Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (66 page)

Fuad Pasha
: Mehmed Fuad Pasha (1814–69), pro-European Ottoman statesman, in favour of reforms and modernization. He served at various times as Grand Vizier, army commander, and Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The Porte
: or Ottoman Porte, was the name given to the central government of the Ottoman Empire. The name derived from the High Gate of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, where diplomats were met. The name was later used for the Foreign Ministry.

Universal Bank
: the ‘Banque Universelle’—the name is similar in style to the Union Générale, founded in 1878 by Paul Eugène Bontoux, and which crashed in 1882. See Introduction, p. xi.

Théâtre des Variétés
: famous theatre on the Boulevard Montmartre, inaugurated in 1807. Some of Offenbach’s operettas were staged there, and it is in that theatre that Nana makes her stage debut in
Nana
, the ninth volume of the Rougon-Macquart series.

Mabille
: the Bal Mabille was an open-air dance-hall on the Champs Élysées.

Havas agency
: the first French news agency, created in 1835.

Opéra-Comique
: in the eighteenth century the Opéra-Comique (now the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique) was housed in the Salle Favart, in the second arrondissement of Paris. In 1838, when this theatre burned down, the company moved into the second Salle Favart built on the same site, where it stayed from 1840 until 1887.

Cartouche
: a notorious Parisian highwayman, Louis Dominique Garthausen (1693–1721), known as ‘Cartouche’ (‘cartridge’), probably as a result of mispronunciation of ‘Garthausen’. His daring exploits were celebrated in ballads and popular prints.

Hôtel Drouot
: famous Paris auction house, specializing in art and antiques.

Tuileries
: the Tuileries here used metonymically for Napoleon III, who sported a moustache and a goatee beard.

Meissonier
: Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815–91), French painter and sculptor, famous for his paintings of Napoleon I and military scenes. His work commanded huge prices.

milked her
: a reworking of a much-quoted remark of Baron Rothschild, who served as part model for Zola’s depiction of Gundermann: ‘Milk the cow but not to the point of making it moo’ (‘Traire la vache mais pas jusqu’à la faire crier’).

covered passages
: covered shopping arcades, built between 1814 and 1848. Walter Benjamin, the German cultural critic, uses the image of the ‘passage’
as a focal point in his celebrated study of city life and consumerism, the ‘Arcades Project’: Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). See Brian Nelson’s Introduction to Zola’s
The Ladies’ Paradise
(Oxford World’s Classics, 1995), p. x.

agreement … Rome
: the agreement known as the September Convention was signed on 15 September 1864; Napoleon III was to remove French troops from Rome within two years, and Italy undertook to guarantee the boundaries of the Papal States and allow the creation of a Papal military force. The Italian government moved from Turin to Florence to indicate that it would not establish itself in Rome, which had been declared the capital of Italy by the first Italian government in 1861. French troops duly left Rome in December 1866. This treaty was opposed by the Pope, French Catholics, and Italian patriots. The French Catholics wanted Napoleon III to go on protecting the Pope. Napoleon III hoped the Pope would come to terms with the Italian government and allow it to move from Florence to Rome. Pope Pius IX, however, rejected all proposals, and Garibaldi’s army invaded Latium and Rome in 1867. The Italians were defeated at the Battle of Mentana by two thousand French troops sent by Napoleon III, and a French garrison remained in Rome to defend the Pope. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870 the French garrison was recalled and King Victor-Emmanuel tried to negotiate an arrangement by which the Italian army would be allowed peacefully to enter Rome as a protection for the Pope; these overtures failed and the Italian army entered by force. Rome and Latium were then annexed to the Kingdom of Italy.

Code
: the ‘Code de commerce’, the commercial code, established in 1807, dealing precisely with shareholding companies, and according to which, until 1867, the constitution of share companies was subject to governmental authorization.

our shares
: Sabatani’s role as frontman closely follows that of Balensi and Izoard, who acted as frontmen for Bontoux’s Union Générale in 1879.

