Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (7 page)

‘You know, the English want to stop all the work there. There could well be war.’

This time Pillerault was shaken by the very enormity of this piece of news. It was incredible, and immediately the word flew from table
to table, acquiring the force of certainty: England had sent an ultimatum demanding the immediate cessation of work. That must obviously have been what Amadieu was talking to Mazaud about, giving him the order to sell all his Suez holdings. A buzz of panic arose in the air, among the rich smells and the increasing clatter of dishes. And at that moment what raised the excitement to a peak was the sudden entry of one of the stockbroker’s clerks, little Flory, a lad with a gentle face almost swallowed whole by a thick brown beard. He rushed forward with a packet of order-cards in his hand, and handed them to his boss, whispering in his ear.

‘Good,’ was Mazaud’s only answer, as he tucked the cards away in his order-book. Then, drawing out his watch:

‘Nearly midday! Tell Berthier to wait for me. Be there yourself too, and go and pick up the telegrams.’

When Flory had gone, Mazaud resumed his conversation with Amadieu, took out some other cards from his pocket, and laid them on the table beside his plate; and every minute some departing customer would lean over as he went by and say something, which he promptly noted, between mouthfuls, on one of the pieces of paper. The false news from who knows where, arising out of nothing, was growing ever bigger, like a gathering storm-cloud.

‘You’re selling, aren’t you?’ Moser asked Salmon.

But the silent smile of the latter was so sharp with perspicacity that it left him anxious, worried now about this English ultimatum, not realizing that he had invented it himself.

‘Personally, I’ll buy whatever’s on offer,’ said Pillerault in conclusion, with the vainglorious temerity of a gambler with no system.

Saccard, his brow heated by the fever of speculation provoked by this noisy ending to lunch in the narrow dining-room, decided to eat his asparagus, irritated anew by Huret, whom he had now given up. For weeks now he, who was usually so quick to make decisions, had grown hesitant, troubled by uncertainties. He felt an imperative need for change, to start afresh, and his first idea had been of an entirely new life in the upper reaches of administration, or else in politics. Why shouldn’t a position in the Legislative Assembly lead him on to the Council of Ministers, as it had his brother? What he didn’t like about speculation was the constant instability, the huge sums lost as fast as they were gained: he had never been able to sleep on a real million, owing nothing to anyone. And now, as he took stock of things,
he decided he was perhaps too passionate a person for this financial battle, which needed such a cool head. That must be why, after such an extraordinary life of both luxury and poverty, he had emerged empty-handed and burnt-out from those ten years of amazing land-deals in the new Paris, while others, less astute than he, had garnered colossal fortunes. Yes, perhaps he had been quite wrong about where his real talents lay; perhaps, with his energy and ardent convictions, he would triumph in one bound in the political fray. Everything would depend on his brother’s response. If he pushed him away, threw him back into the abyss of speculation, well, it would be just too bad, for him and for others; he would take his chances on the big plan he hadn’t mentioned to anyone, the enormous project he had dreamed of for weeks and which alarmed even himself, so vast was it and capable, if it succeeded or if it failed, of setting the world astir.

Pillerault raised his voice once more—

‘Mazaud, is the Schlosser business settled?’

‘Yes,’ replied the broker, ‘the notice will go up today… That’s how it is… it’s always unpleasant, but I’d had the most disturbing reports, and I was the first to make demand.
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Now and again you just have to clear the ground.’

‘I’ve been told’, said Moser, ‘that your colleagues, Jacoby and Delarocque, had some considerable sums invested.’

The broker made a vague gesture.

‘Bah, there have to be some losses… That Schlosser must have been part of a group; and all he’ll have to do is go off to Berlin or Vienna and start plundering the Stock Exchange there.’

Saccard’s gaze had fallen upon Sabatani, of whose secret association with Schlosser he had happened to learn: the two men played the well-known game, one bidding up and the other bidding down for the same stock; the loser would simply share the profit of the other and disappear. But the young man was quietly paying the bill for the meal he had just eaten. Then, with the typical caressing grace of the Oriental mixed with Italian, he went over to shake hands with Mazaud, whose client he was. He leaned over, and placed an order that Mazaud wrote on a card.

