Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (16 page)

Madame Caroline, with her solid common sense, normally very resistant to overheated imaginings, nevertheless allowed herself to be carried along by this enthusiasm, no longer able to see its excessiveness with any clarity. In truth it appealed to that love she had for the Orient, her nostalgia for that admirable land where she had believed herself to be happy; and in a logical counter-effect it was she, with her colourful descriptions and her flood of detail, who, without meaning to, whipped up Saccard’s fever more and more. When she talked about Beirut, where she had lived for three years, there was no stopping her: Beirut, at the foot of the Lebanon, on that tongue of land between stretches of red sand and piles of fallen rocks, Beirut with its houses built like an amphitheatre, set in vast gardens, a delightful paradise planted with orange trees, lemon trees, and palms. Then it was all the coastal towns—Antioch in the north, now bereft of its splendour, and in the south Saida, the Sidon of long ago, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Jaffa, and Tyre, now Sour, whose story is the story of them all: Tyre, whose merchants were kings, whose sailors had sailed around Africa, and which now, its harbour choked with sand, is no more than a field of ruins and the dust of palaces, on which are scattered only some wretched fishermen’s huts. She had accompanied her brother everywhere, she knew Aleppo, Angora, Bursa, Smyrna,
and even Trebizond; she had lived for a month in Jerusalem, the city half asleep amid the trafficking round the holy places, then two months in Damascus, the queen of the Orient in the middle of its vast plain, the city of trade and industry, made by the caravans from Mecca and Baghdad into a centre full of milling crowds. And she also knew the valleys and mountains, the villages of the Maronites and the Druze, perched high over the plateaus or hidden in the depths of the gorges, and the cultivated fields and the barren ones. And from the smallest corners, from the silent deserts as well as the great cities, she had brought back the same admiration for inexhaustible, luxuriant nature and the same anger at the stupidity and wickedness of men. All those natural riches scorned or spoiled! She spoke of the taxes that crush trade and industry, the idiotic law that limits the amount of capital that can be put into agriculture; and the stagnation that leaves in the hands of the peasant today the plough that was in use before the time of Christ, and the ignorance in which millions of men still languish like idiot children, their development arrested. In former times the coast was too small, the towns almost ran into each other; now life has moved away to the West, and it is as if one were travelling through a vast abandoned cemetery. No schools, no roads, the worst of governments, justice for sale, execrable public servants, excessive taxation, ridiculous laws, laziness and fanaticism; not to mention the continual upheavals of civil wars, and massacres that wipe out entire villages. Then she would grow angry, asking how it could be permitted to spoil in this way the work of nature, a blessed land of exquisite charm, a land where every climate could be found, burning plains and temperate mountainsides and eternal snow on the high summits. And her love of life, her persistent hopefulness, made her passionate about the idea of the all-powerful magic wand of science and speculation that could strike this ancient slumbering land into life.

‘Look,’ cried Saccard, ‘this Carmel Gorge in this drawing of yours, where there’s nothing but stones and mastic trees, you’ll see, once the silver mine gets going, first a village will spring up, then a town… And all those ports silted up with sand, we’ll clean them out and protect them with strong jetties. Great ships will anchor where now even small boats do not dare to moor… And on these depopulated plains, these deserted passes, where our railway lines will run, you’ll see a veritable resurrection, yes! The fields will cease to lie fallow, roads and canals will appear, new cities will rise from the ground and life
will at last return, as it does to a sick body when new blood is made to circulate through the depleted veins… Yes! Money will perform these miracles.’

And in what his piercing voice described, Madame Caroline could really see that predicted civilization arising. Those dry technical drawings and those linear outlines came to life, full of people: it was the dream she had sometimes had of an Orient cleansed of its dirt, pulled out of its ignorance, enjoying the fertility of its soil, the charms of its sky, with all the refinements of science. She had already seen such a miracle in Port Said, which in so few years had pushed out on to a bare beach, first sheds to shelter the few workers at the start of the excavation, then the city of two thousand souls, and next the city of ten thousand souls, houses, huge warehouses, an immense jetty, life and well-being stubbornly created by the human ants. And that was what she could see rising up once more, the irresistible forward march, the social drive that rushes towards the greatest possible happiness, the urge to act, to move forward without knowing exactly where one is going, but to go more easily and in better conditions; and the globe turned upside down by the anthill rebuilding its home, and the continual work, new possibilities of enjoyment acquired, man’s power multiplied tenfold, the earth belonging to him more and more each day. Money, backing up science, created progress.