L’Espérance
: a translation of the title might be ‘Hope’ or ‘Hopefulness’.

paper … power
: Eugène Bontoux, after setting up his Union Générale, acquired several financial journals.

discharge
: military service was compulsory in the Second Empire.

Bouffes
: the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, founded in 1855, also known in the nineteenth-century as the ‘Salle Choiseul’, where Offenbach’s
Orpheus in the Underworld
was first performed in 1858. In November 1866 Hervé’s
Les Chevaliers de la table ronde
(
Knights of the Round Table
) had its first night, followed in January 1867 by Delphine Ugalde’s operetta
Halte au moulin
. Saccard’s ‘little singer’ was presumably performing in one of these.

the fortifications
: the walls of Paris had been strengthened in July 1840 at
the insistence of Adolphe Thiers, President of the Conseil d’État. A new fortified enclosure, the ‘enceinte de Thiers’, was built between 1841 and 1844. Its ineffectiveness was demonstrated in the German siege of 1871, and it was later dismantled. Designated as a ‘non-building zone’, it became a slum area, known commonly as
les fortifs
, largely inhabited by the poor who had been driven out of their homes by the demolition and property speculation that accompanied the Haussmanization of Paris.

most bleak
: Ernest Vizetelly, in his 1894 translation, comments in a note that the picture Zola gives of the Cité de Naples is no exaggeration, as he discovered for himself on visiting some of the ‘Cités’ in Paris in the 1880s. When he took Zola round the East End of London in 1893, Zola commented that even the worst dens there were not as bad as those of Paris.

conceived him
: Zola had accepted much of Prosper Lucas’s work on heredity, which (wrongly) maintained that the moment of impregnation had an effect on the resulting child—hence Victor’s ‘crushed cheek’.

Man in the Iron Mask
: a mysterious prisoner in the reign of Louis XIV, whose identity has been much discussed; subject of a novel with this title by Alexandre Dumas
père
(part of
The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later
, 1847), in which the prisoner is said to have been a brother of the king.

25 April
: in 1867. Zola more readily offers months than years, and dates are not always clear, since he sometimes fudges them.

Tonkin
: the old name for what is now North Vietnam.

‘The second of December is a crime!’
: 2 December 1851, the date of Napoleon III’s
coup d’état
.

Denmark affair
: a reference to Denmark’s loss of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia. See note to p. 6.

Solferino
: the battle of 1859 in which French and Sardinian-Piedmontese forces led by Napoleon III defeated the Austrians led by the Emperor Franz-Joseph, with terrible losses on both sides. Napoleon III signed an armistice with Austria, the Treaty of Villafranca, in July 1859, without consulting his Sardinian-Piedmontese allies. Most of Lombardy was ceded by Austria to France, to be transferred thereafter to Sardinia-Piedmont. The Veneto, however, remained in Austrian hands, and although Napoleon III had supported Italian independence against Austria, he ultimately alienated the Italians by his defence of the Pope against Italian attempts to gain control of Rome and the Papal States.

the Cote financière
: literally ‘The Financial Quotation’, amounting to something like ‘stock-exchange listings’.

hundred-louis
: the louis was worth twenty francs.

Mont Valérien
: hill (162 m) to the west of Paris; an area of green parkland with splendid views over the city, it is an ancient site of pilgrimage, home to various religious establishments since the fifteenth century.

Turkey-red cotton
: the rich red dye of Adrianople (now Edirne) in Turkey was brought into France in the eighteenth century and became very popular, the name ‘adrinople’ being used in French, as here by Zola, for red-dyed cotton.

the very start
: in fact, in
The Kill
Saccard starts as a republican journalist, who only changes sides when he sees the success of the
coup d’état
.

Bismarck
: Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg. Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) was an important figure in Europe from the 1860s until dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890. He was Minister President of Prussia from 1862 to1890, and played a major role in the unification of Germany.

Kaiser Wilhelm
: Wilhelm I of Prussia.

Le Siècle
: newspaper founded in 1836, it originally supported constitutional monarchy but at the end of the July Monarchy in 1848 the paper switched to republicanism and opposed the rise of Napoleon III. It ceased publication in 1932.

