Читать книгу Money (L'Argent) - Émile Zola - Страница 7

'No.'

'Delcambre!'

'Delcambre, the Public Prosecutor! that tall, dry man, so stiff and yellow! a future minister! Is it possible?'

Thereupon, in great good-humour, altogether enlivened, the pair separated with a vigorous handshake, after the one had reminded the other that he should take the liberty of calling on him shortly.

As soon as he found himself alone again, Saccard once more heard the loud voice of the Bourse, persistently swelling like that of the rising tide. He had turned the corner, and was making his way towards the Rue Vivienne, by this side of the Place, which through the complete absence of cafés has a more solemn aspect than any other. He passed the Chamber of Commerce, the Post Office, and the great advertising agencies, becoming more and more deafened, growing more and more feverish, as he drew nearer to the principal façade. And when by an oblique glance he could again command a view of the peristyle, he paused afresh as if reluctant to finish his circuit of the colonnade, to complete his investment of it. Here, where the footway broadened, life spread, burst forth upon him; torrents of customers invaded the cafés, the pastrycook's shop never emptied, and pedestrians were ever pausing, fascinated by the display in the shop windows, especially in those of a silversmith's establishment, which were all ablaze with large pieces of plate. And at the four cross-ways, at the four corners of the Place, the flood of cabs and wayfarers seemed to be increasing in inextricable entanglement; whilst the traffic at the omnibus station added to the block, and the carriages of the remisiers, ranged in a line, prevented access to the footway almost from one end of the railing to the other. Saccard's eyes, however, were fixed on the high steps, where frock-coats clustered in the sunlight. Then they were lifted towards the columns, towards the compact mass of speculators—the dense swarm, the blackness of which was scarcely relieved by the pale faces in the crowd. All were standing, no chairs could be seen; the curve formed by the coulisse under the clock could only be divined by the prevalent ebullition, the fury of gestures and words which made the very atmosphere quiver.

More calmness prevailed on the left, among a group of bankers, who were engaged either in arbitrage operations, in fixing the foreign exchange rates, or in negotiating English cheques, and whose ranks were continually being traversed by people on their way to the telegraph office. Speculators overflowed even from the side galleries, crowding and crushing together; and, leaning on the balustrades between the columns, there were some who presented belly or back, as if they were at home, or at a theatre, lolling against the velvet-upholstered front of a private box. The quivering and rumbling, like that of a steam-engine at work, was ever increasing, agitating the entire Bourse—subsiding only for a second to burst forth yet louder, in the same way as a flame may flicker and then flare high again. And gazing on it all, Saccard suddenly recognised the remisier Massias, who descended the steps at full speed and leaped into his carriage, the driver of which forthwith lashed his horse into a gallop.

Then Saccard felt his fists clench, and, violently tearing himself away, turned into the Rue Vivienne, which he crossed in order to reach the corner of the Rue Feydeau, where Busch's office was situated. He had just remembered the Russian letter which he had to get translated. As he was entering the house, however, a young man, standing in front of the stationer's shop on the ground floor, bowed to him, and he recognised Gustave Sédille, son of a silk manufacturer in the Rue des Jeûneurs, whom his father had placed with Mazaud, to study the mechanism of finance. Saccard smiled paternally upon this tall, elegant young fellow, strongly suspecting why he was mounting guard there. Conin's stationery shop had been supplying note-books to the entire Bourse since little Madame Conin had begun to help her husband—fat Conin, as he was called—who never left his back shop, there attending to the manufacturing part of his business, whilst she continually came and went, serving at the counter and doing errands outside. She was plump, blonde, and pink, a real curly-haired little sheep, with light silky hair, a pleasing, coaxing manner, and imperturbable gaiety. She was very fond of her husband, it was said, but this certainly did not prevent her from flirting with the gentlemen of the Bourse. As he passed, Saccard saw her smiling at Gustave through the window. What a pretty little sheep she was! The sight gave him a delightful sensation, akin to that of a caress. Then he at last went upstairs.

