter of an hour left before the closing bell. The crowd was now whirling about and screaming as if lashed by some hellish torment; the trading-floor
was snarling and howling, with a harsh clanging like the smashing of pots and pans, and it was just then that the incident so anxiously awaited by Saccard occurred.

Little Flory, who, since the opening of the Bourse, had been running down from the telegraph office every ten minutes with his hands full of telegrams, reappeared once more, pushing his way through the throng, this time reading a telegram with which he seemed highly pleased.

‘Mazaud! Mazaud!’ called a voice.

And Flory, naturally, turned his head, as if he were responding to his own name. It was Jantrou who wanted to hear the news. But the clerk, in too great a hurry, pushed past him, full of delight at the thought that the Universal would finish with a rise; for the telegram announced that the share-price was rising at the Lyons Stock Exchange, where purchases of such importance had been made that the effect was bound to be felt on the Paris Bourse. Indeed, other telegrams were already arriving, a large number of brokers were receiving orders. The result was immediate and considerable.

‘At three thousand and forty, I take Universals,’ Mazaud was repeating in his shrill, birdlike voice.

And Delarocque, overwhelmed with orders, raised the bid by five francs more.

‘At three thousand and forty-five, I take…’

‘I hold, at three thousand and forty-five,’ bellowed Jacoby. Two hundred, at three thousand and forty-five.’

‘Deliver!’

Then Mazaud himself went higher.

‘I take at three thousand and fifty.’

‘How many?’

‘Five hundred. Deliver!’

But the din was now so dreadful, with all this epileptic gesticulating, that the brokers themselves could no longer hear each other. And caught up in the professional frenzy that possessed them, they continued their work by gestures, since the resonant bass of some voices did not carry, while the fluting of others thinned into nothingness. Enormous mouths could be seen opening, without any distinct sound coming out of them; all the talking was being done by hands alone; an outward gesture meant an offer, and an inward gesture acceptance; fingers raised indicated quantities, and a nod or a shake of the head
said yes or no. It was like one of those fits of madness that can seize a crowd, and was intelligible only to the initiated. Up above, women were leaning their heads over the telegraph gallery, stupefied and horrified at this extraordinary spectacle. In the government-stocks market, it was almost like a brawl, with a furious central group resorting to fisticuffs, while the public, crossing this side of the room in both directions, pushed into the groups that were constantly breaking up and forming again in a continual turmoil. Between the cash market and the main trading-floor, above the tempest-tossed sea of heads, there were now only the three quoters, sitting on their high chairs, floating above the waves like wreckage, with the big white patch of their registers, while they were tugged hither and thither by the rapid fluctuation of the prices being thrown at them. In the cash section especially, the jostling was at its worst, it was a solid mass of heads of hair, without faces, like a dark swarm, lightened only by the little white pages of the notebooks waving about in the air. And on the trading-floor around the basin, now filled with a multicoloured floral display of crumpled cards, one could see the grey of hair, the glistening of bald heads, the pallor of agitated faces, and hands feverishly outstretched, a whole dancing pantomime of bodies moving more freely, all seeming ready to devour each other if the balustrade had not held them back. This last-minute madness had also reached the public, people were being crushed in the hall, in a huge shuffling of feet, like the stampede of a great herd let loose in too narrow a passage; and in the great blur of frock-coats, only the silk hats gleamed, under the diffused light from the high windows.

Then suddenly the sound of a bell rang out through the tumult. Everything calmed down, gestures stopped in mid-air, voices fell silent in the cash market, the government-stock market, and on the trading-floor. There remained only the dull roar of the crowd, like the even voice of a torrent returning to its bed and its normal flow. And in the last of the agitation, the last quotations were circulating; Universals had risen to three thousand and sixty a rise of thirty francs over the previous day. The defeat of the bears was complete; the settlement was once again going to be disastrous for them, for the differences of the fortnight would cost a substantial amount.