‘He’s selling his Suez holdings,’ murmured Moser.

Then, giving way to his need to know, sick with doubt as he was:

‘So, what do you think about Suez?’

Silence fell on the hubbub of voices, and at the neighbouring tables
every head turned round. The question summed up the increasing anxiety. But the back view of Amadieu, who had invited Mazaud to lunch simply to recommend one of his nephews to him, remained impenetrable, having indeed nothing to say. The stockbroker, on the other hand, increasingly astonished by the number of orders to sell he was getting, simply nodded, with his customary professional discretion.

‘Suez is good!’ declared Sabatani in his sing-song voice, making a detour to come over and very courteously shake Saccard’s hand before he left.

The sensation of that handshake, so soft and supple, almost feminine, lingered for a moment with Saccard. In his uncertainty about the road he should take and how to rebuild his life, he decided they were all scoundrels, every man there. Ah, if he were forced to it, how he would hunt them down, how he’d fleece them all, the trembling Mosers, the boastful Pilleraults, the Salmons hollower than a drum, and people like Amadieu, seen as a genius on the strength of one success! The clatter of plates and glasses had resumed, voices were getting hoarse, the doors banged ever louder in the raging hurry to get to the market in case Suez should indeed be about to crash. Looking out of the window onto the middle of the square, lined by carriages and crammed with pedestrians, Saccard could see the sunlit steps of the Bourse, speckled now with the continual surge of human insects, men smartly dressed in black gradually filling the colonnade, while behind the railings a few women appeared, prowling around beneath the chestnut trees.

Suddenly, as he was about to start on the cheese he’d just ordered, a loud voice made him look up.

‘I beg your pardon, my dear chap, I really was unable to get here any sooner.’

It was Huret at last, a Norman from Calvados with the thick, broad face of a wily peasant, but who affected to be a simple man. He immediately ordered something, whatever was available, the dish of the day, with a vegetable.

‘Well…?’ said Saccard curtly, trying to contain his annoyance.

But the other was in no hurry, looking at him with the air of a man both crafty and cautious. Then, starting to eat, he leaned towards him, lowering his voice:

‘Well, I saw the great man… Yes, at his home, this morning… Oh, he was very kind, very well-disposed towards you…’

He paused, drank a large glass of wine, and popped a potato into his mouth.

‘So…?’

‘So, my dear chap, this is how it is… He’s very willing to do all he can for you, he’ll find you a very good position, but not in France… For instance, the governorship of one of our colonies, one of the better ones. You’d be the master there, a real little prince.’

Saccard had turned pale.

‘Come now, you can’t be serious, this is a joke!… Why not just deport me straight off!… Oh yes, he wants to be rid of me. He’d better be careful or I might end up seriously embarrassing him.’

Huret sat there with his mouth full, looking conciliatory.

‘Come, come now, we only want what’s best for you, just let us get on with it.’

‘And allow myself to be wiped out, eh?… Well, just a little while back they were saying here that the Empire soon wouldn’t have any more mistakes left to make. Yes, after the Italian war, and Mexico, and the attitude to Prussia. My word, it’s the truth… You’ll do so many stupid and crazy things that the whole of France will rise up to kick you out.’

With that the Deputy, faithful servant of his minister, turned pale and looked about him anxiously.

‘Ah, please, allow me to say… I can’t go along with you there… Rougon is an honest man, there is no danger of that, so long as he is there… No, don’t say another word, you misjudge him, I must insist.’

Saccard interrupted him violently, controlling his voice between clenched teeth:

‘So be it, go on loving him, carry on cooking up plans with him… Yes or no, will he give me his support in Paris?’

‘In Paris, never!’

Without another word Saccard stood up and called the waiter over to pay the bill, while Huret, accustomed to his fits of rage, very calmly went on swallowing big mouthfuls of bread and let him go, for fear of a scene. But just then there was a great commotion in the room.

Gundermann had just come in, the banker-king, master of the Bourse and the world, a man of sixty, whose huge bald head, thick nose, and round, protruding eyes seemed to express immense obstinacy and weariness. He never went to the Bourse, even affecting not to send any official representative; nor did he ever eat in a public place.
Only once in a while he would happen, as on this day, to enter Champeaux’s restaurant and sit at one of the tables, to order just a glass of Vichy water, on a plate. For the last twenty years he had suffered from a gastric complaint, and the only food he took was milk.

