The employees of the bank were also much harassed and embarrassed by the questions of their friends and families on the Carrière scandal. ‘If Bertillon had really a contract with Carrière why didn’t he pay it? Wasn’t it a shame for a man of Betillon’s distinction? What was the inside story? Was it true that it was a duel to the death between the two? Why? Weren’t they old school friends? Was Bertillon bankrupt? Of bad faith? How did it come about that Bertillon made such a contract, that is, with little consideration, with Carrière, knowing his influence? There must have been an unwritten consideration, probably disgraceful—these bankers, after all, everyone knew. If Bertillon really had the goods on Carrière, and could prove that he was an income-tax evader, why didn’t he push him to the wall?
The employees, according to their lights, answered these questions with different kinds of cynicism and despair. They liked Bertillon, according to their salaries. They had no use for Carrière simply because he was ‘the enemy’. Without doubt, with his campaign against Bertillon he was threatening their existence. Fifty members of French working-class families on the unemployment lists—was that likely to increase the popularity of the government, of the finance minister? Especially at a time like this when the working class needed to be hoodwinked, appeased, when times were getting worse.
In defense of Jules Bertillion his own employees used these arguments …
Michel said, ‘Carrière’s in with the high banking crowd; they’ll drop you Jules, and they’ll back him to the finish: don’t fool yourself.’
Jules frowned: ‘The Comtesse de Chamfort is for me, Voigrand is for me, Jean de Guipatin is for me: they’re high bank, I think.’
Micel laughed with self-mockery. ‘Those two girls are for me, too, as a side line; even Bomba got as far as a rose-garden interview with the Comtesse de Chamfort: she’s rich enough to keep her own menagerie.’ He hastened to add, ‘You’re a lovely, lovely fellow, Jules: you could charm away the consciences and the prejudices of judge and grand jury, even if you’d committed matricide and they’d been paid for a decision against you … but softhearted as gold is, it is impervious to the smiles of the poor; and, no use fooling yourself, Jules: in their terms, you are poor. Furthermore, you don’t know how to build up a fortune.’
‘Now you tell me,’ jeered Jules gently.
‘Why not? You think you’re a crtic of painting, but you’ve never even drawn a face on your blotter!’
‘Ah, ah,’ grinned Jules, and after a few strokes, he held up his blotter: a very passable face of Carrière, ‘for example!’
‘Hatred, not art,’ said Michel.
‘Ah?’ Jules spent a few minutes sketching faces of other persons round the bank. In fact, he had a little talent.
‘And what then? Can’t I make money? Haven’t I made some twenty million francs for you, purely by speculating in the market, these last two years.’
‘You can’t make it for yourself; you can only make it on someone else’s risk.’
‘Defect of temperament.’
After a few minutes they both abruptly came back to the center of discussion: Michel said, ‘Let’s work out our old scheme. It will dispel the cloud of blackmailers in a minute. Sell the bank, take a small luxurious secret room or suite of rooms, near the Opéra, say, and do business for a few rich men. It will increase your prestige and make you nothing but money. You can’t beat Carrière at the publicity game: all the cards are in his hands. You can beat him at the prestige game, simply by retiring: unheard of move! He’ll be furious.’ Jules smiled slyly at the vision, tapped affectionately on the desk, ‘Become a mystery man.’ Jules laughed softly. ‘Only I like glitter, brilliance, you know … old fogies can maneuver behind the beyond. Not me. I’d do it for six months and then I’d be unable to resist the splendor of the façade.’
‘At any rate, try it.’
‘I might’; but his expression showed plainly that he would never be intoxicated with the idea.
‘Nevertheless, it was your own idea: you suggested it as far back as ten years ago. You were more modest then, Jules—you had a sure footing.’
