The Golden Rock

by Theo Varlet

  “Commander,” said Monsieur Germain-Lucas, getting up, “you’ll excuse us, but if we want to get back to Paris tonight...”

  “That’s true, Messieurs. This way, please…”

  And, framed by the two chiefs, each of whom had an electric torch, we advanced through the interior corridors of the ship to a closed bulkhead.

  “This is aft hold number one,” said Monsieur Barcot. “It’s just been opened for you, Messieurs. Be careful on the iron ladder.”

  The beams of the torches lit up, two meters below, a confused mass of yellow pebbles stained with red, randomly heaped: the nuggets of Île Féréor.

  Without a word, the three potentates of finance and politics, descended one after another on to that bed of golden shingle—but when they felt them grating beneath their feet, their emotion surfaced.

  Rivier drew himself up to his full height, breathing out forcefully, and sent a few nuggets flying with the toe of his shoe, as if to verify the density of the layer.

  The governor of the Banque de France embraced the hold with his gaze, with a prolonged giggle that resonated bizarrely in the sonorous shell, and which almost turned into a nervous crisis.

  The President of the Council uttered a litany of oaths in Occitan, and started sketching out a dance...

  After which, recovering their composure, those three men of great intellectual power—those three representatives of superior humanity, those three masters of civilization—bent down over the golden idol, with detached smiles, and each picked up a nugget with their slightly tremulous fingers…as a souvenir.

  Commander Barcot, having accomplished his mission to Paris, remained on his ship, in order to watch over it himself until the day came when it was possible to unload it. As for me, before climbing back into the Admiral’s car with the naval lieutenant, Messieurs Germain-Lucas, Hautôt and Rivier, I took advantage of my trip to the Erebus II to go to my cabin and get my valise.

  At two o’clock in the morning, exactly five hours after our departure from Le Bourget, we disembarked from our aerial vehicle there.

  XI. The Franc Rises Again

  “You’re staying with me,” said Jean Rivier in the automobile that was taking us back to Paris, in a tone which did not admit any protest. “My wife and daughter are in Biarritz for another fortnight, but the service doesn’t suffer from their absence; I hope you won’t find it too poor—but get up early if you want to witness the historic day that you’ve brought about with your news.”

  I was treated as a privileged guest of the house, an honored relative. The house in the Avenue de Villiers was not immense, nor did it exhibit the garish luxury of the nouveau riche; Rivier had taste, and one felt at ease and comfortable in his home. My room had a medium-sized bed, with a canopy and a raised alcove, which reminded me of Louis XIV’s bed at Versailles. Thanks to fatigue, I slept therein “like a king,” and it required the reiterated appeals of the valet de chambre to make me get up at eight o’clock.

  I found Rivier in the middle of breakfast, already opening telegrams.

  “Bonjour, my dear quadruple billionaire!” I joked, in accordance with the entitlement of our old friendship.

  The financier shook my hand over his dispatches, and then said with an indulgent irony: “Me, a billionaire? Do you think so, old chap? But that doesn’t interest me. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I could live on a hundred sous a day. These billions, of which half belong to me, I shall give to France. And from this morning on, the Banque Rivier will hurl them into battle, as the Banque de France will do for its part, to raise the level of the franc. Do you want to watch? You’ve earned it.”

  “Certainly,” I agreed. “But a layman like me won’t understand any of it.”

  “I’ll explain it to you.”

  And with the marvelous faculty of dividing his attention, which I had already admired in him at school, and which he had further developed by methodical exercise, he talked, without interrupting his eating or reading his dispatches.

  “As you’ve seen, the governor of the Banque de France is, like me, a supporter of revaluation. For months, he’s been preparing an offensive, only waiting for an opportunity in which it would be possible to support his effort. Everything’s in place. So, since last night at two o’clock, as soon as he was assured of the existence of the gold at Cherbourg, he’s unleashed an offensive in New York—where it was then eight o’clock in the morning,18 as you know, because of the time difference. Preparation of artillery before the assault. In a few hours, the pound has gone down 25 points; at 460 yesterday evening, it stands at 435 this morning.”

