Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (11 page)

‘Oh, you can see the Bourse! My! How funny it looks from here.’

Indeed he had never before seen it from such a strange angle, a bird’s-eye-view, with the four huge zinc slopes of the roof exposed in amazing detail, bristling with a forest of pipes. The points of the lightning-conductors stood up like giant lances, threatening the sky. And the great building itself was now no more than a cube of stone, striped by rows of columns, a dirty, grey cube, bare and ugly, with a ragged flag on top. But what astonished him most was the steps and the peristyle, dotted with black ants, a whole anthill in turmoil, restlessly moving, creating a huge disturbance that from up here seemed incomprehensible, and even pitiable.

‘How small it all looks!’ he continued. ‘As if one could grab them all up in one handful!’

Then, being familiar with the ideas of his companion, he added with a laugh:

‘When are you going to get rid of all that, with one swift kick?’

Sigismond shrugged.

‘What’s the point? You’re already doing the demolishing yourselves.’

And bit by bit he grew animated, overflowing with the subject he was so full of. A proselytizing urge launched him, at the slightest excuse, into an exposition of his system.

‘Yes indeed, you’re working for us without realizing it… There you are, a few usurpers, dispossessing the masses, and once you are gorged we, in turn, will only have to dispossess you… Every kind of monopolizing, every centralization, leads to collectivism. You are giving us a practical lesson: in the same way that big estates swallow up small plots of land, big manufacturers devour cottage industry and large banks and big stores kill off all competition, growing fat on the ruin of small banks and little shops—they are all, in fact, slowly but surely moving towards the new social order… We are waiting for it all to break down, waiting for the current mode of production to end in the intolerable disorder of its final consequences. Then the bourgeois and the peasants themselves will help us.’

Intrigued, Saccard gazed at him with a vague disquiet, although he thought him quite mad.

‘Well all right, tell me about it, what is this collectivism of yours?’

‘Collectivism is the transformation of private capital, living by the strife of competition, into a unitary social capital, created by the work of all… Imagine a society in which the instruments of production are the property of all, in which everyone works according to his intelligence and strength and the products of this social co-operation are distributed to each and all, in proportion to their effort. Surely nothing could be simpler? Communal production in the factories, yards, and workshops of the nation; then an exchange, a payment in kind. If there is a surplus of production it’s placed in public warehouses, from where it can be recovered to make good any shortages that may occur. It’s a matter of striking a balance… And all this, like the stroke of an axe, fells the rotten tree. No more competition, no more private capital, so no more business of any kind, no commerce, no markets, no stock exchanges. The idea of profit no longer has any meaning. The sources of speculation, unearned incomes, simply are no more.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ Saccard interrupted, ‘that would make a terrific change in the way of life of a lot of people! But what about those who live on private incomes now? Gundermann, for instance, would you take away his billion?’

‘Not at all; we are not thieves. We would buy back his billion, his shares, his income bonds, with a set of vouchers divided into annuities. And just imagine that immense capital replaced in this way by a suffocating wealth of consumer vouchers: in less than a hundred years the descendants of that Gundermann of yours would be reduced to personal labour, like all the other citizens, for the annuities would eventually run out and they would not have been able to turn their forced savings, the excess of that crushing surplus of provisions, into capital, even if the right of inheritance were retained… I tell you, this sweeps away at a stroke not only individual businesses, companies of shareholders, and associations of private capital but all the indirect sources of income, all the credit systems, loans, rents, and tenant farming… There would no longer be any measure of value other than labour. Wages are of course abolished, for in the present capitalist system they are not equivalent to the actual product of labour, since they never represent anything more than what is strictly necessary
for the worker’s daily livelihood. And it must be admitted that it’s the present system that is alone to blame, for even the most honest employer has to follow the harsh law of competition and exploit his workers if he wants to make a living. Our whole social system has to be destroyed… Oh! Gundermann choking under the weight of his vouchers! And Gundermann’s heirs not managing to use it all up, forced to give to others and take up the pickaxe or the workman’s tools, just like their comrades!’

