by Theo Varlet
Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Rivier had been recognized. People already knew about the role his bank was playing, conjointly with the Banque de France, in the operation to revalue the franc. Glances of envy and admiration saluted him as he passed by—or venomous smiles anticipating the imminent reaction. But hostility predominated in the groups around us, and I perceived, in the midst of the pandemonium, fragments of evidently-hostile phrases hurled in Rivier’s face, including such terms as upheaval, catastrophe, ruin, scoundrel and pay dear.
Could he not hear? Was he pretending, bravely, to ignore the threats? I invoked the malaise that the frightful crowd and the heat of the room were causing me to drag him toward the exit, and then on to the stairs, and then outside the gates and the densest crowds.
When it became possible for us to converse again, he laughed scornfully. “Upheaval? Catastrophe? So they say! Imbeciles! The reraising of the franc to its gold value—which I’m seeking and will obtain, by God!—is, on the contrary, the reestablishment of equilibrium…the normal state of affairs. Since the war, as the franc has been debased, we’ve been living in a topsy-turvy house...increasingly topsy-turvy, if I can use that expression. Well, I’m setting the house to rights. There are going to be people who break their backs, obviously—those who took the new situation to be definitive; those who clung to foreign currencies or took their capital elsewhere, and the profiteers who speculated on the aggravation of the fall in our currency. So much the worse for them. In compensation, the others, the great mass of Frenchmen, will congratulate themselves on no longer being constrained to perform deplorable acrobatics standing on their heads. Yes, there’ll be some temporary inconvenience in recovering the legitimate basis, and then a new division of wealth, but it was inevitable sooner or later...and this will doubtless spare us a worse revolution...”
At that moment, one of the agitated individuals that I had noticed on the stairway howling insults at my friend emerged from the swarming and vociferating crowd that was overflowing the gates all around the monument and marched straight toward us with a grimly resolute expression.
“Are you really Rivier, the banker?” he demanded of my companion.
I tried to interpose myself between them, saying “Be careful, Jean-Paul”—but Rivier gently eased me away and faced up to the individual.
“Yes, that’s me. So what?”
“It’s you, wretch—you who have unleashed this movement, you who have made sterling fall like an arrow…you who’ve ruined me, you bandit, villain, bastard!”
I saw the nickel of an American knuckleduster glittering on the fingers of the brandished hand and leapt forward, trying to hold it back—but I only succeeded in diverting it. The blow slid along the length of my arm, and the weapon struck me full in the epigastrum, above the solar plexus.
I tottered…saw in a fog the attacker overcome by witnesses…and fell unconscious into Jean-Paul Rivier’s arms.
XII. Forger
Professor Hans Kohbuler has just returned to Claridge’s with his daughter, beside himself, not knowing which way to turn.
The sudden rise in the franc took him by surprise, four days ago on the twenty-fifth, in his villa at Audresselles, where he was attempting to produce a series of perfect banknotes, exempt from the faults that would not permit those printed by the factotum Gédéon to be used without risk.
Kohbuler was not worried at first; he thought it one of those ephemeral spasms that had been repeated several times in the last seven or eight years, thanks to Morgan or other funds, and which had invariably produced an even steeper fall of the ordinate curve toward the zero point of the abscissa.
On the twenty-sixth, the rise was accentuated vertiginously—the pound fell to 90!—and he was irritated to see the results of his months-long campaign canceled out at a stroke. Reproachful messages arrived from Berlin and Frankfurt, and he had directed his own anger against the subaltern agents charged with spreading the apocryphal Banque de France bills.
On the twenty-seventh, when a question in the Chambre had provoked the response from Monsieur Germain-Lucas, President of the Council, that the Banque de France had resolved to throw all the gold in its reserves into the conflict, down to the last louis, he had thought that the French were insane. In a week…two days…twenty-four hours…that gold would be exhausted, and the franc would fall back into the depths of the abyss...
