fatherly, good-humored fashion. ‘Dear child, please to bear in mind that
a poor fellow, heavy with sleep, has been drinking tea to keep himself
awake till two o’clock in the morning, all for a chance of saying a
solemn word of advice to you--_Marry_! Do not be too particular; do not
brood over your feelings; never mind the sordid schemes of men that have
one foot here and another in the Matifats’ house; do not stop to think
at all: Marry!--When a girl marries, it means that the man whom she
marries undertakes to maintain her in a more or less good position in
life, and at any rate her comfort is assured. I know the world. Girls,
mammas, and grandmammas are all of them hypocrites when they fly off
into sentiment over a question of marriage. Nobody really thinks of
anything but a good position. If a mother marries her daughter well, she
says that she has made an excellent bargain.’ Here Rastignac unfolded
his theory of marriage, which to his way of thinking is a business
arrangement, with a view to making life tolerable; and ended up with,
‘I do not ask to know your secret, Malvina; I know it already. Men talk
things over among themselves, just as you women talk after you leave the
dinner-table. This is all I have to say: Marry. If you do not, remember
that I begged you to marry, here, in this room, this evening!’
“There was a certain ring in Rastignac’s voice which compelled,
not attention, but reflection. There was something startling in his
insistence; something that went, as Rastignac meant that it should, to
the quick of Malvina’s intelligence. She thought over the counsel again
next day, and vainly asked herself why it had been given.”
Couture broke in. “In all these tops that you have set spinning, I see
nothing at all like the beginnings of Rastignac’s fortune,” said he.
“You apparently take us for Matifats multiplied by half-a-dozen bottles
of champagne.”
“We are just coming to it,” returned Bixiou. “You have followed the
course of all the rivulets which make up that forty thousand livres a
year which so many people envy. By this time Rastignac held the threads
of all these lives in his hand.”
“Desroches, the Matifats, Beaudenord, the d’Aldriggers, d’Aiglemont?”
“Yes, and a hundred others,” assented Bixiou.
“Oh, come now, how?” cried Finot. “I know a few things, but I cannot see
a glimpse of an answer to this riddle.”
“Blondet has roughly given you the account of Nucingen’s first two
suspensions of payment; now for the third, with full details.--After
the peace of 1815, Nucingen grasped an idea which some of us only fully
understood later, to wit, that capital is a power only when you are very
much richer than other people. In his own mind, he was jealous of the
Rothschilds. He had five millions of francs, he wanted ten. He knew a
way to make thirty millions with ten, while with five he could only
make fifteen. So he made up his mind to operate a third suspension of
payment. About that time, the great man hit on the idea of indemnifying
his creditors with paper of purely fictitious value and keeping their
coin. On the market, a great idea of this sort is not expressed in
precisely this cut-and-dried way. Such an arrangement consists in giving
a lot of grown-up children a small pie in exchange for a gold piece;
and, like children of a smaller growth, they prefer the pie to the gold
piece, not suspecting that they might have a couple of hundred pies for
it.”
“What is this all about, Bixiou?” cried Couture. “Nothing more _bona
fide_. Not a week passes but pies are offered to the public for a louis.
But who compels the public to take them? Are they not perfectly free to
make inquiries?”
“You would rather have it made compulsory to take up shares, would you?”
asked Blondet.
“No,” said Finot. “Where would the talent come in?”
“Very good for Finot.”
“Who put him up to it?” asked Couture.
“The fact was,” continued Bixiou, “that Nucingen had twice had the luck
to present the public (quite unintentionally) with a pie that turned out
to be worth more than the money he received for it. That unlucky good
luck gave him qualms of conscience. A course of such luck is fatal to a
man in the long run. This time he meant to make no mistake of this sort;
he waited ten years for an opportunity of issuing negotiable securities
which should seem on the face of it to be worth something, while as a
matter of fact----”
“But if you look at banking in that light,” broke in Couture, “no sort
of business would be possible. More than one _bona fide_ banker, backed
up by a _bona fide_ government, has induced the hardest-headed men on
‘Change to take up stock which is bound to fall within a given time.
You have seen better than that. Have you not seen stock created with the
concurrence of a government to pay the interest upon older stock, so as
to keep things going and tide over the difficulty? These operations were
more or less like Nucingen’s settlements.”