  “But why haven’t you acted sooner, if it’s so easy?”

  “That’s a good one! Because, if we couldn’t sustain the effort, that artificial rise of the franc would be followed by a reaction that would bring it back to a lower level than its departure-point…as it has one every time it’s been attempted without making use of the Banque’s reserves. This coup, however, can be undertaken on a large scale, and there’s trouble brewing. Have you finished eating? Yes? Get your hat and coat, then, and let’s be off.”

  Ten minutes later, the financier’s Hispano deposited the two of us on the sidewalk of the Boulevard Haussmann, in the new section, outside the Banque Rivier et Cie.

  That temple to the god Speculation—more modern and more powerful than the classical god Gold, who shares his sanctuaries—rivals the Crédit Lyonnais and the Société Générale, and deploys an even more modern sumptuousness. Its vestibule and its central rotunda are clad in Portoro marble, yellow with black veins, which makes the gleam stand out and give it a nobler distinction. The high windows, collaborating with the electric light of invisible lamps, create an atmosphere on inhuman serenity. There are none of those old grilles between the servants of the god and the public; they can look one another in the face. Only the priest of the banknotes, with his coffer, from which wads of bills emerge, is enclosed in a cage of transparent glass, where he officiates.

  On senses that it is one of the sacred hearts of Paris—that people, in going in there, are more genuinely pious than when they go into a basilica; believers and unbelievers meet there is a common devotion, that of wealth.

  By contrast, the Exchange Hall, not open to the public, but into which Rivier took me, after a brief pause in his office, has the bare simplicity of a substation distributing electric current. And indeed, as I was to learn, it is there that currency is distributed. On the wall, there are two dozen telephones, each surmounted by a bell or a buzzer of some sort, all sounding different notes, which are sufficient to identify the instrument in the brain of the “broker”—the leader of the orchestra—and to open by reflex in that polyglot brain the pigeon-hole of the corresponding idiom.

  “This is Monsieur Harduin, our chief broker,” said Rivier, introducing me to a plump, bald little man with a gray moustache, who was moving back and forth with an unexpected briskness in front of his instruments. “He speaks eighteen languages.”

  Like his employer, Monsieur Harduin possessed the faculty of exercising his attention in several domains at the same time. He bowed to me and listened to the banker’s orders without interrupting his work. A solemn bell rang.

  “That’s London,” Rivier whispered to me.

  “Hello London!” proffered the broker, in English, into one of the twenty-four telephones. “Four twenty-five, you say? Too late…at twenty this morning.”

  Then hanging up and going to the next apparatus, which was tinkling an octave higher: “Hello Brussels,” he said, in French. “Nothing to do about yesterday. I’m selling sterling at 420.”

  It was the turn of other clamors. Madrid, Florence…and corresponding languages.

  A telegraphist irrupted, however, and threw a flood of blue and white forms on the table.

  “America now,” Rivier explained. The blues are wireless messages and the whites Cable and Western.”

  And while the broker listened, replied, read dispatches, made notes, put thing
s in order, scribbled figures and flew back and forth, my friend continued to educate me.

  “We have a dozen large banks in Paris allowed to trade currency, where the same thing is happening—which is to say that, at this moment, there are three hundred telephones in communication with foreign capitals, in the process of diffusing throughout the world the currencies that are in or out of favor.”

  “Hello Frankfort. Four hundred and twenty?”

  “What—they aren’t lowering it?” said Rivier.

  “Frankfurt and Berlin are selling paper francs hand over fist these days, Monsieur,” the broker replied. “I daren’t...”

  “They’ll pay dearly to cover it, if they take it to term; it’s impossible for them to have all the paper they’re offering at their disposal—but it doesn’t matter. Sell, and keep selling, pounds and dollars. I repeat that we’re acting in concert with the Banque de France.”