In the meantime, the pound continued to fall; that day, it closed at 30. And yet, according to the calculations of all the exchange markets centralized in Frankfurt, the famous metallic reserves had been swallowed up, and more. Even so, in all the markets of Europe and America, France had not ceased to offer gold, gold and more gold. It was a deluge, an inundation, an avalanche of gold, which absorbed and drowned the paltry efforts of foreign agents to sell paper francs.
And it is necessary to believe that there is still gold in France, for today, on the twenty-ninth, the last step has been taken; the implausible has been realized; the paper franc has resumed parity with gold; sterling is at 25.25!
Too bad! Doomed, in the estimation of his chiefs, the professor has resolved this morning to play his trump card and to distribute the batch of defective bills regardless.
Postal packages have been sent to his correspondents, stuffed with false banknotes, irreproachable or suspect—it no longer matters. And he has brought the remainder of the stock back to Paris in his suitcases: twenty pseudo-millions of paper francs.
Among all the hypotheses that he envisages and passes in review to explain the success of the “French fit of insanity,” he has not thought of linking the return of the Erebus II with the seemingly-desperate maneuver by the Banque de France. He knows that the ship has returned to Cherbourg, but since it is waiting there, inert and disarmed, for orders to depart, he has lost interest in it.
In his preoccupation, he is even neglecting Dr. Marquin, of whose telephonic communication some days ago the hotel desk has notified him. The business of island N has retreated into the background, and he has read in the newspapers, almost with indifference, that the League of Nations will attribute to France tomorrow, by international treaty, the legal property of what he believes, since the message from the Seeland, to be a mass of volcanic rocks.
But Frédérique-Elsa has not forgotten. Having arrived in Paris two hours ago, she hopes…she expects—perhaps for that very afternoon, who knows?—the visit of the man she loves. Just as long as her father is absent when he comes!
The franc is maintaining parity, seemingly stabilized for good—and the professor, who has just received the latest news from the Bourse by telephone, hangs up the receiver furiously.
He will attempt his final maneuver, with the collaboration of the banker Heinrich Goldshield. He embraces his daughter, goes into his personal apartment—number 203—by the communicating door, which he closes and bolts. He stuffs his pockets with banknotes, and goes down the stairs, for he needs to walk in order to relax his nerves.
Half way between the second and first floors, he goes past the elevator, which is rising. Dr. Marquin!—a fleeting glimpse. Dr. Marquin, looking the other way, who has not seen him!
Struck by a sudden idea, Professor Hans Kohbuler pauses on the steps, turns back and climbs back up to the third floor. At the end of the corridor, the doctor’s back is just disappearing, and the door of room 204 is closing behind him.
With a silent grimace, the professor stops outside the next door, 203, enters without making a noise, and goes straight to one of the telephones, whose receiver he raises to his hairy ears.
On the other end of the wire, in the drawing room of apartment 204, where Frédérique-Elsa and Dr. Marquin are conversing, a microphone is hidden in the rose of a brass ornament in the form of a chimera...
XIII. Amorous Indiscretion
Ordinarily, that blow from the fanatic’s knuckleduster would have knocked me out for four or five minutes, after which I would have resumed he normal course of my affairs without further distress, but I was in
a condition of depleted resistance because of sleepless nights on the island, and then on the Erebus II, not to mention five hours on a train and four on an airplane when I had scarcely disembarked. All that accumulated fatigue degenerated, under the trauma of the blow, into a serious gastric crisis, which kept me in bed for three whole days.
It was a further opportunity for Jean-Paul to prove his friendship. Oratory extravagance was not his style, and he made no allusion to the accident except to say to me, once I had recovered consciousness, thanks to the attentions of the famous neuropathologist Raginski, to whom he had turned to ensure my immediate care: “I’m greatly indebted to you, old chap. That’s the second time you’ve save my life, or as good as…I need an opportunity to settle up, don’t I?
With what was for him an authentic devotion, however, he gave me hours of his time—hours more precious than ever during the crisis in which he was risking his fortune and the very existence of his bank. He had a horror of sick-rooms and the spectacle of illness, but he came three or four times a day to chat at my bedside, telling me the latest news.