“The thing may look queer on a small scale,” said Blondet, “but on a
large we call it finance. There are high-handed proceedings criminal
between man and man that amount to nothing when spread out over any
number of men, much as a drop of prussic acid becomes harmless in a pail
of water. You take a man’s life, you are guillotined. But if, for any
political conviction whatsoever, you take five hundred lives, political
crimes are respected. You take five thousand francs out of my desk;
to the hulks you go. But with a sop cleverly pushed into the jaws of a
thousand speculators, you can cram the stock of any bankrupt republic
or monarchy down their throats; even if the loan has been floated,
as Couture says, to pay the interest on that very same national debt.
Nobody can complain. These are the real principles of the present Golden
Age.”
“When the stage machinery is so huge,” continued Bixiou, “a good many
puppets are required. In the first place, Nucingen had purposely and
with his eyes open invested his five millions in an American investment,
foreseeing that the profits would not come in until it was too late. The
firm of Nucingen deliberately emptied its coffers. Any liquidation
ought to be brought about naturally. In deposits belonging to private
individuals and other investments, the firm possessed about six millions
of capital altogether. Among those private individuals was the Baroness
d’Aldrigger with her three hundred thousand francs, Beaudenord with four
hundred thousand, d’Aiglemont with a million, Matifat with three hundred
thousand, Charles Grandet (who married Mlle. d’Aubrion) with half a
million, and so forth, and so forth.
“Now, if Nucingen had himself brought out a joint-stock company, with
the shares of which he proposed to indemnify his creditors after more or
less ingenious manoeuvring, he might perhaps have been suspected. He
set about it more cunningly than that. He made some one else put up the
machinery that was to play the part of the Mississippi scheme in Law’s
system. Nucingen can make the longest-headed men work out schemes
for him without confiding a word to them; it is his peculiar talent.
Nucingen just let fall a hint to du Tillet of the pyramidal, triumphant
notion of bringing out a joint-stock enterprise with capital sufficient
to pay very high dividends for a time. Tried for the first time, in days
when noodles with capital were plentiful, the plan was pretty sure
to end in a run upon the shares, and consequently in a profit for the
banker that issued them. You must remember that this happened in 1826.
“Du Tillet, struck through he was by an idea both pregnant and
ingenious, naturally bethought himself that if the enterprise failed,
the blame must fall upon somebody. For which reason, it occurred to
him to put forward a figurehead director in charge of his commercial
machinery. At this day you know the secret of the firm of Claparon and
Company, founded by du Tillet, one of the finest inventions----”
“Yes,” said Blondet, “the responsible editor in business matters, the
instigator, and scapegoat; but we know better than that nowadays. We
put, ‘Apply at the offices of the Company, such and such a number, such
and such a street,’ where the public find a staff of clerks in green
caps, about as pleasing to behold as broker’s men.”
“Nucingen,” pursued Bixiou, “had supported the firm of Charles Claparon
and Company with all his credit. There were markets in which you might
safely put a million francs’ worth of Claparon’s paper. So du Tillet
proposed to bring his firm of Claparon to the fore. So said, so done.
In 1825 the shareholder was still an unsophisticated being. There was
no such thing as cash lying at call. Managing directors did not pledge
themselves not to put their own shares upon the market; they kept no
deposit with the Bank of France; they guaranteed nothing. They did not
even condescend to explain to shareholders the exact limits of their
liabilities when they informed them that the directors in their
goodness, refrained from asking any more than a thousand, or five
hundred, or even two hundred and fifty francs. It was not given out that
the experiment in _aere publico_ was not meant to last for more than
seven, five, or even three years, so that shareholders would not have
long to wait for the catastrophe. It was in the childhood of the art.
Promoters did not even publish the gigantic prospectuses with which they
stimulate the imagination, and at the same time make demands for money
of all and sundry.”
“That only comes when nobody wishes to part with money,” said Couture.
“In short, there was no competition in investments,” continued Bixiou.
“Paper-mache manufacturers, cotton printers, zinc-rollers, theatres, and
newspapers as yet did not hurl themselves like hunting dogs upon their
quarry--the expiring shareholder. ‘Nice things in shares,’ as Couture
says, put thus artlessly before the public, and backed up by the
opinions of experts [‘the princes of science’), were negotiated
shamefacedly in the silence and shadow of the Bourse. Lynx-eyed
speculators used to execute (financially speaking) the air _Calumny_ out
of _The Barber of Seville_. They went about piano, piano, making known
the merits of the concern through the medium of stock-exchange gossip.
