Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (29 page)

‘You will tell him, won’t you, Madame, that somewhere there’s a poor woman praying for him… Oh, it’s not that I’m religious, I don’t want to lie, I’ve never been a hypocrite. No, between the churches and us it’s all over, we don’t even think of them any more, they never did us any good, going there was just a waste of time… But even so that doesn’t mean there isn’t something up above us, and it’s somehow comforting, when someone has been kind, to call down the blessings of Heaven upon him.’

Her tears overflowed, rolling down her withered cheeks.

‘Listen to me, Madeleine, listen…’

The little girl, so pale in her snow-white nightdress, licking the jam off her bread with the tip of a greedy tongue while her eyes shone with happiness, raised her head and listened carefully, without interrupting her treat.

‘Every night, before going to sleep in your bed, you will put your hands together like this and you’ll say: “Lord, please let Monsieur Saccard be rewarded for his goodness; may he have a long and happy life.” D’you hear? You promise?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

In the weeks that followed Madame Caroline lived in a state of great moral agitation. She no longer knew what to think about Saccard. The story of Victor’s birth and abandonment, that unfortunate Rosalie, seized on the step of a staircase with such violence that she had been left disabled, the promissory notes signed and never paid, and the unfortunate fatherless child growing up in such filth—all of that deplorable past made her sick at heart. She thrust aside the images that arose from that past, just as she had not wanted to provoke any indiscretions from Maxime; there were certainly some bad things in earlier years that frightened her and would, she thought, have given her too much pain. But then there was this woman in tears, joining together the hands of her little girl, making her pray for this man, this Saccard, adored like the God of all goodness and in fact truly good, having really saved souls in that passionate businesslike activity of his, which became virtue when the work he was doing was virtuous. So she ended up unwilling to judge him and telling herself, to ease her conscience as a well-informed woman who had done too much reading and
thinking, that in him, as in all men, there was both the best and the worst.

However, she had a secret pang of shame at the thought that he had possessed her. That still astounded her, but she reassured herself, vowing that it was over and done with, and that such a momentary surprise could never happen again. And three months went by, during which she went twice a week to see Victor, and one evening she found herself once more in the arms of Saccard, definitively his mistress and allowing it to become a settled relationship. What was happening to her? Was she, like so many others, just curious? Was it those shady love affairs of yesteryear that she had stirred up that had given her the desire for sensual knowledge? Or was it rather the child who had become the link, the fatal bond, between her, the mother through chance and adoption, and him, the father? Yes, it must have been just a distorted effect of sentiment. In her great sorrow at being childless, looking after the child of this man in such poignant circumstances must have touched her so deeply as to overthrow her will. Each time she saw him again she gave herself more freely to him, and her frustrated maternal longings lay at the heart of her abandon. Besides, she was a woman of clear common sense, and she could accept the facts of life without wearing herself out trying to explain their myriad complex causes. For her, that sort of untangling of mind and heart, that refined hair-splitting analysis, was only an entertainment for society ladies with nothing to do, no household to manage and no child to love, phoney intellectuals who try to find excuses for their sins and try to mask, with their science of the soul, the appetites of the flesh, common to duchesses and barmaids. She, with her overload of erudition, who had once wasted her time ardently longing to understand the whole vast world and join in the disputes of the philosophers, she had emerged from all that with a great disdain for those psychological pastimes that tend to serve as replacements for piano-playing and embroidery, and which, she would say with a laugh, had depraved more women than they cured. So, on those days when there seemed to be holes in her very self and she felt there had been a breakdown in her free will, she preferred, having once acknowledged it, to have the courage to accept the facts; and she relied on the work of life itself to remove the stain and repair the damage, just as the ever-rising sap of an oak tree renews both its wood and its bark. If she was now Saccard’s mistress, without having
intended it and without being at all sure she respected him, she picked herself up again from this fall with the thought that he was not unworthy of her, charmed as she was by his qualities as a man of action, his energy for conquest, and believing him to be kind and helpful to others. Her initial shame had disappeared in that instinctive need one has to purify one’s faults, and nothing was in fact more natural and peaceful than their relationship: a liaison more of reason than passion, he happy to have her there in the evening when he was not going out, and she almost maternal with her soothing affection, her lively intelligence, and her honesty. And for this rogue of the Paris streets, scorched and toughened in every kind of financial swindle, it was really an undeserved stroke of luck, a reward stolen like everything else, to have as his own this adorable woman who at thirty-six was so young and healthy under the snowy mass of her thick white hair, a woman of such bold good sense and natural wisdom, with her faith in life just as it is, in spite of all the mud it carries in its flow.

