"What do you think of the Bourse?" asked Lemercier, as their carriage
took the way to the Bois.
"I cannot think of it yet; I am stunned. It seems to me as if I had been
at a 'Sabbat,' of which the wizards were 'agents de change,' but not less
bent upon raising Satan."
"Pooh! the best way to exorcise Satan is to get rich enough not to be
tempted by him. The fiend always loved to haunt empty places; and of all
places nowadays he prefers empty purses and empty stomachs."
"But do all people get rich at the Bourse? or is not one man's wealth
many men's ruin?"
"That is a question not very easy to answer; but under our present system
Paris gets rich, though at the expense of individual Parisians. I will
try and explain. The average luxury is enormously increased even in my
experience; what were once considered refinements and fopperies are now
called necessary comforts. Prices are risen enormously, house-rent
doubled within the last five or six years; all articles of luxury are
very much dearer; the very gloves I wear cost twenty per cent more than I
used to pay for gloves of the same quality. How the people we meet live,
and live so well, is an enigma that would defy AEdipus if AEdipus were
not a Parisian. But the main explanation is this: speculation and
commerce, with the facilities given to all investments, have really
opened more numerous and more rapid ways to fortune than were known a few
years ago.
"Crowds are thus attracted to Paris, resolved to venture a small capital
in the hope of a large one; they live on that capital, not on their
income, as gamesters do. There is an idea among us that it is necessary
to seem rich in order to become rich. Thus there is a general
extravagance and profusion. English milords marvel at our splendour.
Those who, while spending their capital as their income, fail in their
schemes of fortune, after one, two, three, or four years, vanish. What
becomes of them, I know no more than I do what becomes of the old moons.
Their place is immediately supplied by new candidates. Paris is thus
kept perennially sumptuous and splendid by the gold it engulfs. But then
some men succeed,--succeed prodigiously, preternaturally; they make
colossal fortunes, which are magnificently expended. They set an example
of show and pomp, which is of course the more contagious because so many
men say, 'The other day those millionnaires were as poor as we are; they
never economized; why should we?' Paris is thus doubly enriched,--by the
fortunes it swallows up, and by the fortunes it casts up; the last being
always reproductive, and the first never lost except to the individuals."
"I understand: but what struck me forcibly at the scene we have left was
the number of young men there; young men whom I should judge by their
appearance to be gentlemen, evidently not mere spectators,--eager,
anxious, with tablets in their hands. That old or middle-aged men should
find a zest in the pursuit of gain I can understand, but youth and
avarice seem to me a new combination, which Moliere never divined in his
'Avare.'"
"Young men, especially if young gentlemen, love pleasure; and pleasure in
this city is very dear. This explains why so many young men frequent the
Bourse. In the old gaining now suppressed, young men were the majority;
in the days of your chivalrous forefathers it was the young nobles, not
the old, who would stake their very mantles and swords on a cast of the
die. And, naturally enough, _mon cher_; for is not youth the season of
hope, and is not hope the goddess of gaming, whether at _rouge-et-noir_
or the Bourse?"
Alain felt himself more and more behind his generation. The acute
reasoning of Lemercier humbled his _amour propre_. At college Lemercier
was never considered Alain's equal in ability or book-learning. What a
stride beyond his school-fellow had Lemercier now made! How dull and
stupid the young provincial felt himself to be as compared with the easy
cleverness and half-sportive philosophy of the Parisian's fluent talk!
He sighed with a melancholy and yet with a generous envy. He had too
fine a natural perception not to acknowledge that there is a rank of mind
as well as of birth, and in the first he felt that Lemercier might well
walk before a Rochebriant; but his very humility was a proof that he
underrated himself.
Lemercier did not excel him in mind, but in experience. And just as the
drilled soldier seems a much finer fellow than the raw recruit, because
he knows how to carry himself, but after a year's discipline the raw
recruit may excel in martial air the upright hero whom he now
despairingly admires, and never dreams he can rival; so set a mind from a
village into the drill of a capital, and see it a year after; it may
tower a head higher than its recruiting-sergeant.