For a moment, before leaving the hall, Saccard stretched up as though the better to take in the crowd around him in one glance. He was really bigger, so uplifted by his triumph that the whole of his
little figure swelled and grew longer, became enormous. The person he seemed to be looking for over the heads of the crowd was the absent Gundermann, the Gundermann he would like to have seen defeated, grimacing and begging for mercy; and he was determined that at least all those unknown agents of the Jew, all the filthy Jews who were there, full of resentment, should see him thus transfigured, in the glory of his success. This was his great day, the day people still talk about, as they do about Austerlitz and Marengo.
*
His clients and his friends had rushed to him. The Marquis de Bohain, Sédille, Kolb, and Huret were shaking his hand, while Daigremont, with the false smile of his worldly affability, was congratulating him, knowing that at the Bourse death often follows such victories as these. Maugendre would have kissed him on both cheeks in his excitement, though exasperated to see Captain Chave just shrugging his shoulders. But the most complete, even religious, adoration came from Dejoie, who had run from the newspaper office to learn what the last quotation had been, and now stood quite still, a few steps away, rooted to the spot by tenderness and admiration, his eyes glistening with tears. Jantrou had disappeared, no doubt gone to take the news to Baroness Sandorff. Massias and Sabatani were panting and beaming, as if on the triumphant evening of a great battle.

‘Well, what did I tell you?’ cried the delighted Pillerault. Moser, with a long face, made vague, threatening noises.

‘Yes, yes, but he laughs longest who laughs last… Mexico will have to be paid for; affairs in Rome are even more confused since Mentana,
*
and Germany is going to fall upon us one of these fine mornings… Yes, yes, and these fools, the higher they go, the further they’ll fall. Ah, it’s all up now, you’ll see!’

Then, as Salmon this time continued to look at him gravely, he added:

‘That’s your view, isn’t it? When everything’s going too well, it means everything’s going to crash.’

But now the hall was emptying, and soon the only thing left would be the cigar-smoke in the air, a bluish cloud, thickened and yellowed by all the dust flying about. Mazaud and Jacoby, now restored to normality, had returned together to the brokers’ office, the latter more upset at his own losses than by the defeat of his clients; while the former, who didn’t speculate, was full of delight at the last quotation, so valiantly fought for. They talked to Delarocque for a few minutes,
exchanging their engagements, holding in their hands their little books full of notes, notes that their settlement clerks would go through that very evening to process the deals that had been made. Meanwhile, in the clerks’ office, a low room with big pillars, rather like a badly kept classroom, with rows of desks and a cloakroom at the far end, Flory and Gustave Sédille, who had gone there to get their hats, were noisily engaged in merry chatter while waiting to find out the average quotation, which was calculated by the clerks of the syndicate, according to the lowest and highest of the quotations. Towards half-past three, when the poster had been put up on one of the pillars, they both neighed like horses, clucked like hens, and crowed like roosters, in their satisfaction at the splendid result they had achieved with their manoeuvres on Fayeux’s orders to sell. It meant a pair of diamond earrings for Chuchu, who was now tyrannizing Flory with her demands, and six months payment in advance for Germaine Coeur, whom Gustave had been foolish enough to entice definitively away from Jacoby, who had just taken up with a horsewoman from the Hippodrome on a monthly basis. The noise continued unabated in the clerks’ room, with all sorts of silly tricks and throwing about of hats, like the romping of schoolboys in the playground. And on the other side, under the peristyle, the kerb market was hastily finishing its business, and Nathansohn, delighted with his dealings, was making his way down the steps through the last of the speculators, who were still lingering there in spite of the now intense cold. By six o’clock, this whole world of gamblers, brokers, dealers and jobbers, once they had calculated their gains or losses, and others had prepared their brokerage bills, would all get dressed up and, with their distorted view of money, complete the dizziness of the day in restaurants and theatres, fashionable soirées, and mistresses’ boudoirs.