“The pound’s at 151…92…74,” he announced. All’s going well, and we’re winning the battle, but the hardest part remains to be done, for in order to ensure that gold money is reestablished we need to buy back paper francs above par. Oh, if we could publish right away that we have eight billion in gold at Cherbourg and eight more on the way…because, by the way, I forgot to tell you that the destroyer and the transport vessel arrived at the island on the very day you disembarked in France. The destroyer is still there, but the transporter, loaded in double quick time, has already set sail. Not to mention that yesterday, two more cargo ships set sail from Brest.”
On the evening of the twenty-fourth, as I was dining in my room, I learned that Jolliot had come to inquire about my health.
“He’s been in Paris since yesterday. He read your name in the newspapers, after the attack in the Place de la Bourse. Not knowing whether his visit would be welcome, I told him that you’d go to see him once you were back on your feet. You’ll go? Hold your tongue, then—he’s a chatterbox, your friend; I sensed it right away.”
By virtue of an excessive modesty—for Rivier had been straight with me and not tried to hide anything—I dared not ask him for permission to telephone Claridge’s to ask whether the Kohbulers had returned from their trip. My first excursion in Paris, when I finally got up on the twenty-ninth, was to go there, by way of a convalescent stroll.
As if nature itself were participating in the celebration of the Resurrection of the Franc, a renewed warmth had spread over the capital as September came to an end. After three weeks of cold and rainy weather, the meteorological perturbation provoked by the fall of the bolide had brought about equally-unusual simulacrum of summer. For three days, the blue sky had had the ardor of June; overcoats and furs were abandoned, and lightly-clad female flesh was displayed to extent of the heart’s desire.
Paris was joyful. A lightness, forgotten for a long time, impregnated the atmosphere, as in distant and happy times past. For years, I understood then, post-war anxiety and instability had been weighing upon us without our being aware of it; people had got used to it, adapted to it—but what had been taken, a few days earlier, for an everyday humor had been nothing but that chronic melancholy in which everyone had partaken.
Oh, it was very different that morning! A jubilation irradiated Paris, putting a new light into everyone’s eyes. It reminded me invincibly of the Golden Age before the war.
In that Paris transfigured by thirteen years of mechanical progress and intensive civilization, I rediscovered my youth. Nothing but beaming faces on the sidewalk; nothing in the light air but optimistic remarks commenting on the invincible rise of the franc. I heard one shop-girl with a brazenly pretty face say to her companion, who was carrying an enormous hat-box: “You wonder, my girl, with the pound at 28 this morning, whether we can afford silk stockings!”
But that was nothing but juvenile bravado, a symptom of the general confidence—a confidence disappointed so many times, recovered at a stroke, full and smiling. The effect of the rise of the franc, as Rivier said, was entirely in the mind, limited to the satisfaction of knowing that, as before, paper was worth almost as much as gold. In the same way that every jolt in the franc’s gradual fall had been deadened by the mechanism of commerce, the brutality of its decline absorbed, only raising the cost of living with a certain delay, it would take weeks, this time—perhaps months—for prices to adapt to the new value of the franc.
What joy to Claridge’s to hear the reply: “Professor and Mademoiselle Kohbuler will return this afternoon.”
I felt a need to go as far as sharing my delight with someone. Rivier was eating lunch out that day, I had no idea where. That left Jolliot. I took a taxi to his place—12A, Avenue de l’Observatoire—but he was in conference with an American theater-manager; I was only able to see him between two doors for five minutes.
“That swine didn’t do too much damage, then? You look splendid. Yes, Cienne’s here; she’s dressing to go to the studio. But she’s fed up with Panama, as I am; we’re going to spend the winter in Los Angeles. But the deal we’ve been offered doesn’t look so good any more, with this damned exchange rate—the dollar will be at par soon! What’s got into your mate Rivier? They’re crazy to move out the Banque’s reserves, after having sworn that they were untouchable! What incoherence! What a mess! Where are we headed?”