Hamelin, who was listening with a smile, then made a wise remark.

‘All this is the poetry of results, but we haven’t yet even reached the prose of implementation.’

But it was only the excessiveness of his ideas that really excited Saccard, and it got worse on the day when, having started reading books on the Orient, he opened a history of the Egyptian expedition.
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He was already haunted by the memory of the Crusades, that return of the West to its cradle in the East, that great movement which had brought the furthest parts of Europe back to the countries of their origin, which were still flourishing and where there was so much to learn. But the lofty figure of Napoleon struck him even more, setting off there to wage war, with a grandiose and mysterious aim. If he spoke of conquering Egypt and setting up a French establishment there, thus giving France the trade of the Levant, he was certainly not telling the whole story: and Saccard tried to read into what remained vague and enigmatic about the expedition some sort of colossally ambitious project, the reconstruction of a huge empire,
Napoleon crowned in Constantinople, emperor of the Orient and the Indies, realizing the dream of Alexander, greater than that of Caesar or Charlemagne. Didn’t he say, in Saint-Helena, speaking of Sidney, the English general who had stopped him at the Battle of St-Jean-d’Acre:
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‘That man made me miss my destiny.’ And what the Crusades had attempted, what Napoleon had been unable to accomplish, it was that gigantic idea of conquest of the Orient that fired the imagination of Saccard, a carefully planned conquest, achieved by the twin forces of science and money. Since civilization had spread from East to West, why shouldn’t it go back to the East, returning to the original garden of humanity, to that Eden of the Hindustan peninsula which lay asleep in the weariness of centuries? It would be a new period of youth, it would galvanize the Earthly Paradise, making it habitable once more with steam and electricity, putting Asia Minor back at the centre of that ancient world, as the point of intersection of the great natural paths that link the continents. It was now a matter of making not millions, but billions and billions.

From then on Hamelin and he had long discussions every morning. If their hopes were vast, the difficulties were numerous and enormous. The engineer, who indeed had been in Beirut in 1862 during the terrible butchery that the Druzes carried out on the Maronite Christians, an event in which France had had to intervene,
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did not conceal the obstacles they would meet among these perpetually warring peoples, dependent on the whims of the local powers. But he did have powerful contacts in Constantinople, he had secured the support of the Grand Vizier Fuad Pasha,
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a man of real merit, a declared partisan of reform; and he flattered himself he would be able to obtain all the necessary concessions from him. On the other hand, although he predicted the fatal bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, he saw a rather favourable circumstance in its frantic need for money, and the continual loans it took out year after year; a needy government, though it offers no personal guarantee, is very ready to make deals with particular enterprises if it sees the slightest benefit in so doing. And wasn’t it a practical way of answering the everlasting and burdensome question of the Orient, to interest the Empire in great civilizing works and lead it towards progress, so that it would no longer be that monstrous barrier standing between Europe and Asia? What a fine, patriotic role would be played in all this by French companies!

Then one morning Hamelin calmly broached the secret programme
to which he had occasionally alluded, the one he referred to, with a smile, as the crowning of the edifice.

‘After this, once we are the masters, we shall remake the kingdom of Palestine and install the Pope there… At first it could be just Jerusalem, with Jaffa as the seaport. Then Syria will be declared independent and we shall add it on… You know, the time draws near when it will be impossible for the Papacy to remain in Rome, with all the revolting humiliations in store for it there. We must be prepared for that day!’

Saccard listened to him open-mouthed as he said these things quite simply, with his profound Catholic faith. He did not himself shrink from extravagant imaginings but would never have gone quite that far. This man of science, so apparently cold, absolutely amazed him.