Months went by, and it must be said that throughout all the difficult initial period of setting up the Universal Bank Madame Caroline found Saccard very energetic and very prudent. Her suspicions about shady deals, her fears that he might compromise her brother and herself, vanished entirely on seeing him constantly struggling with difficulties, exerting himself from morning to night to ensure the perfect operation of this great new engine, with its machinery grating as if about to explode; and she was grateful, she admired him. The Universal Bank was not in fact working as he would have wished, for it had to contend with the silent hostility of the major banks: ugly rumours were circulating, new obstacles constantly arose, immobilizing the capital and prohibiting big profitable ventures. So Saccard had made a virtue of the slow progress to which he had been reduced, moving forward one step at a time on solid ground, looking out for pitfalls, and too busy avoiding a fall to dare launching himself into the hazards of speculation. He was eaten up with impatience, pawing the ground like a racehorse made to trot along slowly; but never had the early days of a new bank been more honourable and correct, and the whole of the stock exchange was talking about it in astonishment.

So it was that they reached the time for the first General Meeting of shareholders. It had been fixed for 25 April.
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On the 20th Hamelin arrived from the East to chair the meeting, having been hastily summoned by Saccard, who was suffocating in the restricted space of the
bank. Hamelin, anyway, brought excellent news; contracts had been agreed for the formation of the United Steamboat Company, he had acquired concessions granting the exploitation of the Carmel Silver Mines to a French company; in addition there was the Turkish National Bank, for which he had just laid the foundations in Constantinople, and which would be a real branch of the Universal. As for the big question of the Asia Minor Railways, that had not yet matured so must be set aside for the present; he would have to go back to continue his research, the day after the General Meeting. Saccard was delighted and had a long conversation with Hamelin and Madame Caroline, and he had no trouble convincing them that an increase in the company’s capital was an absolute necessity if they were to provide adequately for these ventures. The most important shareholders, Daigremont, Huret, Sédille, and Kolb, had been consulted and had approved the increase, so the proposal could be studied and presented to the board on the very eve of the meeting of shareholders.

This Extraordinary Meeting was a solemn affair, with all the directors present in the austere room, tinged with green by the tall trees of the adjoining Beauvilliers garden. There were normally two meetings a month; the small, but most important meeting on the 15th, when only the top people, the business executives, would attend; and the big meeting, the ceremonial meeting, around the 30th, to which everyone came, the silent directors and the merely ornamental ones, to approve what had already been arranged and append their signatures. That day the Marquis de Bohain, with his little aristocratic head, was one of the first to arrive, bringing with him, in his grand air of weariness, the approval of all the nobility of France. And the Viscount de Robin-Chagot, the vice-president, a man at once affable and avaricious, was given the task of looking out for the directors who had not been pre-advised and taking them aside to give them the orders of the manager, the real master. It was all a matter of course, and they all indicated their compliance with a nod.

At last the session began. Hamelin made known to the board the report he was to read at the Annual General Meeting. This was the big task Saccard had been working on for some time, and he had just written it up in two days, adding the notes that Hamelin had brought; and he was now modestly listening to it with an air of lively interest, as if it were all entirely new to him. The report began by outlining the transactions of the Universal Bank since its foundation: they had all
been good, just minor, everyday matters, carried out from one day to the next, the usual banking routine. However, handsome profits were expected on the Mexican loan, which had been launched the month before, after the Emperor Maximilian’s departure for Mexico: a very muddled loan, with crazy premiums, and Saccard bitterly regretted not having been able to get deeper into it for lack of funds. All this was no more than ordinary, but the bank had survived. For its first period, which was only three months, from its foundation on 5 October to 31 December, the total profits only amounted to slightly more than four hundred thousand francs, which had allowed the bank to pay off a quarter of the start-up expenses, pay the shareholders their five per cent, and put ten per cent into the reserve fund; in addition, the directors had taken the ten per cent granted by the company’s statutes, and there remained a sum of about sixty-eight thousand francs carried over to the next financial period. But there had been no dividend. Nothing could have been more ordinary and honourable than this. It was the same with the share-prices of the Universal on the Bourse: they had slowly and steadily risen from five hundred to six hundred francs in the normal way, like the share-prices of any self-respecting bank; and over the last two months they had remained stationary, there being nothing to raise them any further in the petty everyday dealings in which the new banking-house seemed to be quietly dormant.