  “You need to indicate a limit to me, though, Monsieur, for they’re not selling on term, but for immediate settlement. We could be liable before noon for eighty or a hundred million francs in gold…which we’ll have to buy back in gold, to meet the obligation. We don’t have the gold, and neither does the Banque de France.”

  “We will have. I’m giving you carte blanche.”

  “Even if we get to a billion?”

  “Even then—and more. Go!”

  The broker looked at his employer, saw that he was serious, and rubbed his hands.

  “Oh, in that case, Monsieur...”

  And he resumed his maneuvers in front of the apparatus, with renewed conviction.

  Following the law of communicating vessels, the flow of pounds and dollars poured out fictively by that curt, dry voice—as well as by the Banque de France a kilometer away—redirected the course. In two hours of that exercise, almost without my noticing Rivier’s departure, the pound had fallen to 320.

  At half past eleven, Jean-Paul came back in and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Now, if you want to see the second act, let’s go have lunch in the vicinity of the Bourse. It’s there that the aftermath of the battle will unfold.”

  I followed him back to his office to collect my coat—but before going out I asked his permission to make a telephone call.

  “As many as you want, old man.” And with one hand sorting out the papers, he used the other to push the apparatus across the desk to me.

  “Élysée 29-81,” I requested, and then: “Hello, Claridge’s Hotel? I’d like to speak to Professor Hans Kohbuler…or, if he’s not there, to Mademoiselle Kohbuler.”

  I intended to announce that I would visit then late that afternoon, but the metallic voice articulated in my ear: “Professor and Mademoiselle Kohbuler have been away from Paris for a week, but they’ve retained their apartment and will be returning any day. Shall I tell them that you called?”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up, disappointed and annoyed—and was suddenly embarrassed to find a singular stare fixed upon me by my friend.

  “Kohbuler?” he said “Do you know him?”

  I attempted to adopt a casual manner. “Oh, I met him once…with his daughter…at the Jolliots.” I felt as if I’d been caught out, like a guilty schoolboy interrogated by a teacher.

  Rivier addressed an amicable gesture of protest to me with his hand. “It’s all right, old man. Don’t get excited. I’m not an examining magistrate interrogating you about citizen Kohbuler—and if you’re interested in his daughter, you’re not wring; it appears that she’s a pretty thing, the little doctor, and as charming as she’s irreproachable. She has much more merit than her father...”

  “You can talk freely,” I said, as he left the sentence suspended. “The father doesn’t inspire any sympathy in me at all.”

  “Well, in that case, Antoine, listen, I’ll tell you this in confidence, as an old friend. I’ve never met Kohbuler but people have mentioned him to me, not very favorably. Yes, someone highly placed in the Prefecture of Police, duty-bound to be discreet…so don’t go overboard with regard to Mademoiselle Kohbuler too quickly, for her Papa, the so-called Swiss Professor, might be something else entirely. They’re keeping an eye on him at the Prefecture. Travels a lot…too much. Stays at Claridge’s like a Yankee billionaire, and spreads thousand-franc notes around as if they don’t cost him anything.”

  I didn’t simulate astonishment; I recalled the man’s eyes, his Teutonic accent, and the indefinable antipathy that he had inspired in me.

  “So much the worse for him,” I replied. “Let them throw him in prison or deport him. That won’t prevent me from marrying his daughter, if she wants to. She’s not at risk, I hope?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I’ve said too much. Hush, eh? Don’t let Kohbuler know that he’s under suspicion. You’re a good enough Frenchman to understand, even if you’re smitten with the demoiselle. But let’s go to lunch! Quarter to twelve. We need to be at the Bourse for the opening bell, at twelve thirty.”

  The journey by car took almost as long as it would have done on foot, amid the hypertension clogging the arteries of central Paris. In the Place de la Bourse, we went to a restaurant full of brokers, where we had difficulty finding an empty table-end...

  While we were served, hurriedly, I examined my neighbors. Their faces revealed an intense internal animation: a fever of anxiety or triumph; but apart from a few outbursts of numbers, the majority conserved their vocal cords, conversing in low voices, or eating in hasty silence.