Suddenly Jules cried, ‘Let me be damned in my own way!’ He came down on the four legs of his chair, twisted his face, his blue eyes flashed. ‘Who told you I wanted to build a bank? I don’t! I want to play around and go up in smoke perhaps! Why not! It’s my bank, it’s my fun. You people are crazy wanting me to make something! What for? To keep you all going! I don’t give that much’ (a flip of the fingers) ‘for anyone, understand! I don’t want to be pensioning forty or fifty people for life. A mystery man!’ He got up and impatiently took two or three steps up and down. ‘Children build houses with blocks; I don’t build. I’m a bear, you hear that.’ His passion fell off him, like tatters falling off a Prince Charming, his sun came out again. ‘Michel, I’m a borer eating the leg of the pier!’ He laughed, placed his two hands on Michel’s broad thick shoulders, shook him: it seemed as if all his vigor was in his hands. He said affectionately, ‘Capitalism is spitting blood: ha, ha! You teach me that, Michel, and then, like a grandmother, you want to see me make a career!’ He took a few steps in the room again. ‘But how did I make my first money? In a krach! In the war! And after? During the mad inflation of the mark! And after? In 1929! And now? I lost a golden opportunity when the pound went off: you see? You two are urging me to build, and I’m losing my grip.’
‘No,’ said Michel, ‘believe me, Jules, it’s the Fragonards you have at home; their baleful influence.’
‘I have a hunch,’ cried Jules laughing, his skin luminous, his eyes jellies of vivacity, ‘in the next two or three months, there are fortunes to be made—on the bear side; let us bear the world! Michel, we’ll become Rockefellers: all we need is the daring! Let’s stake everything on a crazy hunch I have! Something tells me.’
‘Yes?’ said Michel very dryly, disgusted. ‘Is a picture on the wall upside down? Did you run your tire into a horseshoe this morning? Call in the fortunetellers: I’m leaving.’
Joyously but with determination, Jules caught his arm, ‘Michel, you’re my fortuneteller, I need no other. The sign I go by is this: when Michel, ursus major, as they say, tries to make me a great figure in the community, a real catastrophe is coming: why? When they have converted you there’s no one else to convert! Your own reasoning!’ Michel smiled sheepishly: ‘All right; perhaps you’re right. And what will we sell?’
‘Everything,’ said Jules whirling his arms with the gestures and smile of a dancer. ‘You say Kreuger? O.K.! K. and T.? You say Insull? O.K. Insull! Let’s sell the American market, the French market, the Swedish market.’
‘Henri Léon says wheat,’ remarked Michel.
‘No, no,’ Jules wagged his finger vigorously, ‘nothing real. I don’t speculate in commodities; that’s bad luck. Speculating in rust on wheat is bad luck. Speculating in heart failure among the mandarins of the Bourse, that’s good luck.’
‘What a Red Indian you are, Jules, the original Voodoo Kid!’
Jules snickered in his engaging vanity. ‘My dear boy, do I need fortunetellers? I’m the topnotcher of fortunetellers. They buy their curtains at the Samar Pont-Neuf, and I buy mine,’ he made a large gesture, bringing in the cardinal’s chair, the pillar lamps, the lusters, the tables, ‘I buy mine at Alavoine, Place Vendôme, and Jansen, Rue Royale: a fortuneteller, I!’
Michel got up, half convinced, in spite of all his knowledge, by Jules’s fire. ‘You really want me to sell?’
‘Sure, sure!’ Jules collapsed, sank into his chair, became sardonic to mask his fatigue.
‘What, Jules?’
‘What I said!’
‘K. and T.?’
‘Whatever you like’; a burst of energy: ‘but sell, only sell, sell only; sell the world!’
‘Our experience.’
‘Sell it!’
‘Jules, a hunch is a hunch,
but—’
Jules smiled wearily and pityingly at Michel. ‘Michel, there is nothing to life but a hunch. Cause and effect? Philosophy? Economics?’ His hand cut an elliptic in the air, ‘Like the charts nuts make of throws of the dice. Nobody who ever made any money, ever had any brains—a proof—’
Michel laughed. ‘Men sell highest ex brains,’ finished Jules, with fatigue, ‘unless brains is their racket! No money in ability! Look at Mahmoud! Did you see the wonderful little telephone board he figured out? An Arab; a savage! Starves himself into a swoon at Ramadan and all that; does what they tell him at the mosque. I could do it too, but if I did, if I learned to do a single useful thing in life, Michel, only one thing, I would not be able to make money: utility and moneymaking are incompatible. My Fragonards are useless, my evening jacket is useless.’