For twenty years Busch had occupied a small logement, comprising two chambers and a kitchen, high up, on the fifth floor. Born at Nancy, of German parents, he had come here from his native town, and had gradually extended the circle of his business, which was wonderfully complicated, without feeling the need of a larger office. Relinquishing the room overlooking the street to his brother Sigismond, he contented himself with a little chamber on this side of the courtyard of the house—a little chamber in which old papers, batches of documents, packages of all kinds were so piled up, that there was no room left except for a single chair beside the desk. One of his principal lines of business was a traffic in depreciated shares and debentures, thousands of which he collected together, serving as an intermediary between the Little Bourse of the 'Wet Feet' and the bankrupts embarrassed to account for their real or imaginary losses. He accordingly followed the market, at times buying direct, but more frequently supplied with batches of stock that were brought to him. In addition also to usury and a secret traffic in jewels and precious stones, he particularly occupied himself with the purchase of 'bad debts.' This it was that filled his office with old paper to overflowing, this it was that sent him forth to the four corners of Paris, sniffing and watching, with connections in all circles of society. As soon as he heard of a failure, he hurried off, prowled around the liquidator, and ended by buying up everything which could not immediately be realised. He kept a watch on the notaries' offices, looked out for inheritances difficult of settlement, and attended the sales of hopeless claims. He himself published advertisements, in this wise attracting impatient creditors who preferred to get a few coppers down rather than run the risk of prosecuting their debtors. And from all these manifold sources this chiffonnier of bad debts derived supply upon supply of paper, huge basketfuls, an ever-increasing pile of unpaid notes of hand, unfulfilled agreements, unredeemed acknowledgments of liability, unkept engagements of every kind. Then a sorting-out became necessary, a fork had to be thrust into this mess of broken victuals, a special and very delicate scent being required in the operation. To avoid waste of effort, it was necessary to make a choice in this ocean of debtors, who were either insolvent or had disappeared. In principle, Busch asserted that every claim, even the most seemingly hopeless, may some day become valuable again; and he had a series of portfolios, admirably classified, to which corresponded an index of names, which he read over from time to time to refresh his memory. However, naturally enough, among the insolvent ones, he more closely followed those who seemed to him to have near chances of fortune. Prosecuting his inquiries, he stripped people bare, discovered what means they possessed, penetrated family secrets, took note of all rich relatives, and especially of such newly-acquired situations as allowed of an attachment of salary. He thus often allowed a man to ripen for years, in order to strangle him at his first success. As for the debtors who disappeared, these stimulated him to yet greater energy, threw him into a fever of continual search, with his eyes on every signboard as he scoured the streets, and on every name printed in the newspapers. He hunted for addresses as a dog hunts for game, and as soon as he held the vanished and insolvent ones in his clutches, he became ferocious, clearing their pockets with bills of costs, sucking them dry, getting a hundred francs for what had cost him ten sous, brutally explaining the while what risks he ran as a speculator, forced to extort from those whom he caught all that he pretended to lose by those who slipped like smoke through his fingers.

In hunting for debtors, La Méchain was one of the helpers whom Busch was fondest of employing; for although he was obliged to have a little band of 'game-beaters' in his service, he lived in distrust of these disreputable, famishing assistants; whereas La Méchain had property of her own—an entire cité behind the Butte Montmartre, the Cité de Naples, as it was called, a vast tract of land covered with tumble-down shanties, which she let out by the month, a nook of frightful poverty, where starvelings were heaped together in filth, a crowd of pigsties which the wretched fought for, and whence she pitilessly swept away her tenants and their dung-heaps as soon as ever they ceased to pay her. However, her unfortunate passion for speculation consumed her, ate up all the profits of her cité. And she had also a taste for financial losses, ruins, and fires, amid which melted jewels can be stolen. When Busch charged her with obtaining some information, or ferreting out a debtor, she would sometimes even spend money out of her own pocket in view of furthering her researches, such was the pleasure she took in them. She called herself a widow, but no one had ever known her husband. She came, too, no one knew whence, and seemed always to have been about fifty years old, and monstrously fat, with the piping voice of a little girl.

On this occasion, as soon as La Méchain had taken her seat on the single chair in Busch's office, the room became full, blocked up by her mass of flesh. Busch stood like a prisoner at his desk, buried, as it were, with only his square head showing above the ocean of papers. 'Here,' said she, removing from her old bag the huge pile of papers that distended it, 'here is what Fayeux has sent me from Vendôme. He bought everything for you at that sale in connection with the Charpier failure, which you told me to call to his attention—one hundred and ten francs.'

Fayeux, whom she called her cousin, had just established an office down there as a collector of dividends. His ostensible business was to cash the coupons of the petty bondholders of the district; and, as the depositary of these coupons and the cash they yielded, he speculated in the most frenzied manner.