He ended up interrogating me about my voyage, but as he had read the official version about the engine trouble off the Azores, he provided the questions and the answers, and when he had asked: “When are you leaving again?” and I had replied: “I don’t know,” I got away with being called “a washout as an explorer.”
“Well, old chap,” he concluded, “I have to get back to my Yank. But I’ll see you again? When can you come to lunch? The day after tomorrow? Good—we’ll talk then.”
I had lunch alone in a student restaurant on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The prices had not changed; the fixed-price menu that I had seen at one franc twenty-five before the war was still twenty-two francs fifty. Nowhere in the stores on the boulevard, which I then amused myself by passing in review, was any symptom of real lowering yet in evidence. On the windows of the Petite Samaritaine, it’s true, slanting calico ribbons announced a 20% discount on all articles, but the reduction was purely fallacious.
I went back to Claridge’s by way of a long walk along the Seine, trying to soothe my impatience by looking in the boxes of the booksellers, and then going up the Champs-Élysées in the shade of the plane-trees, which were still green. It was warm. The water-wagons were spraying the shiny roadway, along which automobiles were speeding rapidly. The waves of confidence and hope emitted by all the passers-by penetrated me, and my brain amplified them, like an ultra-sensitive resonator.
I was as excited as a student ringing the doorbell of his first mistress as I stepped into the elevator at Claridge’s.
“The professor and Mademoiselle came in two hours ago...”
And the luxurious cage, its mahogany and nickel gleaming, that hoisted me up to the third floor of the palace, seemed to be bearing me up to Eden...
Frédérique! She it was who opened the door of number 204 to me, in an ultramarine blue dress, the same color as her gold-flecked eyes. Her! With her blonde hair in a Florentine bob, her frank smile and the perfume Remember forming an aureole around her, like an evocation of the sun on a beach and an infinite sea...
“Monsieur Marquin! My father’s gone out, just a minute ago. He’ll be sorry to have missed you...” But she seemed, on her own account, to be delighted. Not for a second did I fear that she might hesitate to let me in.
I pronounced the conventional formulae while following her into a study-drawing-room decorated in white lacquer with gold threads, and net curtains with the design of ducks in flight...
I was not a child; I was thirty-four years old, and had experience of femini
ne seduction—but what I experienced that day was completely unprecedented.
As in a glorious dream, an apotheosis of realized joy, in which a new love swept away my old life, leaving me brand new before her, and absolutely confident, I sat down in the armchair she indicated to me, and accepted a cigarette.
Her face stood out, fully illuminated, and I could not see anything but her.
The polite comments that were exchanged mechanically were of no importance to me. Gripped by a marvelous emotion, I followed the expressions passing over her mobile features…which transfigured her, causing her to put on successively, from one minute to the next, the thousand and one faces of my most cherished dreams of old…the harem of beauty that fortunate love is able to discover in the Chosen One...
We chatted, by way of social reflex, but another exchange of thoughts, infinitely more serious and emotional, was effected between us…as if the waves of a fluid and inarticulate language—the primordial language of souls—were bathing us in an atmosphere of reciprocal comprehension, connecting the essential and secret magnetisms of our being...
I did not make a gesture toward her; I did not even want to take her by the hand. Those effluvia created an atmosphere of sacred drama that was sufficient in itself.
Was she afraid of seeing me anticipate future joys? Or, warned by her subtle feminine instinct, did she understand that we had exhausted the beauty of the moment, and it could only decline?
I was woken up, so to speak, by a direct question: “Would you like to tell me about your voyage, my friend? Let’s take advantage of being alone.”
Her face, as if haloed by superhuman light, revealed the utmost depths of her limpid and fraternal soul. No secrecy could exist between us. My oath of silence, made to Commander Barcot, did not concern her, the sister soul rediscovered…the complementary half of my being, the one that vibrated in perfect harmony with mine.