‘It makes you beautiful.’
‘My beauty is useless: so, I’m a howling success.’ He smiled, radiant in his folly, full of sorcery, ‘And you are useless, Michel; that’s why I intend to keep you with me forever: the Reds will never get you!’
Michel laughed and went to the door. ‘You’re babbling. I’m going to put through the orders.’
‘Sell, sell, sell,’ said Jules mocking. As he went down the corridor, Michel heard the airy voice, ‘Sell, sell.’ And in fact, Jules, a successful fakir, had the upper hand of his good sense: and Michel sold fifty thousand shares of Swedish Match. A few months later, everyone was to ask himself where Alphendéry, ‘the mystery man of the bank,’ and Jules, ‘the young banker of great promise,’ got their information.
* * *
Scene Seventy-four: Worldling versus Mercury
Carriére, with his idea of vengeance, irritable and melodramatic, swollen by vanity and drugs as well as by a very competent knowledge of his own superiority in position and wealth, required a speedy end to the short duel. He had boasted of his intention all round Paris and the resorts of the Upper Ten Thousand to which they both belonged, and he was anxious to see the leers, fears, congratulations, and swarming of parasites and petty ambitions which would follow Jules’s complete crushing, as well as the new polarization of his society. He dreamed of it at night, unhappily, sometimes groaned, sometimes woke dreaming it was all over and he had his hand on Bertillon’s slender, long, and muscular throat. A dream he had one night reminded him of a day in vacation time during his schooldays, when he had gone bathing with Jules Bertillon for the first time. Sensitive to beauty and endless sonneteer at that time, he was seduced out of indifference by Jules’s youthful delicacy: for a season he had tried to make friends with Jules. His dream had always been the ‘ideal friendship.’ But Jules always chose for friends rich idle healthy mediocre boys and discussed with them countless schemes for getting on in the world.
Jules thought Carrière something of an ass, and in a short time, bored to death with the school ritual and his failure at it, left for a commercial career. Jacques went to medical school, published poems in reviews, made an art collection, learned fencing and elegance, bought a yacht, and in the yacht club met again Jules Bertillon, grown into one of the most elegant, lackadaisical, and charming youths of Paris, newly married to Claire-Josèphe, with a Spanish fortune, of irreproachable life and simple manners. Jules, with a fortune of his own, picked up in the war, in Poland it was said, or Russia, Jules, a newly fledged banker and feted companion, always accompanied by blueblood youth: Comte Jean de Guipatin, of Bourbon blood, Prince de Monteverde, bobsleigh champion, Roger Flowers, South African millionaire, amiable chief rowdy of Blue-Coast bars, Robert Legris, wartime friend and now his inseparable, son of a banking and stock-exchange house of Amsterdam. Carrière tried to complete the sketched friendship of years before—but Jules always wafted himself away and the result was no contact. But Carrière this time wasted few days on Bertillon: he had developed a tropical thicket of sensuality, and the ‘crowd he hung round with’ were wilder and certainly not irreproachable.
One day he heard in the club, ‘Carrière’s always under full sail; Bertillon knows how to trim his sheets to the wind: he’ll get there. He’s got the lucky streak!’
At that time Bertillon seemed to be shooting into the higher and more gilded skies of finance; he was said to be intimate with Débuts, influential liberal head of the Banque du Littoral du Nord. Carrière never for a moment believed that anyone in his world could take his place, and he thought he would soon prove it, but in pleasures he let years slip by. He lost money in 1929, for he had large investments everywhere, and about the beginning of 1930 he had reckoned up his books of accounts—he was thirty and Bertillon had eclipsed him as far as personal prestige went: Carrière, for all his family wealth, was horribly smirched, and it almost seemed lost, by the well-known scandal of his life. He suddenly bent his wasted powers and not yet wasted health to overtaking Bertillon, the only other young man of personal fame in his entourage.