'The country isn't worth much,' muttered Busch, 'but there are discoveries to be made there all the same.'

He sniffed the papers, and began sorting them out with an expert hand, roughly classifying them in accordance with a first appraisement, in which he seemed to be guided by their mere smell. As he proceeded, his flat face grew dark, and he paused at last with an expression of disappointment.

'Humph! there is no fat here, nothing to bite. Fortunately it did not cost much. Here are some notes, and here some more. If they are signed by young people, who have come to Paris, we shall perhaps catch them.' Then, with a slight exclamation of surprise, he added: 'Hallo, what's this?'

At the bottom of a sheet of stamped paper he had just found the signature of the Count de Beauvilliers, and the sheet contained only three lines of large handwriting, evidently traced by an old man: 'I promise to pay the sum of ten thousand francs to Mademoiselle Léonie Cron on the day she attains her majority.

'The Count de Beauvilliers,' he slowly continued, thinking aloud; 'yes, he had several farms, quite a large estate, in the vicinity of Vendôme. He died of a hunting accident, leaving a wife and two children in straitened circumstances. I held some of his notes formerly, which with difficulty I got them to pay—he was a wild droll, not good for much——'

Suddenly he burst into a loud laugh, reconstructing in his mind the story attaching to the note.

'Ah! the old sharper, he played the little one a nice trick with this bit of paper, which is legally valueless. Then he died. Let me see, this is dated 1854, ten years ago. The girl must be of age now. But how could this acknowledgment have got into Charpier's hands? He was a grain merchant, who lent money by the week. No doubt the girl left this on deposit with him in order to get a few crowns, or perhaps he had undertaken to collect it.'

'But this is very good,' interrupted La Méchain—'a real stroke of luck.'

Busch shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. 'Oh no, I tell you that it is legally worth nothing. If I should present it to the heirs, they may send me about my business, for it would be necessary to prove that the money is really due. Only, if we find the girl, I may induce them to be reasonable, and come to an understanding with us, in order to avoid a disagreeable scandal. You understand? Look for this Léonie Cron; write to Fayeux, and tell him to hunt her up down there. That done, we may perhaps have a laugh.'

He had made two piles of the papers, with the intention of thoroughly examining them when he should be alone, and now sat motionless, with his hands open, one resting on each pile.

A spell of silence followed; then La Méchain resumed: 'I have been attending to the Jordan notes. I really thought that I had found our man again. He has been employed somewhere, and now he is writing for the newspapers. But they receive you so badly at the newspaper offices; they refuse to give you addresses. And besides, I think that he does not sign his articles with his real name.'

Without a word, Busch had stretched out his arm to take the Jordan portfolio from its place. It contained six notes of hand of fifty francs each, dated five years back and maturing monthly—a total sum of three hundred francs—which the young man had undertaken to pay to a tailor in days of poverty. Unpaid on presentation, however, the capital sum had been swollen by enormous costs, and the portfolio fairly overflowed with formidable legal documents. At the present time the debt had increased to the sum of seven hundred and thirty francs and fifteen centimes. 'If he has a future before him,' muttered Busch, 'we shall catch him one of these days.' Then, some sequence of ideas undoubtedly forming in his mind, he exclaimed: 'And that Sicardot affair, are we going to abandon it?'

La Méchain lifted her fat arms to heaven with a gesture of anguish. A ripple of despair seemed to course through her monstrous person. 'Oh, Lord!' she wailed, with her piping voice, 'it will cost me my very skin.'

This Sicardot affair was a very romantic story which she delighted to tell. A cousin of hers, Rosalie Chavaille, a daughter of her father's sister, living with her mother in a small lodging on the sixth floor of a house in the Rue de la Harpe, had fallen a victim to a married man, who occupied with his wife a room sublet to him on the second floor. There were some abominable circumstances in connection with the affair, but the girl's mother, consenting to silence, had merely required that the evil-doer should pay her the sum of six hundred francs, divided into twelve notes of fifty francs each, payable monthly. Before the first month was at an end, however, the man—an individual of gentlemanly appearance—had disappeared, and all trace of him was lost, whilst misfortunes continued falling thick as hail. Rosalie gave birth to a boy, lost her mother, and fell into a life of vice and abject poverty. Stranded in the Cité de Naples, her cousin's property, she had dragged about the streets till the age of twenty-six; but at last, during the previous year, she had been lucky enough to die, leaving behind her her son Victor, whom La Méchain had to keep; and of the whole adventure there only remained the twelve unpaid notes of hand. They had never been able to learn more of the individual who had signed them than that he called himself Sicardot.

