by Emile Zola
At that moment, Mazaud felt death pass over his face. He had carried over Saccard for too large an amount, and he had the distinct sensation that the Universal, in its collapse, was breaking his back. But his handsome, dark face, with its small moustache, remained stolid and impenetrable. He bought some more, exhausting the orders he had received, with his young-cockerel voice crowing just as shrilly as it had in success. And facing him, his opposite numbers, Jacoby bellowing and Delarocque apoplectic, despite their effort at indifference, showed some signs of anxiety; for they could see that he was now in great danger, and if he went bust, would he pay them? Their hands gripped the velvet of the balustrade, while their voices kept on shouting, as if mechanically, out of professional habit, while their fixed stares reflected all the dreadful anguish of this drama of money.
Then, during the last half-hour, it was disaster, the rout steadily worsening, and carrying people away in a gallop of confusion. After extreme confidence and blind infatuation came the reaction of fear, all now rushing to sell, if there was still time. A hail of orders to sell beat upon the trading-floor, all one could see was order-slips raining down; and these huge blocks of shares, scattered pell-mell like this, accelerated the fall, made it a real collapse. The prices, going down and down, fell to one thousand five hundred, to one thousand two hundred, to nine hundred. There were no more buyers, nothing was left, the ground was strewn with corpses. High above the dark swarm of frock-coats, the three quoters seemed like mortuary clerks, registering deaths. By a singular effect of the wind of disaster blowing through the room, all agitation had come to a stop and the noise had died down, as in the stupor of a great catastrophe. A frightening silence reigned when, after the ringing of the closing bell, the closing price of eight hundred and thirty francs became known. And the rain went on stubbornly streaming down the windows, which now let in only a sort of sickly twilight; the hall, under the dripping umbrellas and trampling of feet, had become a cesspit, like the muddy floor of an ill-kept stable, littered with all sorts of torn papers; while the trading-floor displayed the bright, multicoloured slips, the green, the red, the blue, thrown away in handfuls, in such quantities that day that the vast basin was overflowing.
Mazaud had gone back to the brokers’ room at the same time as Jacoby and Delarocque. He went up to the bar and, consumed with a raging thirst, drank a glass of beer, and gazed at the huge room, with its cloakroom, its long central table with the chairs of the sixty brokers ranged around it, the red-velvet hangings, all the banal and faded luxury which made it look like the first-class waiting-room of a large railway-station; he looked at it with an astonished air, as a man might, who had never really seen it before. Then, as he was leaving, without a word, he shook hands with Jacoby and Delarocque in the usual way, but all three were pale beneath their appearance of everyday normality. He had told Flory to wait for him at the door, and he found him there, along with Gustave, who, having definitively left the office a week ago, had come along simply out of curiosity, always smiling and leading a life of pleasure, without ever wondering whether his father, on the morrow, would still be able to pay his debts; while Flory, looking very wan, was struggling to talk, and making idiotic grimaces, under the impact of the fearful loss he had just made, of about a hundred thousand francs, with no idea where to find the first sou of it. Mazaud and his clerk disappeared into the rain.
But in the hall, panic had raged above all around Saccard—this was where the war had done most damage. Without at first understanding, he had faced up to the danger and watched the whole rout. Where did that noise come from? Wasn’t that Daigremont’s troops arriving? Then, when he had heard the prices collapsing, still unable to grasp the cause of the disaster, he had stiffened himself, ready to die on his feet. An icy chill rose up from the ground to his skull, he sensed something irreparable, this was his defeat for ever; and no base regret for money, or anger about pleasures lost, had any part in his pain; he bled only for his humiliation at being vanquished, and for the dazzling, definitive victory of Gundermann, consolidating once more the omnipotence of that king of money. At this moment Saccard was really superb, his whole slight figure braving destiny with unblinking eyes, his face stubbornly set, standing alone against the flood of despair and resentment that he could already feel rising against him. The whole room was seething, surging towards his pillar; fists were clenched, mouths were muttering curses; and he had kept on his lips an unconscious smile, that could easily seem a provocation.
First, in a sort of mist, he made out Maugendre, with a face of mortal pallor, as Captain Chave led him away on his arm, saying over and over that he had told him how it would be, with the cruelty of a minimal gambler, delighted to see the big players come a cropper. Then there was Sédille, with drawn face and the mad look of a merchant whose business is crumbling, who came like a good fellow, though with trembling hands, to shake Saccard’s hand, as if to say he bore him no grudge. At the first sign of danger, the Marquis de Bohain had moved away, going over to the triumphant army of short-sellers, telling Kolb, who was also prudently keeping his distance, about the worrying doubts he had had about Saccard ever since the last shareholders’ meeting. Jantrou, quite distraught, had disappeared again, running as fast as he could to take the closing price to Baroness Sandorff, who would surely have a hysterical fit in her carriage, as she was apt to do on days when she lost heavily.
There too, facing the still silent and enigmatic Salmon, were Moser the short-seller and the bullish Pillerault;, the latter, in spite of his ruin, remained provocative, with his proud face, while the former, having made a fortune, was spoiling his victory with worries about the future.
‘You’ll see, in the spring, we’ll be at war with Germany. All this has a bad smell, and Bismarck is watching and waiting.’
‘Oh, do stop all that! Once again I made the mistake of giving things too much thought… Too bad! I just need to start all over again, and all will be well.’
