Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (55 page)

Hamelin’s eyes filled with tears of grief and rage. He had so successfully laid the foundations for his great Catholic bank in Rome, the Treasury of the Holy Sepulchre, which in the coming days of persecution, would allow the Pope to be royally installed in Jerusalem, in the legendary glory of the Holy Land: a bank that would put the new kingdom of Palestine beyond the reach of political disturbance,
basing its budget, with the guarantee of the country’s own resources, on a series of share-issues that Christians the world over would vie with each other to buy! And all of that was now foundering, thanks to the imbecile madness of speculation. Hamelin had gone away, leaving behind him an admirable state of affairs, with millions aplenty, and a bank enjoying so fast and so great a prosperity that it had astonished the world; and less than a month later, he returned to find the millions had melted away, and the bank was wrecked, reduced to dust, nothing left but a black hole, over which fire seemed to have passed. His stupor grew, he violently demanded explanations, trying to understand what mysterious power had driven Saccard to strive so relentlessly against the colossal edifice he had built, destroying it stone by stone on one side, while on the other he claimed to be completing it.

Saccard, without getting angry, gave a very clear reply. After the first hours of turmoil and despair, he had recovered his self-possession, standing sturdily on his own two feet, with his indomitable hopefulness. Treachery had made the catastrophe terrible, but all was not lost, he would raise it all up again. Besides, if the Universal had enjoyed such rapid prosperity, wasn’t that due to the very methods for which he was now being reproached? The creation of the syndicate, the successive increases of capital, the early balance-sheet of the last shareholders’ meeting, the shares kept by the bank and, later, the shares bought en masse, so wildly. It was all of a piece. Accepting the success meant also accepting the risks. When you overheat a machine, it sometimes bursts. For the rest, he acknowledged no fault, he had simply done, but with more intelligence and vigour, what every manager of a bank does; and he had not abandoned his brilliant idea, his gigantic idea, of buying up the entirety of the shares and bringing down Gundermann. He had lacked the money, that was all. Now they must start again. A shareholders’ meeting had been called for the following Monday, and he was certain of his shareholders, he said: they would be willing to make the necessary sacrifices, he was convinced that at a word from him they would all bring him their money. Meanwhile, they would manage on the little sums that the other financial houses, the big banks,
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were advancing every morning for the day’s urgent needs, to avoid too sudden a collapse which would endanger them too. Once the present crisis was over, everything would start again and be splendid once more.

‘But’, Hamelin objected, already calmed by this smiling tranquillity of Saccard’s, ‘can’t you see the tactics behind the help being offered by our rivals? It’s a way of protecting themselves first, and then of slowing down our fall to make us fall further… What worries me is that I see Gundermann in all this.’

In fact Gundermann was one of the first to offer help, to avoid the immediate declaration of bankruptcy, with the extraordinary practical common sense of a man who, having been forced to set fire to a neighbour’s property, hastens thereafter to bring pails of water to prevent the destruction of the whole neighbourhood. He was above resentment, and the only glory he cared about was being the premier money-merchant of the world, the richest and the most shrewd, having succeeded in sacrificing all his passions to the continuous increase of his fortune. Saccard made an impatient gesture, exasperated by this evidence of the victor’s wisdom and intelligence.

‘Oh, Gundermann is playing Mister Magnanimous, and thinks he’s wounding me with his generosity.’

Silence fell, and it was Madame Caroline, who had not spoken until now, who at last went on:

‘My friend, I’ve let my brother speak to you as he needed to do, in the legitimate grief he has felt on learning all these deplorable things… But our situation, his and mine, seems clear, and it seems to me impossible—it is, isn’t it?—that he should find himself compromised if this affair were to turn out decisively badly. You know at what price I sold our shares, no one can say that he pushed for a rise to get a bigger profit from his holdings. Besides, if there is a catastrophe we know what we have to do… I confess I don’t have your obstinate hopefulness. But you’re right, we must fight until the last minute, and you can be sure my brother will certainly not discourage you from that.’