Ambition was Carrière’s core as the love of turning a trick was Jules’s. Jules, not out of cynicism, but out of the clarity of his nature, believed nothing that was told him, sought the person’s interest behind each sentence, lied perpetually for the pleasure of tricking even the credulous, tried to recast every situation, for the pleasure of changing it; he cared not so much for money as for moneymaking, and, when he had got the hang of moneymaking, not so much the making of money as the endless field for speculation and fantasy it yielded him. He hated to think, he liked to depend entirely ‘on inspiration,’ and his inspiration was fertile enough not only on the principle of hit-and-miss but because through endlessly studying in one field and experimenting in it, with his original and single-minded talent, he was bound to make some good strikes. Jules had some gifts of nature, also: an unusual generosity, a visible harmony that tamed even critics, cynics, the unquiet, the suspicious, and the blackmailing, at least for the moment of their conversation.
Jacques Carrière finally admitted that nature, not Jules’s intelligence, had given him a worthy pacemaker. He began to make political relations, to advance himself as a possible candidate for deputy, to figure the cost of launching himself, by means of press and social pressure, to calculate how long it would be before he could start his own private bank. It would be a moderate task for one of his ability, not too hard. Jules was a gambler in life, basically, he told himself and his friends, and he was ignorant of ambition, that is, in the sense that he neither maligned nor aligned, nor campaigned. ‘An innocent!’ Carrière said, sneering. But an actor from the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, who cultivated good society and heard Bertillon’s bank called the ‘Banque Mercure,’ exclaimed, ‘Now I understand: an allusion has been rankling … Bertillon is altogether the personage of the old-world Mercury!’ The name stuck to him and Carrière had the displeasure of hearing his rival referred to by the caressing and satiric name …
William and Michel Alphendéry knew some moments of panic now: William was all for settling with Carrière, when Michel was for fighting, and when Michel’s courage failed, William had become obstinate. Jules was swayed by one, the other, Claire-Josèphe, and the moods of the day. Each hour of the day, they were hagridden by Carrière and his threats, and they perpetually thought out new schemes either for denouncing him, showing him up, bringing him ‘to reason,’ and circumventing his design.
Alphendéry thought that the following representation should be made to him: that, if he continued to demand the gigantic profit that Jules insisted on paying him on the ‘gentlemen’s agreement,’ a profit that was beyond all honor, equity, or reason, he would either force Bertillon to his own ruin or they would be forced to fix up a bankruptcy to save the funds of the bank and the clients’ deposits …
* * *
Scene Seventy-five: A Family Brawl
Alphendéry was summoned before the judge on the Rosen-krantz and Guildenstern complaint.
‘I’m going to make a human speech,’ he said to William before leaving. ‘Let’s try and mop e
verything up before Jules comes back. By doing something they don’t expect with their smart official manners and ‘literal interpretations,’ I’ll try to terminate the case today.’ William smiled.
The judge, prejudiced against the Bertillon bank by the host of little cases which had been filling the courts, and also by things whispered in the corridors of the courts, turned severely to Alphendéry. ‘Mr. Rosenkrantz claims that you have not fulfilled a single one of your engagements towards Kaimaster Blés, S.A., that he has been a victim of what he calls sabotage, and that you yourself, acting by yourself, and conscious that he thought you were mandatory in the bank, not only first tricked him and his partner in the first place, pretending to engage the bank when you only engaged yourself, but that further, this is a part of the bank’s system of avoiding its contracts, that you are not responsible, have no seizable assets in France, and, in the last place, broke the contract with them, before the agreed time was out, with the intention of annoying them and damaging their credit.’
Alphendéry, who had taken in the insolent assurance of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern on the other side of the judge’s desk, the almost smiling ease of Maître Lallant who was handling their case, as the cases of other enemies of the bank, came forward with a debater’s supple resolute alacrity.
‘Monsieur le Juge, may I present my story to you in its entirety?’
House of All Nations Page 69