With a fresh gesture, Busch took down the Sicardot papers, contained in a thin grey paper wrapper. No costs had accumulated, so there were merely the twelve notes.

'If Victor were only a nice child!' explained the old woman in a sorrowful voice. 'But he's dreadful! Ah! it is hard to be encumbered with such inheritances—an urchin who will end on the scaffold, and those bits of paper which will never bring me anything!'

Busch kept his big pale eyes obstinately fixed upon the notes. How many times already had he thus studied them, hoping that some hitherto unnoticed detail, something in the form of the letters, or in the grain of the stamped paper, would supply him with a clue! He asserted at times that that fine, pointed handwriting was not altogether unknown to him. 'It is curious,' he repeated once more, 'I am certain that I have somewhere already seen such a's and o's as these, so elongated that they resemble i's.'

Just then there came a knock; and he asked La Méchain to stretch out her hand to open the door, for the room communicated direct with the staircase. You had to cross it in order to reach the second chamber, the one that overlooked the street. As for the kitchen, this was a stifling hole on the other side of the landing.

'Come in, monsieur,' said La Méchain, and Saccard entered. He was smiling, inwardly amused by the copper plate screwed upon the door, and bearing in large letters the words: 'Disputed Claims.'

'Oh yes, Monsieur Saccard, you have come for that translation—my brother is there in the other room. Come in, pray come in.'

La Méchain, however, absolutely barred the passage, and scrutinised the new-comer with an air of increasing surprise. No end of manœuvring was necessary for Saccard to effect an entrance; he had to retreat to the stairs again whilst she stepped out, and drew back on the landing, so that he might pass in and finally reach the adjoining room, into which he disappeared. During these complicated movements, La Méchain had not once taken her eyes off him.

'Oh!' she faintly gasped, like one sorely oppressed, 'this Monsieur Saccard, I never had so near a view of him before. Victor is the perfect image of him.'

Busch looked at her, at first failing to understand; then a sudden light dawned upon his mind, and in a stifled voice he swore: 'Thunder! that's it; I knew very well that I had seen that handwriting somewhere.'

And this time he rose, rummaged among his batches of papers, and at last found a letter that Saccard had written him during the previous year to ask him for an extension of time in favour of an insolvent lady. He quickly compared the handwriting of the notes with that of this letter. The a's and the o's were clearly the same, though they had grown yet more pointed with the lapse of time; and there was also a marked similarity between the capital letters.

'It is he, it is he,' he repeated. 'Only, let me see, why Sicardot? Why not Saccard?'

In his mind, however, there awoke a confused recollection of some story of Saccard's past—a story which an agent, named Larsonneau, now a millionaire, had once told him: Saccard tumbling into Paris on the day after the coup d'état, coming there to exploit the rising power of his brother Rougon; then, first of all, his poverty in the dingy streets of the old Latin Quarter; next, his rapidly acquired fortune, under cover of a disreputable marriage, when he had been lucky enough to lose his first wife. It was at the time of those difficult beginnings that he had changed his name from Rougon to Saccard, by simply transforming his first wife's name, which was Sicardot.

'Yes, yes, Sicardot; I remember perfectly,' muttered Busch. 'He had the effrontery to sign notes with his wife's name. No doubt the family assumed that name when they came to the Rue de la Harpe. And then the rascal took all sorts of precautions, ready to move at the slightest alarm. Ah! so he was not only hunting for money; well, well, one of these days his doings will cost him dear.'

'Hush! hush!' resumed La Méchain. 'We have him now, and well may one say that there is indeed a Providence. At last, then, I am to be rewarded for all that I have done for that poor little Victor, whom I dearly love all the same, in spite of the fact that there is nothing to be done with him.'

She was radiant; her little eyes sparkled amid all the melting, puffy flesh of her face.