That evening, the fun-loving Paris that stays up late talked of nothing but the tremendous duel between Gundermann and Saccard. The women, quite caught up in speculation, through enthusiasm and fashion, made ostentatious use of technical terms like ‘settlement’ and ‘option’, ‘carry-over’ and ‘close’, without necessarily understanding them. People talked especially about the critical situation of the short-sellers, who, for so many months, had been paying larger and larger sums at each settlement to cover ever greater differences as Universals just went up and up beyond any reasonable limit. Some were certainly gambling without cover, and getting carried over,
being unable to deliver the shares; they kept on and on, still betting on a fall, hoping for a sudden collapse of the market; but in spite of all the carrying-over, which became ever more expensive as money grew more scarce, the bears, exhausted and crushed, were going to be annihilated if the rise went on. It was true, though, that the situation of the all-powerful Gundermann, reputed to be their chief, was quite different, for he had his billion in his cellars, his inexhaustible troops that he could go on sending out to be massacred, no matter how long and murderous the campaign. This was his invincible strength, being able to keep on short-selling, with the certainty that he would always be able to pay the differences, until the day when the inevitable fall would give him victory.

People talked about it, calculating what large sums he must already have seen swallowed up, when, on the 15th and 30th of every month, he sent forth sacks of gold that melted in the fire of speculation, like lines of soldiers mown down by bullets. Never before had he experienced, in the Bourse, so fierce an attack on his power, which he intended to be sovereign and indisputable; for, if he was, as he liked to repeat, a simple money-merchant, not a gambler, he was fully aware that to remain that merchant, the first in the world, in control of the public fortune, he had to be absolute master of the market; and he fought not for immediate gain but for his very royalty, and his life. Hence the cold obstinacy, the wild grandeur of the struggle. He was seen on the boulevards or along the Rue Vivienne, with his pale, impassive face, walking, as ever, like an exhausted old man, but without the slightest trace of any anxiety. He believed only in logic. Once the shares of the Universal went above the two-thousand-franc mark, it was the beginning of madness, and at three thousand it was sheer lunacy; they were bound to fall, just as a stone thrown in the air inevitably drops; and he was waiting. Would he go right to the end of his billion? Around Gundermann people throbbed with admiration, but also with the desire to see him at last devoured; while Saccard, who provoked a more tumultuous enthusiasm, had on his side the women, the smart salons, and the whole fashionable world of gamblers, who had been pocketing handsome profits ever since they started coining money with their faith, and trading on Mount Carmel and Jerusalem. The forthcoming ruin of the big Jewish banks had been decreed; Catholicism was going to acquire the empire of money, as it had that of souls. But if his troops were making huge gains,
Saccard himself was running out of money, emptying his coffers to make his continual purchases. Of the two hundred million available, almost two-thirds were now tied up: this was a prosperity too great, an asphyxiating, suffocating triumph. Any company that tries to be mistress of the Bourse in order to preserve the price of its shares is a company doomed. So indeed, at the start, Saccard had only intervened with caution. But he had always been the man of imagination, seeing things on too grand a scale, transforming his shady and risky deals into epic poems; and this time, with this really colossal and prosperous enterprise, he had moved into extravagant dreams of conquest, with an idea so mad, so huge, that he did not even formulate it clearly to himself. Ah, if only he had had millions, endless millions, like those dirty Jews! The worst of it was that he could see the end of his troops, only a few more millions left for massacre. Then, if the fall should come, it would be his turn to pay the differences; and being unable to produce the shares, he would have to ask to be carried over. For all his victory, the tiniest speck of grit could wreck his vast machine. There was some vague awareness of this even among the faithful, those who believed in the rise the way they believed in God. This was what was exciting Paris still more, all the confusion and doubt that accompanied this duel between Saccard and Gundermann, this duel in which the victor was bleeding to death, this hand-to-hand struggle between two fabulous monsters, trampling underfoot the poor devils who dared to join in their game, and threatening to strangle each other upon the heap of ruins they were piling up beneath them.