She was very moved, once more captured by tolerance towards this man with his obstinate vivacity, but trying not to show this weakness, for she could no longer close her eyes to the execrable things he had done and would surely do yet again, with all the dishonest passion of an unscrupulous brigand.

‘Certainly,’ declared Hamelin, weary and incapable of further resistance, ‘I am not going to paralyse you when you’re fighting to save us all. You can count on me if I can be of help.’

And once more, at this last hour, facing the most terrible threats,
Saccard reassured them, winning them over again and leaving them with these words, full of promise and mystery:

‘Sleep easy… I cannot say more, but I am absolutely certain I can get everything back on track again before the end of another week.’

This remark, which he did not explain, he repeated to all the associates of the bank, and all the clients who came to him, frightened or even terrified, seeking advice. For three days now, there had been an endless gallop through his office in the Rue de Londres. The Beauvilliers, the Maugendres, Sédille, and Dejoie all came, one after another. He received them very calmly, with a soldierly air, and with vibrant words that put courage back in their hearts; and when they spoke of selling, of realizing at a loss, he got angry, shouted at them not to do anything so stupid, promising on his honour, to get back to the quote of two thousand or even three thousand francs. In spite of all the mistakes that had been made, they all still had blind faith in him: if only he could be set free to rob them again, he would sort everything out and in the end make them all rich, as he had sworn to do. If no accident occurred before Monday, and if he was given time to call an Extraordinary General Meeting, no one doubted that he would pull the Universal safe and sound out of the ruins.

Saccard had thought of his brother Rougon, that was the all-powerful help he had indicated without giving any further explanation. On meeting the traitor Daigremont face to face and bitterly reproaching him, he had received only this response: ‘But my dear chap, it wasn’t I who abandoned you, it was your brother.’ Of course the man was within his rights, since he had only joined the company on condition that Rougon was in it, and Rougon had been formally promised; so it was not at all astonishing that he should pull out when the minister, far from being in it, was at war with the Universal and its manager. This was at least an excuse to which there was no answer. Struck by this, Saccard realized what a huge mistake he had made by quarrelling with his brother who alone could defend him, and make him so sacred an object that no one would dare to bring about his ruin, knowing the great man was behind him. For Saccard’s pride, this was one of the hardest moments, when he decided to beg Deputy Huret to intervene on his behalf. But he still maintained a threatening attitude, refusing to disappear, and demanding help as if it were a right, from Rougon, who had more to lose than he did from a scandal. The next day, as he awaited Huret’s promised visit, Saccard only
received a note, in which he was told in vague terms not to be impatient and to count on a happy outcome later on, if circumstances permitted. He had to content himself with these few lines, which he regarded as a promise of neutrality.

But the truth was that Rougon had just taken the firm decision to finish once and for all with this diseased member of his family, who had been embarrassing him for years with the perpetual terror of unsavoury events, and he preferred to be at last done with him for good. If catastrophe came, he was resolved to let things take their course. Since he would never get Saccard to go voluntarily into exile, the simplest solution, surely, was to force him to leave the country, helping him to take flight after a thorough condemnation. A sudden scandal, quickly swept under the carpet, and that would be an end of it.

Besides, the minister’s position was becoming difficult ever since he had declared to the Legislative Assembly, in a passage of memorable eloquence, that France would never allow Italy to take possession of Rome. Heartily applauded by the Catholics, he had been severely attacked by the increasingly powerful Third Party,
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and he could see the time coming when the latter, supported by the Liberal Bonapartists, were going to force him out of power, unless he also gave them some sort of pledge. And the pledge, if circumstances so decreed, would be the abandonment of the Universal Bank, which, under the patronage of Rome, had become disturbingly powerful. Finally, what had clinched his decision was a secret message from his colleague in the Ministry of Finance, who, being about to float a loan, had found Gundermann and all the Jewish bankers very reticent, intimating that they would refuse their capital as long as the market remained uncertain for them, and open to adventurers. It was a triumph for Gundermann. Better the Jews, with their accepted sovereignty of gold, than the Ultramontane Catholics as masters of the world, if they became the kings of the Bourse!