Busch, however, after the momentary fever attending this long-sought-for solution, brought to him by chance, grew cold again as he reflected, and shook his head. Undoubtedly. Saccard, although ruined for the moment, was still good to shear. One might have fallen upon a less desirable father. Only he would not allow himself to be annoyed; he had terrible teeth. And besides, he was certainly unaware that he had an illegitimate son; he might deny it, in spite of the extraordinary resemblance that had so astounded La Méchain. Moreover, he was now for the second time a widower, free, under no obligation to account for his past to anyone, so that, even if he should acknowledge the child, there was no threat that could be utilised against him. As for merely realising the six hundred francs which the notes represented, that would be really too paltry a stroke; the miraculous help which chance had brought must be turned to better account than that. He must reflect, nurse the affair, find a way of cutting the crop at harvest time, and not before. 'We mustn't be in a hurry,' he concluded. 'Besides, he is down; let us give him time to get up again.'

And, before dismissing La Méchain, he finished dealing with the little matters with which she was charged—a young woman who had pawned her jewels for her lover; a son-in-law whose debt would be paid by his mother-in-law, if they could find a way to work it; in short, some of the most delicate varieties of the complex and difficult business of collecting bad debts.

Saccard, on entering the adjoining room, had stood for a second dazzled by the bright light that streamed in through the sunny window panes, unhindered by any curtain. This room, with its walls covered with paper bearing a design of blue flowrets on a light background, was almost bare; there was merely a little iron bedstead in one corner, a deal table in the middle, and two straw-bottomed chairs. Along the partition on the left, some planks, scarcely planed, served as a bookcase, loaded with volumes, pamphlets, journals, and papers of all sorts. But the broad sunlight at this height imparted to all the bareness a sort of youthful gaiety, a smile of artless freshness. And Busch's brother, Sigismond, a beardless fellow of five and thirty, with long, scanty, chestnut hair, was sitting at the table, his broad, bumpy forehead buried in his thin hand, so absorbed in his perusal of a manuscript that he did not turn his head, not having heard the door open.

He was an intelligent man was this Sigismond, educated in the German universities, and speaking not only French, his mother tongue, but German, English, and Russian. He had made the acquaintance of Karl Marx at Cologne in 1849, and had become the most highly prized of the contributors to the 'New Rhenish Gazette.' From that moment his religion had been fixed; he professed Socialism with an ardent faith, giving his entire being to the idea of an approaching social renovation, which would assure the happiness of the poor and humble. Since his master, banished from Germany, and forced to leave Paris after the days of June, had been living in London, writing and trying to organise the party, Sigismond, on his side, had vegetated in his dreams, so careless as to his material life that he would surely have perished of hunger had his brother not taken him to live with him in the Rue Feydeau, near the Bourse, with the idea that he might utilise his knowledge of languages as a professional translator. This elder brother adored his junior with a maternal passion. Ferocious wolf though he was towards debtors, quite capable of wading through blood that he might steal half a franc, he was straightway moved to tears and evinced all the passionate, minute tenderness of a woman whenever this tall, absent-minded fellow, who had remained a child, was in question. He had given him the fine room overlooking the street, he served him as a domestic, and took entire charge of their strange household, sweeping the floors, making the beds, and ordering the food which a little restaurant in the neighbourhood sent up twice a day. Moreover, he so active, with his head full of a thousand business matters, not merely suffered his brother to remain idle—for, thwarted by private writing, very few translations were made—but he even forbade him to work, anxious as he was concerning an ominous little cough. And in spite of his stern love of money, his murderous greed, which converted money-making into the sole motive of life, he smiled indulgently at the theories of this revolutionist, relinquishing capital to him like a toy to a child, at the risk of seeing him break it.

On his side, Sigismond did not even know what his brother did in the next room. He was utterly ignorant of all that frightful traffic in depreciated stock, and of the purchase of bad debts; he lived in a loftier region, in a sovereign dream of justice. The idea of charity wounded his feelings, made him angry: charity was alms, inequality consecrated by kindness, and he admitted nought but justice, the rights of each individual man regained and adopted as the unchangeable principles of the new social organisation. And thus, following the example of Karl Marx, with whom he was in constant correspondence, he spent his days in studying this organisation, incessantly modifying and improving upon paper the society of to-morrow, covering immense pages with figures, building up on the basis of science the whole complicated scaffolding of universal happiness. He took capital from some, to distribute it among all the others; he moved billions, displaced the wealth of the world with a stroke of his pen; and this he did in that bare room, without any other passion than his dream, without any desire of enjoyment to satisfy, so frugal that his brother had to get angry in order to make him drink wine and eat meat. He desired that the labour of every man, measured according to his strength, should assure the satisfaction of his appetites; but, for his own part, he was killing himself with work, and living upon nothing—a real sage, exalted in his studious occupations, disengaged from material life, very gentle and very pure. Since the previous autumn, however, he had been coughing more and more; consumption was seizing hold of him, but he did not even condescend to notice it and nurse himself.