And Sigismond burst out laughing, like a child in a playground, but still standing at the window with his eyes on the Bourse, where the black ant-hill of speculation still swarmed. Burning patches of red appeared on his cheeks; imagining the amusing ironies of the justice of the future was his one entertainment.

Saccard had grown more and more uneasy. What if this dreamer was right after all? What if he had correctly divined the future? He explained things in a way that seemed very clear and sensible.

‘Bah!’ he muttered to reassure himself. ‘All this is not going to happen next year!’

‘Of course not,’ the young man went on, once more solemn and weary. ‘We’re in the time of transition, the time of agitation. Perhaps there will be some outbreaks of revolutionary violence, they are often inevitable. But the excesses and outbursts are temporary… Oh, I don’t try to disguise the immediate difficulties. All that dreamed-of future seems impossible, it’s hard to give people a reasonable idea of that future society, that society of fair labour whose way of life will be so different from ours. It’s like another world on another planet… And it has to be admitted: reorganization isn’t ready yet, we’re still finding our way. I, who hardly sleep any more, spend my nights on it. For instance, we can certainly be told: “If things are as they are, it’s because the logic of human activity has made them so.” So what a task it is, to take the river back to its source and direct it into another valley!… Certainly, the present state of society has owed its prosperity over the centuries to the individualist principle, which through emulation and personal interest becomes an endlessly renewed source of fertile production. Will collectivism ever reach that level of fecundity, and how are we to activate the productive function of the worker once the idea of earnings has been destroyed? This, for me, is where the doubt and anguish lie, the weak ground on which we must fight if we want the victory of socialism to be won on it one day… But we
will overcome, for we are justice itself. Look! You see that monument before you… Do you see it?’

‘The Bourse?’ Saccard answered. ‘Lord, yes, I can see it!’

‘Well, it would be stupid to blow it up, it would simply get rebuilt elsewhere. But I predict that it will blow itself up, once the state has taken it over and become, in consequence, the sole and universal bank of the nation. And who knows? It may then serve as a public warehouse for our excess of wealth, one of those granaries of abundance in which our grandchildren will find the luxuries for their feast-days.’

With an expansive gesture, Sigismond seemed to open up this future of general and widespread happiness. And he was so carried away that a new fit of coughing shook his frame as he returned to his table, with his elbows among the papers and holding his head in his hands to smother the hacking rattle of his throat. But this time it would not calm down. Suddenly the door opened and Busch, having sent away La Méchain, ran in looking distraught, as if he himself was suffering that abominable coughing. He at once leaned over and took his brother in his broad arms, as if rocking an unhappy child.

‘Come on, my dear, what is making you choke like this? You know I want you to call a doctor. This is just not sensible… you must have been talking too much, for sure.’

And he cast a sidelong glance at Saccard, still standing in the middle of the room, decidedly disturbed by what he had just heard from the mouth of this tall fellow, so passionate and so ill, who from his window up here must be casting a spell over the Bourse with his notions of sweeping everything away and rebuilding.

‘Thanks, I’ll leave you now,’ said the visitor, eager to be outside. Send me my letter, with the ten lines of translation… I’m expecting some more, so we’ll settle the whole lot together.’

But, now the crisis was over, Busch kept him back a moment or two more.

‘By the way, the lady who was here just now had met you before, oh! a long time ago.’

‘Ah! Where was that?’

‘Rue de la Harpe, in ’52.’

Self-controlled as he was, Saccard nevertheless lost colour. A nervous tic twitched at his mouth. It wasn’t that he remembered at that instant the girl he’d tumbled on the staircase: he hadn’t known
about her pregnancy, and did not know there was a child. But the memory of those first wretched years was always very disagreeable.

‘Rue de la Harpe. Oh, I only stayed there about a week when I first arrived in Paris, while I looked for somewhere to live… Au revoir!’

‘Au revoir!’ Busch pointedly repeated, mistakenly seeing Saccard’s embarrassment as an admission of guilt, and already thinking about how best to exploit this affair.