‘That’s mad!’ he cried. ‘The Porte
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won’t give up Jerusalem.’

‘Oh, why not?’ Hamelin tranquilly continued. ‘It is in such urgent need of money! Jerusalem is a bother, they’d be glad to get rid of it. They often don’t know which side to take between the diverse faiths fighting for possession of the sanctuaries. Besides, the Pope would have real support in Syria from the Maronites, for, as you know, he has established a College in Rome for their priests… In short, I’ve really thought it out, I’ve seen how it would all work, and it will be the new era, the triumphant era of Catholicism. Some may say this is going too far, that the Pope would find himself isolated, cut off from European affairs. But what glory and authority he will have when he reigns over the sacred places, speaking in the name of Christ, from the Holy Land where Christ himself once spoke! That is where his patrimony lies, that must be his kingdom. And rest assured, we shall make it powerful and solid, that kingdom; we shall put it beyond the reach of political disturbance by basing its budget, guaranteed by the resources of the country, upon a vast bank in which Catholics the world over will fight to have shares.’

Saccard, who had begun to smile, already delighted if not entirely convinced by the hugeness of the project, could not help baptizing this bank, with a joyful cry of discovery:

‘The Treasury of the Holy Sepulchre, eh? Superb! Just what we need!’

But he then met the sensible gaze of Madame Caroline, also smiling but sceptical, even slightly irritated; and he felt ashamed of his enthusiasm.

‘No matter, my dear Hamelin, we had best keep secret that crowning
of the edifice, as you call it. We’d be laughed at. And besides, our programme is already very heavily loaded, it’s a good idea to reserve for the initiate the final consequences, the glorious end.’

‘Undoubtedly, that has always been my intention,’ said the engineer. That will be the mystery.’

And it was with that word, on that day, that the exploitation of the portfolio, the putting into operation of the whole enormous series of projects, was definitively decided. They would begin by creating a modest lending-house to launch the first deals; then, with success helping them along, they would gradually become masters of the market and conquer the world.

The next day, as Saccard had gone up to see the Princess d’Orviedo to get her orders on the subject of the Work Foundation, he remembered the dream he had briefly cherished of becoming the prince consort of this queen of charity, a mere distributor and administrator of the fortune of the poor. And he smiled, for all that now seemed to him rather silly. He was built to create life, not to treat the wounds that life has made. Now at last he was going to get back to his own work, in the thick of the battles of finance, in that race for happiness which has always been the very march of humanity through the centuries, always moving toward more joy and more light.

That same day he came upon Madame Caroline alone in the study. She was standing at one of the windows, held there by the appearance of the Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter in the next-door garden at an unaccustomed hour. The two women were reading a letter with an air of great sadness, no doubt a letter from the son Ferdinand, whose position in Rome was probably far from brilliant.

‘Look,’ said Madame Caroline when she saw Saccard. ‘Yet more trouble for those unfortunate women. Beggar-women in the street cause me less pain.’

‘Bah!’ he cried gaily, ‘you must ask them to come and see me. We’ll make them rich too, since we’re going to make everybody’s fortune!’

And in the fervour of his happiness he tried to kiss her on the lips. But she had moved her head away, suddenly grave and pale with some involuntary malaise.

‘No, please don’t.’

It was the first time he had tried to approach her again since she had abandoned herself to him in a moment when she had lost all self-awareness. Now that the serious business matters were arranged,
he was able to think about his good fortune as a lover, and wanted to settle matters on this side of things too. Her sharp movement of withdrawal astonished him.

‘Really? Would that truly displease you?’

‘Yes, really. Very much so.’

She was calmer now, and she in turn was smiling.

‘Besides, admit it, it doesn’t matter that much to you either.’

‘Oh, but I adore you.’

‘No, don’t say that, you’re going to be so busy! Besides, I assure you that I’m ready to have a real friendship with you, if you are the man of action I take you to be and if you do all the great things you say you’ll do… Anyway, friendship is better!’