  “Tell me,” I said, leaning toward the banker’s ear, “are these people dealing in shares?”

  My naivety made Jean-Paul smile.

  “Dealing in shares? Oh yes, you imagine, like a true ‘average Frenchman,’ that stocks and shares are discussed publicly, whether one is under the peristyle of the Bourse or in the wings? Not at all. The second act is even less ostentatious that the first, as you’ll see. I’ll introduce you into the den where it’s simmering gently.”

  The ritual bell rang. Rivier guided me through the bustling crowd obstructing the environs of the Palais de la Bourse and took me up to the second floor. The “den” was well-guarded; ushers stopped us several times, and my friend had to negotiate to obtain my admission.

  In a banal room, ripolined in cream and garnished with a blackboard, a dozen individuals were gathered around a table, among whom I recognized the Banque Rivier’s broker. They were exchanged numbers in low voices while riffling through notebooks, lists and—above all—dispatches that telegraphists entering at every moment rained down in front of them.

  “The official areopage,” Rivier whispered to me. “The chief brokers of the great banks of Paris. They’ve centralized the orders of the smaller ones. The clerk at the blackboard is noting the fluctuation of the results, which modify the new orders.”

  Every five minutes, the marker approached the table, picked up a figure, and went back to inscribe it, erasing the previous one. Beside him, another clerk was operating the keys of some sort of calculating machine.

  Even to me, who did not understand the first thing about the Bourse, it was evident that the crisis was enormous, and I felt a shiver go through me at every figure indicating a further fall in the pound. In twenty minutes, in successive leaps of between five and ten francs, it had fallen from 300 to 275.

  Rivier was triumphant, but apart from a brief smile of complicity darted at him by the brokers of the two allied banks, the Twelve maintained the phlegm of mathematicians in their concentrated activity. The moderate tone of their voices ended up revolting me.

  “But these fellows don’t feel anything,” I whispered to Rivier. “They’re automatons!”

  “Layman that you are,” he joked, “you can’t comprehend the pure emotions of our transcendental algebra. It’s a great spectacle you want, is it, gawker? So be it—let’s go back down. But don’t forget that the movement originates here. The man playing the keyboard, beside the marker, is transmitting the figures from the blackboard to the floor of the Exch
ange.”

  As soon as we were out of the den, a gust of noise greeted us…a vast rumor of raised voices that filled the corridors, coming from below. On the staircase, it became the buzz of a beehive in revolution. The peristyle, the wings, the parquet, all the speculative compartments of the Bourse, the external steps as well as the internal ones, communicating through all the openings, were uniting their clamors, which attained the paroxysm of their frenzy in the great central all, around the floor.

  At first I stood there, stunned and bewildered, in the midst of that crowd of fanatics, who were shouting orders at one another at the top of their voices, all at the same time, with the volubility of morra19 players, employing gestures when voices became impotent to pierce the tumult.

  Here, there was genuine panic and rage, such as I had imagined, poured over vibrant human beings by the twelve Olympians on the second floor. All eyes went incessantly to the automatic displays installed around and above the floor, twenty centimeters from the ceiling, where white figures on black inscribed the official exchange rates. Every time the figures jumped, orders were exchange more vigorously, voices bursting out in hoarse and shrill yells.

  “Pound at 260!” Apoplectic and sweating, or grinding teeth and drunk with rage, exhibiting all the animal deformations of impotent fury in the face of a cataclysm or the joy of an unexpected and unprecedented triumph can impose on human features, all around me the dealers in stocks were striving in vain to alleviate the movement of foreign shares, to maintain them on the slippery slope down which they were inevitably sliding, following the pound.

  Already, Rivier scribbled to me in his notebook, for lack of the ability to make himself heard, Royal Dutch has fallen from 190,000 to 110,000, Rio from 18,000 to 9000. On the other hand, French shares were climbing: “family savings,” rents and loans were recovering their former dignity...