Down in the street again Saccard went back automatically towards the Place de la Bourse. He was quite shivery, he did not even look at little Madame Conin, whose pretty blonde face was smiling from the stationer’s door. In the square the commotion had increased, the clamour of trading was beating down on pavements teeming with people with the unfettered violence of a high tide. It was the quarter-to-three shouting-match, the battle of the last calls, the frenzy to find out who would emerge with full pockets. And standing at the corner of the Rue de la Bourse, opposite the peristyle, he thought he saw, in the confused jostling under the columns, the bear-trader Moser and the bull trader Pillerault, both doing battle, and fancied he could hear, emerging from the main hall, the shrill voice of the broker Mazaud, occasionally smothered by great bursts from Nathansohn, who was sitting under the clock in the kerb market. But a carriage going by, on the edge of the gutter, almost splattered him. Massias leaped from it even before the coachman had reined in, and ran up the steps in one bound, breathlessly carrying some client’s last order.

And Saccard, still standing motionless, gazing at the milling crowd up there, was mulling over his life, haunted by the memory of his beginnings reawakened by Busch’s question. He recalled the Rue de la Harpe, then the Rue Saint-Jacques, to which he had dragged his down-at-heel conquering-hero boots when newly arrived in Paris and determined to master it; and fury once more seized hold of him at the thought that he had not yet conquered, that he was once again out on the streets, seeking his fortune, unsatisfied, and tormented by a hunger for gratification such as he had never before experienced so painfully. That madman Sigismond spoke truly: work cannot make a life, the wretched and the stupid labour only to make others grow fat. There was only speculation, speculation which, from one day to the next, could at a stroke give well-being, luxury, an expansive life, life whole and entire. If this old social world had to crumble away one
day, wouldn’t a man like him still manage to find the time and place to satisfy his desires before the collapse?

But a passer-by jostled him and didn’t even turn round to apologize. He saw it was Gundermann, taking his little daily constitutional; he watched him go into a sweetshop from which this king of gold frequently bought a one-franc box of sweets for his granddaughters. And that jostling, at that moment, in the fever that had been mounting in him since he started his circling of the Bourse, was like a whiplash, the final decisive thrust. He had finished his siege of the square, he would attack. It was a vow of merciless struggle: he would not leave France, he would defy his brother, he would risk everything in a battle of terrible audacity, which would either lay Paris at his feet or throw him broken into the gutter.

Until the market closed Saccard stayed resolutely at his post of observation and menacing intent. He watched the peristyle emptying and the steps filling with the slow disbanding of all these excited, weary people. Around him the roadway and the pavements were still crowded with an uninterrupted flow of people, the eternal crowd, ready to be exploited, the shareholders of tomorrow, who could not go past this great lottery of speculation without turning their heads, impelled by desire and fear of what went on in there, the mystery of financial transactions, a mystery all the more attractive to French brains since so few of them ever penetrate it.

A
FTER
Saccard’s last disastrous land-deal, when he had to leave his palace in the Parc Monceau, abandoning it to his creditors to avoid an even greater catastrophe, his first idea had been to take refuge with his son Maxime. Maxime, since the death of his wife, who now lay in a little cemetery in Lombardy,
*
had been living on his own in a mansion on the Avenue de l’Impératrice,
*
where he had organized his life with a careful and ferocious egoism; as a young man prematurely aged by vice, he was impeccably eating up the fortune of his dead wife, and firmly refused to take his father in, explaining, with an air of sweet reasonableness, that this was so that they could go on living in harmony.

After that Saccard thought of another refuge. He would rent a little house in Passy, a bourgeois retreat for retired businessmen, then he remembered that the ground floor and first floor of the Orviedo mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare were still lying empty, their doors and windows shuttered. The Princess d’Orviedo had been living in three rooms on the second floor since the death of her husband, and she had not even had a sign put up at the carriage entrance, now overgrown with weeds. A low door at the other end of the front of the building led to the second floor by a servants’ staircase. Saccard had frequently been in touch with the Princess over business matters, and had been astonished, on his visits to her, at her failure to try and make some profit out of her building. But she would just shake her head; she had her own ideas on money matters. However, when he suggested himself as a tenant she agreed at once, granting him, for a derisory rent of ten thousand francs, the use of the sumptuous ground floor and first floor, a princely accommodation worth at least double.