Saccard having made a movement, Sigismond at last raised his large vague eyes, and was astonished, although he knew the visitor.

'I have come to get a letter translated.'

The young man's surprise increased, for he had done all he could to discourage his customers, the bankers, speculators, and brokers, all that circle of the Bourse who receive, especially from England and Germany, so many communications on financial matters, company prospectuses and statutes, circulars, and so forth.

'Yes, a letter in Russian. Oh! only ten lines long.'

Thereupon Sigismond stretched out his hand, Russian having remained his speciality, he alone translating it rapidly among all the other translators of the neighbourhood, who mainly lived by German and English. The rarity of Russian documents in the Paris market explained his long periods of idleness.

He read the letter aloud in French. It was, in three sentences, a favourable reply from a Constantinople banker, a simple yes as to a matter of business.

'Ah! thank you,' exclaimed Saccard, who seemed delighted; and he asked Sigismond to write the few lines of translation on the back of the letter. But Sigismond was seized with a terrible fit of coughing, which he stifled in his handkerchief, in order not to disturb his brother, who always ran in whenever he heard him cough in that way. Then, the attack over, he rose and went to open the window wide, for he was stifling, and wished to breathe the air. Saccard, who had followed him, gave a glance outside, and raised a slight exclamation: 'Oh! so you see the Bourse? How queer it looks from here!'

Never in fact had he seen it under such a singular aspect, in a bird's-eye view, with the four vast zinc slopes of its roof extraordinarily developed and bristling with a forest of pipes. The lightning-rods rose erect like gigantic lances threatening the sky. And the edifice itself was nothing but a cube of stone, streaked with columns at regular intervals, a bare, ugly cube of a dirty gray hue, surmounted by a ragged flag. But, above all else, the steps and the peristyle astonished him, covered with black ants, a swarm of ants in revolution, all agog, in a state of wonderful commotion, which was not to be explained from such a height, and prompted a feeling of pity.

'How small they all look!' continued Saccard; 'it seems as if one could take the whole of them in the hand, with one grip.' Then, knowing his companion's ideas, he added with a laugh: 'When are you going to sweep all that away with a kick?'

Sigismond shrugged his shoulders. 'What is the use? You are demolishing yourselves fast enough.'

Then, little by little, he became animated, overflowing with the subject he was full of. A proselytising spirit launched him, at the slightest word, into an exposition of his system. 'Yes, yes, you are working for us without suspecting it,' said he. 'You are a few usurpers, who expropriate the mass of the people, and when you have gorged yourselves we shall only have to expropriate you in our turn. Every monopoly, every phase of centralisation, leads to collectivism. You are setting us a practical example, in the same way as the large estates absorbing the small patches of land, the large producers devouring the petty home industries, the great financial establishments and great stores killing all competition, and battening on the ruin of the little banks and the little shops, are slowly but surely leading towards the new social state. We are waiting for everything to crack, for the existing method of production to end in the intolerable disorder which will be its ultimate consequence. Then the bourgeois and the peasants themselves will aid us.'

Saccard, feeling interested, looked at him with a vague anxiety, although he took him for a madman. 'But come, explain to me, what is this collectivism of yours?'

'Collectivism is the transformation of private capital, living by the struggle of competition, into a unitary social capital, exploited by the labour of all. Imagine a society in which the instruments of production will be the property of all, in which everybody will work according to his intelligence and strength, and in which the products of this social co-operation will be distributed to each in proportion to his effort! There can be nothing more simple, eh? Common production in the factories, yards, and workshops of the nation! Then an exchange, a payment in kind! If there should be over-production, the surplus will be lodged in public warehouses, from which it will be taken to fill up any deficits that may arise. One will have to strike a balance. And this, like one blow of an axe, will fell the rotten tree. No more competition, no more private capital, and, therefore, no more "business" of any kind—neither commerce, nor markets, nor Bourses. The idea of profit will thenceforth have no meaning. The sources of speculation, of incomes acquired without work, will be dried up.'