Italians in Rome
: Rome was taken by the Italians in September 1870.

loans to speculators
: a holder of capital can make a loan to speculators who, not having sufficient funds for the immediate settlement, deposit the stock with the lender for a fixed term, at the end of which the purchaser either collects money on, or pays, the difference between the purchase price and the price at time of settlement. The lender receives interest on the loan.

Le Figaro
: originally a satirical weekly, founded in 1826 and published rather irregularly until 1854. It became a daily in November 1866; Zola was one of the paper’s early contributors.

in conflict
: referring to the increasing tension between Prussia and Austria. Napoleon III had given the impression in May 1866 that he was ready to agree to a rearrangement of the map of Europe and to intervene directly in the crisis between Austria and Prussia, as each sought to benefit from the unification movement of Germany.

declared war on Austria
: Napoleon III’s Treaty of Villafranca, after Solferino, had meant that Italy had not been able to secure the Veneto; now, in 1866, Italy was declaring war on Austria to regain that territory.

Sadowa … 4 July
: the Austrians had defeated the Italians at Custoza, but Prussian troops defeated the Austrian army at Sadowa. As the war was expected to continue, shares fell sharply at the Bourse. However, just three weeks later, on 22 July 1866, a treaty was signed by which the Emperor of Austria, accepting the mediation of France, surrendered the Veneto to Napoleon III. This was seen as a diplomatic triumph, and shares rose sharply, though only for a short time. In October that year Napoleon handed the Veneto over to Victor-Emmanuel, the King of Italy.

Custoza
: battle fought near Verona in 1866 in the Italian War of Independence.

the Moniteur
:
Le Moniteur universel
was an official government organ, authorized to report the debates of the National Assembly. Founded as
La Gazette nationale ou Moniteur universel
in 1789, the
Gazette nationale
was dropped from the title in 1811. It was superseded in 1869 by the
Journal officiel de l’Empire français
.

Palace of the Legion of Honour
: the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, also known as the Hôtel de Salm, built in the late eighteenth century on the left bank of the Seine, near what is now the Musée d’Orsay. The palace was burned down during the Commune in 1871 and then replaced by the replica we see today.

Holy Sepulchre
: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an important place of pilgrimage in the Christian quarter of the walled Old City of Jerusalem: it is traditionally regarded as the site of the crucifixion and burial of Christ, as well as the resurrection.

instruments of the Passion
: the nails of the crucifixion, the lance that speared the side of Christ, the crown of thorns, and the sponge soaked in vinegar. See the Gospel of John 19.

1 April … opened
: the great exhibition by which Napoleon III meant to demonstrate the power of the Empire to the rest of the world.

opera house
: the lavish Paris Opéra, known as the Palais Garnier in honour of its architect Charles Garnier, was built from 1861 to 1875 as part of Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris. Inaugurated in 1875, its opulence, rich gold-and-velvet decoration, and baroque sumptuousness may well have influenced Zola’s description of the ‘palace’ Saccard provides for his bank.

Rue de Londres
: the Union Générale, which provided the model for Saccard’s Universal Bank, had similarly changed its premises, moving from the Rue de Châteaudun in 1879 to the Rue d’Antin.

the Orient question
: there was growing concern about tensions between Christians and Muslims and conflict within the Ottoman Empire, which controlled most of the land between Egypt and Constantinople. A rebellion in Crete against Ottoman rule had been put down but still simmered, and continued to inspire similar movements elsewhere. Signs of instability in the Ottoman Empire stimulated the ambitions of countries seeking to extend their territory. Russia’s ambitions in Europe, particularly in Turkey, were seen as a threat to the balance of power in Europe, and various possible solutions were considered, among them the creation of a Christian empire in the Orient, to bring peace to the region.

interpellation
: in 1860 Napoleon III had granted the Legislative Body the right to vote annually on an address in response to the speech from the throne. In 1867, in a move toward a more liberal style of government, the Emperor changed this to allow ‘interpellation’, that is, the formal right of the Assembly to put questions to a member of the government, thus allowing the elected Deputies to influence, to some extent, government activity.