So far, Saccard had not weakened. But hearing someone behind him mention Fayeux, the collector of revenues in Vendôme, with whom he had had dealings for a number of petty shareholders, the name had caused him some distress, reminding him of the enormous mass of humble folk, wretched little investors who would be crushed to pieces under the wreckage of the Universal. Then, suddenly, the sight of Dejoie, distraught and deathly pale, sharpened that distress, with this one poor man whom he knew, seeming to personify all the rest of the humble folk now ruined. At the same time, in a sort of hallucination, the pale and desolate faces of the Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter arose before him, gazing at him in despair with their wide eyes full of tears. And at that moment, Saccard, the pirate, with a heart toughened by twenty years of banditry, Saccard, who took pride in never having felt his legs give way and who had never once sat down on the bench right there beside the pillar, this same Saccard experienced a moment of real weakness, and had to let himself sink down upon it for a moment. Crowds still surged around, almost suffocating him. He raised his head to get some air, and was at once on his feet, for he recognized, up in the telegraph gallery, looking down on the hall, La Méchain, towering over the battlefield with her enormous fat person. Her old black-leather bag lay beside her on the stone balustrade. Waiting to fill it up with worthless shares, she was watching out for the dead, like the voracious crow that follows armies until the day of massacre.
Saccard then, with a firm step, went away. His entire being seemed to him empty; but by an extraordinary effort of will, he went forward, erect and steady. But his senses seemed to have been blunted, he could no longer feel the ground, he seemed to be walking on a thick woollen carpet. His eyes too were clouded by mist, and his ears buzzing with noise. As he went out of the Bourse and down the steps, he no longer recognized people, they were just phantoms floating around him, vague shapes and stray sounds. Did he not see the broad grimacing face of Busch go by? Did he not pause for a moment to chat with Nathansohn, who was very much at ease, and whose weakened voice seemed
to come from far away? Were not Sabatani and Massias walking with him, amid the general consternation? He seemed to see himself once more with a large group around him, perhaps Sédille and Maugendre again, all sorts of faces that faded away, and kept changing. And as he was about to go away, and disappear into the rain and the liquid mud submerging Paris, he repeated in a shrill voice to all that phantom throng, making it a last point of honour to show his freedom of spirit:
‘Ah! How very upset I am about that camellia that got left out in my courtyard, and died of the cold!’
CHAPTER XI
MADAME CAROLINE, horrified, sent a telegram that very evening to her brother, who still had one more week in Rome; and three days later, rushing to the scene of danger, Hamelin arrived in Paris.
There was a fierce encounter between Saccard and the engineer, right there in the workroom where formerly their venture had been discussed and decided on with so much enthusiasm. During those three days, the collapse at the Bourse had horribly worsened, and Universal shares had gone down, fall after fall, even to below par, to four hundred and forty francs; and the fall was continuing, the whole edifice was crumbling hour by hour.
Madame Caroline listened in silence, not wanting to intervene. She was full of remorse, accusing herself of complicity, for it was she who, after promising to watch over things, had let it all happen. Instead of contenting herself with merely selling her shares to try to hamper the rise, shouldn’t she have found some other recourse, like warning people, taking some action, in short? Adoring her brother as she did, her heart bled for him, seeing him compromised in this way, with his great ventures undermined and his whole life’s work called in question; she suffered all the more in that she felt she had no right to judge Saccard: hadn’t she loved him? Was she not his, through that secret bond, the shame of which she now felt more than ever? Placed as she was between these two men, she was being torn apart in a violent struggle. On the evening of the catastrophe, she had launched out at Saccard in a great fit of frankness, emptying her heart of all the reproaches and fears it had been gathering for so long. Then, seeing him smiling, still tenacious and unvanquished, and thinking of how much strength he needed to keep standing up, she had felt she had no right, when she had been so weak with him, to finish him off by hitting him when he was down. And taking refuge in silence, showing blame only by her attitude, she wanted to be merely a witness.
But Hamelin, he who was normally so conciliatory, so detached from everything other than his work, this time grew angry. He made an extremely violent attack on speculation; the Universal had succumbed to the madness of speculation in a frenzy of sheer lunacy. Of course he was not one of those who claimed that a bank can simply let its shares go down, as, for instance, a railway company can: railway companies have their mass of equipment, equipment that makes money, whereas the bank’s real equipment is its credit, so it is in dire trouble the moment its credit wobbles. But there was a question of proportion. If it was necessary, even wise, to keep the share-price at two thousand francs, it was crazy and completely criminal, to push it up, to try to put it up to three thousand and even beyond. As soon as he arrived, Hamelin had insisted on the truth, the whole truth. It was now impossible to lie to him, to tell him what he had allowed them to announce in his presence at the last shareholders’ meeting, that the company did not possess a single one of its own shares. The books were there and he easily saw through the lies they held. For instance, Count Sabatani; he knew that this frontman concealed the activities of the bank itself, and he was able to follow month by month Saccard’s mounting fever over the last two years, starting timidly, buying only with moderation, then driven on to larger and larger purchases, reaching the enormous figure of twenty-seven thousand shares costing nearly forty-eight milllion francs. Wasn’t that mad, a madness of such impudence it seemed to take people for fools, with such enormous transactions attributed to Sabatani? And Sabatani was not the only one, there were other men of straw, bank employees, even directors, whose purchases, entered as carried over, exceeded twenty thousand shares, these too representing nearly forty-eight million francs. Indeed, that was just the completed purchases; to these must be added the fixed-term purchases,* made in the course of the last January settlement, representing a sum of sixty-seven-and-a-half million for more than twenty thousand shares, of which the Universal would have to take delivery; in addition, ten thousand other shares at the Lyons Stock Exchange, which made another twenty-four million. All of this, when added up, showed that the bank was holding nearly a quarter of the shares it had issued, and had paid for those shares the appalling sum of two hundred million francs. That was the abyss into which it had sunk.
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,* 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.’