It was later related that the Minister of Justice, Delcambre, with his relentless grudge against Saccard, had had Rougon sounded out about the conduct to be followed with regard to his brother if justice had to intervene, and had received only the heartfelt cry: ‘Ah, if he’ll just get rid of him for me, I’ll light a special candle for him!’

After that, with Rougon abandoning him, Saccard was done for. Delcambre, who ever since he got into power had just been waiting
for the opportunity, at last had him on the margin of the law, on the very edge of the vast net of the judiciary, needing now only a pretext to launch his police and his judges against him.

One morning Busch, furious at not having acted sooner, took himself off to the Palais de Justice. If he didn’t hurry, he would never now get out of Saccard the four thousand francs still owed to La Méchain on the famous bill of expenses for little Victor. His plan was simply to create an appalling scandal, accusing Saccard of the abduction of a child, which would allow the exposure of all the filthy details of the rape of the mother, and the abandonment of the child. Such a prosecution of the manager of the Universal, in all the heightened emotions of the bank’s current crisis, would rouse the whole of Paris; and Busch still hoped that Saccard would pay up at the first threat. But the surrogate who had been appointed to receive him, a nephew of Delcambre, listened to his story with an air of impatience and boredom: No, no! Nothing serious could be done with such gossip, this did not fall under any article of the law. Disconcerted, Busch grew angry, and was speaking of his long and patient wait, when the magistrate suddenly interrupted him on hearing him say that he had pushed his good-will towards Saccard to the point of depositing funds on credit in the Universal. What? He had funds compromised in the certain failure of that institution, and he was taking no action? Nothing could be simpler; he had only to make a charge of embezzlement, for the law was already aware of fraudulent transactions which were going to result in bankruptcy. This was what would deal a terrible blow, not the other story—that melodrama about a girl who drank herself to death, and a child brought up in the gutter. Busch listened with a grave, attentive face, launched on this new path, pulled towards an act he had not originally intended, but whose decisive consequences he could foresee: Saccard under arrest, and the Universal receiving its death-blow. Simple fear of losing his money would have made him decide at once. He liked nothing better than disasters and the opportunity to fish in troubled waters. Yet he hesitated, saying he would think about it and come back later, and the surrogate Public Prosecutor had to thrust the pen into his hand, and make him write out, there and then in his office, on his desk, the charge of embezzlement, which, as soon as Busch had gone, he carried off in a ferment of zeal to his uncle, the Minister of Justice. The deed was done.

Next day, at the bank in the Rue de Londres, Saccard had a long
interview with the auditors and the appointed administrator, to draw up the balance-sheet he wanted to present to the shareholders’ meeting. In spite of the loans from the other financial houses, it had proved necessary to close the counters and suspend all payments, in the face of increasing demands. This bank, which only a month before, had nearly two hundred millions in its coffers, had been able to reimburse its desperate clients only the first few hundreds of thousands of francs. Bankruptcy had been officially declared by a Commercial Court, after a summary report given the day before by an expert called in to examine the books. In spite of everything, Saccard, as if unaware, with an extraordinary mixture of blind hopefulness and obstinate bravura, was still promising to save the situation. And indeed, that very day he was awaiting a response from the floor of the Bourse about fixing a rate of compensation, when the usher came in to tell him that three gentlemen were waiting to see him in an adjoining room. This was perhaps salvation, so Saccard rushed off happily, only to find a police superintendent, accompanied by two constables, who immediately arrested him. The summons had just been issued after perusal of the expert’s report, pointing out irregularities in the accounts, and particularly after the accusation of abuse of trust from Busch, who claimed that funds he had deposited in the bank had been misappropriated. At the same time Hamelin was being arrested at his home in the Rue Saint-Lazare. This time it really was the end, as if every hatred and every kind of ill-luck had relentlessly worked against them. The Extraordinary General Meeting could not now take place: the life of the Universal Bank was over.