'Oh! oh!' interrupted Saccard, 'that would change many people's habits, and no mistake! But what would you do with those who have incomes to-day? Gundermann, for instance, would you take away his milliard?'

'Not at all; we are not robbers. We should redeem his milliard, all his shares, debentures, and State bonds, with certificates of enjoyment, divided into annuities. And just imagine this immense capital thus replaced by an overwhelming wealth of articles of consumption: in less than a century your Gundermann's descendants would, like other citizens, be reduced to personal labour; for the annuities would finally become exhausted, and they would not have been able to capitalise their forced economies, the overplus of their overwhelming supply of articles of consumption, even admitting that the right of inheritance should be left untouched. I tell you that this would at one stroke sweep away, not only individual enterprises, companies, syndicates, and so forth, but also all the indirect sources of income, all systems of credit, loans, rentals, and so on. Nothing but labour would be left as a measure of value. Wages would naturally be suppressed, for in the present capitalistic system they are never equivalent to the exact product of labour; but at the utmost represent no more than is strictly necessary for the labourer's daily maintenance.[9] And it must be admitted that the existing system alone is guilty in the matter, that the most honest employer is clearly forced to follow the stern law of competition, to exploit his workmen, if he himself wishes to live. We have to destroy our entire social system. Ah! just think of it, Gundermann stifling under the burden of his certificates of enjoyment, his heirs unable to consume everything, obliged to give to others, and to take up the pick or the chisel, like other comrades!'

Thereupon Sigismond burst into a good-natured laugh, like a child at play, still standing by the window, with his eyes fixed on the Bourse, where swarmed the black ant-hill of speculation. A burning flush was rising to his cheeks; he had no other amusement than to picture in this wise the comical ironies of to-morrow's justice.

Saccard's uneasiness had increased. Suppose this wide-awake dreamer were after all speaking the truth. Suppose he had divined the future. He explained things that seemed very clear and sensible. 'Bah!' muttered Saccard, as though to reassure himself, 'all that won't happen next year.'

'Certainly not,' rejoined the young man, again becoming serious and weary. 'We are in the transition period, the period of agitation. There will perhaps be revolutionary violences; they are often inevitable. But the exaggerations and outbursts are temporary. Oh! I do not conceal the great immediate difficulties. All this future that I dream of seems impossible. It is difficult to give people a reasonable idea of this future society, the society of just labour, whose morals will be so different to ours. It is like another world in another planet. And then, it must be confessed, the scheme of reorganisation is not ready; we are still hunting for it. I, who now scarcely sleep at all, exhaust my nights in searching. For instance, it is certain that our adversaries can say to us: "If things are as they are, it is because the logic of human actions has made them so." Hence, what a task to take the river back to its source, and direct it into another valley! The existing social system certainly owes its centuries of prosperity to the individualist principle, which emulation and personal interest endow with a fertility of production that is ever being renewed. Will collectivism ever attain to such fertility, and by what means are we to stimulate the productive functions of the workman when the idea of profit shall have been destroyed? There, to my mind, lies the doubt, the anguish, the weak point over which we must fight, if we wish the victory of Socialism to be some day won. But we shall conquer, because we are Justice. There! you see that building in front of you? You see it?'

'The Bourse?' said Saccard. 'Why, yes, of course I see it.'

'Well, it would be stupid to blow it up, because it would be rebuilt. Only I predict to you that it will go up of itself when the State shall have expropriated it, and have become the sole universal bank of the nation; and, who knows? perhaps it will then serve as a public warehouse for our surplus wealth, as one of the store-houses where our grandchildren will find the necessary supply of luxury for their days of festivity.'

Thus, with a sweeping comprehensive gesture, did Sigismond reveal this future of universal average happiness. And he had become so excited that a fresh fit of coughing shook him, and sent him back to his table, with his elbows among his papers and his head in his hands, striving to stifle the harsh rattle in his throat. But this time he did not succeed in stopping it. The door suddenly opened, and Busch, having dismissed La Méchain, ran in with a bewildered air, suffering himself at the sound of that abominable cough. He at once leaned over, and took his brother in his long arms, as one takes hold of a child to soothe its pain.

'Come, youngster,' said he, 'what is the matter with you, that you are stifling like this? You know I wish you to send for a doctor. This isn't reasonable. You surely must have talked too much.'