The restaurant staff were immediately in a flurry to bring the glass of water, and all the diners kept their heads down. Moser, looking quite overwhelmed, gazed at this man who knew all the secrets and made the market go up or down as he pleased, the way God controls the thunder. Pillerault, having faith only in the irresistible force of a billion francs, greeted him. It was half-past twelve, and Mazaud, swiftly abandoning Amadieu, came back and bowed to the banker, who occasionally did him the honour of placing an order. Many of the brokers who were just leaving stopped and stood around the god, paying court with their spines respectfully inclined, in the midst of the clutter of messy tables; and watched with veneration as he took the glass of water and raised it with trembling hands to his colourless lips.

Some time back, during the land speculation on the Monceau plain, Saccard had had some disagreements, and even quite a quarrel, with Gundermann. They were incapable of getting on, the one a gambler full of passion, the other cold, sober, and logical. So the former, already angry and exasperated by this triumphant entrance, was leaving when the other called out to him:

‘Tell me, my dear friend, is it true? You’re leaving the world of business… Upon my soul, you’re doing the right thing. It’s just as well…’

Saccard received this like the lash of a whip across his face. He drew up his slight frame and replied in a voice as sharp as steel:

‘I am setting up a banking house with a capital of twenty-five million, and I expect to be calling on you soon.’

And he went out, leaving behind him the agitated hubbub of the room, where they were all jostling one another in their anxiety not to miss the opening of the Bourse. Oh! to be successful at last, and stamp on these people who were turning their backs on him, to engage in a struggle for power with this king of gold, and maybe one day bring him down! He hadn’t really made up his mind about launching his grand plan, and he was still surprised at the declaration which his need to respond had drawn from him. But would he be able to try his luck elsewhere, now that his brother was abandoning him, now
that men and even things seemed to be wounding him and throwing him back into the fight, like the bull that is led back, bleeding, into the ring?

For a moment he stood tremulously on the edge of the pavement. It was the busy time when all the life of Paris seems to pour into this central square between the Rue Montmartre and the Rue Richelieu, the two congested arteries carrying the crowds. From each of the four junctions at the four corners of the square flowed a constant, uninterrupted stream of vehicles, weaving their way along the road through the bustling mass of pedestrians. The two lines of cabs at the cab-stand along the railings kept breaking up and then re-forming; whilst on the Rue Vivienne the dealers’ victorias
*
stretched out in a close-packed line, with the coachmen on top, reins in hand, ready to whip the horses forward at the first command. The steps and the peristyle of the Bourse were overrun with swarming black overcoats; and from the kerb market, already set up and at work beneath the clock, came the clamour of buying and selling, the tidal surge of speculation, rising above the noisy rumble of the city. Passers-by turned their heads, impelled by both desire and fear of what was going on there, in that mysterious world of financial dealings into which French brains but rarely penetrate, a world of ruin and bankruptcy and sudden inexplicable fortunes, in the midst of all that barbaric shouting and gesticulation. And Saccard, on the edge of the stream, deafened by the distant voices and elbowed by the jostling bustle of the crowd, was dreaming once more of the royalty of gold in this home of every feverish passion, with the Bourse at its centre, beating, from one o’clock until three, like an enormous heart.

But since his downfall he had not dared to go back into the Bourse, and even now a feeling of wounded vanity, the certainty of being greeted as a failure, still prevented him from climbing the steps. Like a lover driven from the boudoir of a mistress whom he desires all the more, even while telling himself he detests her, he kept coming back irresistibly, making a tour of the colonnade on various pretexts, crossing the garden as if taking a leisurely walk in the shade of the chestnut trees. In this sort of dusty square with neither grass nor flowers, on the benches among the urinals and the newspaper stands, swarmed a mixed crowd of shady speculators and bareheaded local women suckling their babies; here he affected a nonchalant saunter but kept looking up, watching, furiously imagining he was laying siege to the
monument, surrounding it in an ever tighter circle, to re-enter it one day, in triumph.