Then the report moved on to the future, and now there was a sudden expansion, with a vast horizon opening on to a whole series of grand ventures. The report laid particular emphasis on the United General Steamboat Company, the shares of which were to be issued by the Universal: a company with a capital of fifty million, which would have a monopoly of all the transport services of the Mediterranean and would be joined by the two main rival companies, the Phocean for the service through the Piraeus and the Dardanelles for Constantinople, Smyrna and Trebizond, and the Maritime Company for Alexandria, via Messina and Syria, as well as some minor banking institutions which would also join the association, Combarel and Co. for Algeria and Tunisia, Veuve Henri Liotard also for Algeria, via Spain and Morocco, and finally the Féraud-Giraud Brothers for Italy, via Civitavecchia for Naples and the cities of the Adriatic. In creating one single company out of all these rival firms and banks that had been killing each other off, they were taking over the whole of the
Mediterranean. Thanks to the centralization of the capital they would be able to build their own boats of unprecedented speed and comfort, the services would be more frequent, and new ports of call would be created, making the Orient a suburb of Marseilles; and what importance might not the company later acquire when, with the completion of the Suez Canal, it would be able to create services for India, Tonkin,
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China and Japan! Never had there been a safer or more wide-ranging enterprise. The next thing would be the supporting of the Turkish National Bank, on which the report provided lengthy technical details, all demonstrating its unshakeable solidity. And this outline of future operations ended with the announcement that the Universal was also taking under its wing the French Carmel Silver Mines Company, with a capital of twenty million francs. Laboratory tests indicated a substantial proportion of silver in the samples of ore examined. But even more than science, the ancient poetry of the Holy Land seemed to send that silver streaming down like a miraculous rain-shower, a divine and dazzling idea that Saccard had used at the end of a sentence and with which he was well pleased.

Finally, after all these promises of a glorious future, the report concluded with the matter of the increase of capital. It would be doubled, raised from twenty-five to fifty million. The system adopted for the issue was of the utmost simplicity, so that everyone could easily understand it: fifty thousand new shares would be created and would be reserved, share by share, for the bearers of the fifty thousand initial shares; so there would not even be a public subscription. But these new shares would be five hundred and twenty francs, inclusive of a premium of twenty francs, making a total sum of one million which would be carried over to the reserve fund. It was quite fair, and indeed prudent, to impose this small tax on the shareholders, since they were being favoured in the new issue. Besides, only a quarter of the price of the shares, plus the premium, would have to be paid on issue.

When Hamelin came to the end of the report a great hubbub of approval arose. It was perfect, no further comment was required. During the whole time of the reading, Daigremont, absorbed in a careful examination of his nails, had occasionally smiled at various vague thoughts; and the deputy Huret, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, was half asleep, thinking himself at the Chamber of Deputies; while Kolb, the banker, had calmly, taking no pains to hide
the fact, embarked on a lengthy calculation upon the sheets of paper that he, like every other director, had on the table before him. Sédille, however, anxious and distrustful as ever, decided to ask a question: what would happen to the shares abandoned by shareholders who chose not to exercise their right? Would the company hold them on its own account, and wouldn’t this be illegal, since the legal declaration of increased capital could not be made by the lawyer until the whole of the additional capital had been subscribed? And if the company decided to get rid of them, to whom and how was it going to do so? But from the silk-manufacturer’s first words the Marquis de Bohain, noting Saccard’s impatience, cut him short, declaring in his grand and aristocratic manner that the board left such matters of detail in the devoted and competent hands of the chairman and the manager. And then only congratulations were heard, and the meeting closed in the midst of general delight.