And thereupon he darted a side glance at Saccard, who had remained in the middle of the room, quite upset by what he had just heard from the lips of that tall fellow, so passionate and so ill, who from his window on high doubtless cast a spell over the Bourse with all his stories of sweeping everything away, in order to build up everything afresh.

'Thanks; I leave you,' said the visitor, in a hurry to get outside again. 'Send me my letter, with the ten lines of translation. I expect some others, and we will settle for them all together.'

The attack being over, however, Busch detained him a moment longer. 'By the way,' said he, 'the lady who was here just now used to know you—oh! a long time ago.'

'Ah! where was that?'

'In the Rue de la Harpe, in '52.'

Despite his usual perfect mastery over himself, Saccard turned pale. A nervous twitch distorted his mouth. Not that he, at that minute, remembered the girl whom he had wronged; he had never even known of her becoming a mother, he was ignorant of the existence of the child. But he always greatly disliked being reminded of the wretched years of his début in life.

'Rue de la Harpe! Oh! I only lived there a week, at the time of my arrival in Paris, just long enough to look for rooms. Au revoir!'

'Au revoir!' emphatically answered Busch, who deceived himself with the idea that Saccard's embarrassment implied confession, and who was already wondering how largely he might profit by the adventure.

On finding himself in the street, Saccard mechanically turned back towards the Place de la Bourse. He was trembling, and did not even look at little Madame Conin, whose pretty blonde face was smiling in the doorway of the stationery shop. The agitation had increased on the Place; it was with uncurbed flood-tide violence that the clamour of the speculators swept across the roadway to the footwalks swarming with people. It was the last roar, the roar which bursts forth as soon as the clock points to a quarter to three, the battle of the last quotations, the rageful longing to know who will come away with his pockets full. And, standing at the corner of the Rue de la Bourse, opposite the peristyle, Saccard fancied that, amid all the confused jostling under the columns he could recognise 'bear' Moser and 'bull' Pillerault quarrelling, and that he could hear the shrill voice of broker Mazaud coming from the depths of the great hall, but drowned occasionally by the shouts of Nathansohn, sitting under the clock in the coulisse. However, a vehicle, fringing the gutter as it drove up, came near spattering him with mud. Massias leaped out, even before the driver had stopped, and darted up the steps at a bound, bringing, quite out of breath, some customer's last order.

And Saccard, still motionless and erect, with his eyes fixed on the mêlée above him, ruminated over his life, haunted by the memory of his beginnings, which Busch's question had just awakened. He recalled the Rue de la Harpe, and then the Rue Saint-Jacques, through which he had dragged his boots, worn down at heel, on arriving in Paris to subdue it like a conquering adventurer; and a fury seized him at the thought that he had not subdued it yet, that he was again upon the pavement, still watching for fortune, still unsatisfied, tortured by such an appetite for enjoyment that never had he suffered more. That mad fellow Sigismond was right: labour cannot give one life; merely wretches and fools labour, to fatten the others. There was only gambling that was worth anything—gambling which in one afternoon can at one stroke bring comfort, luxury, life, broad and entire. Even if this old social world were fated to crumble some day, could not a man like himself still find time and room to satisfy his desires before the Downfall?

But just then a passer-by jostled him without even turning to apologise. He looked, and recognised Gundermann taking his little walk for his health, and saw him enter a confectioner's, whence this gold king sometimes brought a franc box of bonbons to his grand-daughters. And that elbow-thrust, at that minute, in the fit of fever that had been rising in him since he had begun the circuit of the Bourse, was like the whip-stroke, the last shove that determined him. He had completed his investment of the fortress, now he would make the assault. He swore to begin a merciless struggle; he would not leave France, he would defy his brother, he would play the final rubber, a battle of terrible audacity, which should either put Paris beneath his heels or throw him into the gutter with a broken back.

Until the moment when the Bourse closed Saccard obstinately lingered there, erect at his post of menace and observation. He watched the peristyle clearing, the steps blackening again as the whole fagged, heated crowd slowly scattered. Both on the foot and roadways around him the block continued—an endless flow of people, the eternal crowd of future victims, the investors of to-morrow, who could not pass that great lottery office of speculation without turning their heads, curious and fearful as to what might be going on there, as to all those mysterious financial operations which are the more attractive to French brains as they are penetrated by so few of them.