They could only exploit the victim in his own house, on the Bourse, or
in company; so they reached him by means of the skilfully created rumor
which grew till it reached a _tutti_ of a quotation in four figures----”
“And as we can say anything among ourselves,” said Couture, “I will go
back to the last subject.”
“_Vous etes orfevre, Monsieur Josse_!” cried Finot.
“Finot will always be classic, constitutional, and pedantic,” commented
Blondet.
“Yes,” rejoined Couture, on whose account Cerizet had just been
condemned on a criminal charge. “I maintain that the new way is
infinitely less fraudulent, less ruinous, more straightforward than the
old. Publicity means time for reflection and inquiry. If here and there
a shareholder is taken in, he has himself to blame, nobody sells him a
pig in a poke. The manufacturing industry----”
“Ah!” exclaimed Bixiou, “here comes industry----”
“---- is a gainer by it,” continued Couture, taking no notice of the
interruption. “Every government that meddles with commerce and
cannot leave it free, sets about an expensive piece of folly; State
interference ends in a _maximum_ or a monopoly. To my thinking, few
things can be more in conformity with the principles of free trade than
joint-stock companies. State interference means that you try to regulate
the relations of principal and interest, which is absurd. In business,
generally speaking, the profits are in proportion to the risks. What
does it matter to the State how money is set circulating, provided that
it is always in circulation? What does it matter who is rich or who is
poor, provided that there is a constant quantity of rich people to be
taxed? Joint-stock companies, limited liability companies, every sort of
enterprise that pays a dividend, has been carried on for twenty years
in England, commercially the first country in the world. Nothing passes
unchallenged there; the Houses of Parliament hatch some twelve hundred
laws every session, yet no member of Parliament has ever yet raised an
objection to the system----”
“A cure for plethora of the strong box. Purely vegetable remedy,” put in
Bixiou, “_les carottes_” (gambling speculation).
“Look here!” cried Couture, firing up at this. “You have ten thousand
francs. You invest it in ten shares of a thousand francs each in ten
different enterprises. You are swindled nine times out of the ten--as a
matter of fact you are not, the public is a match for anybody, but
say that you are swindled, and only one affair turns out well (by
accident!--oh, granted!--it was not done on purpose--there, chaff
away!). Very well, the punter that has the sense to divide up his stakes
in this way hits on a splendid investment, like those who took shares in
the Wortschin mines. Gentlemen, let us admit among ourselves that those
who call out are hypocrites, desperately vexed because they have no good
ideas of their own, and neither power to advertise nor skill to exploit
a business. You will not have long to wait for proof. In a very short
time you will see the aristocracy, the court, and public men descend
into speculation in serried columns; you will see that their claws are
longer, their morality more crooked than ours, while they have not our
good points. What a head a man must have if he has to found a business
in times when the shareholder is as covetous and keen as the inventor!
What a great magnetizer must he be that can create a Claparon and hit
upon expedients never tried before! Do you know the moral of it all?
Our age is no better than we are; we live in an era of greed; no one
troubles himself about the intrinsic value of a thing if he can only
make a profit on it by selling it to somebody else; so he passes it on
to his neighbor. The shareholder that thinks he sees a chance of making
money is just as covetous as the founder that offers him the opportunity
of making it.”
“Isn’t he fine, our Couture? Isn’t he fine?” exclaimed Bixiou, turning
to Blondet. “He will ask us next to erect statues to him as a benefactor
of the species.”
“It would lead people to conclude that the fool’s money is the wise
man’s patrimony by divine right,” said Blondet.
“Gentlemen,” cried Couture, “let us have our laugh out here to make
up for all the times when we must listen gravely to solemn nonsense
justifying laws passed on the spur of the moment.”
“He is right,” said Blondet. “What times we live in, gentlemen! When
the fire of intelligence appears among us, it is promptly quenched by
haphazard legislation. Almost all our lawgivers come up from little
parishes where they studied human nature through the medium of the
newspapers; forthwith they shut down the safety-valve, and when the
machinery blows up there is weeping and gnashing of teeth! We do nothing
nowadays but pass penal laws and levy taxes. Will you have the sum of it
all!--There is no religion left in the State!”
“Oh, bravo, Blondet!” cried Bixiou, “thou hast set thy finger on the
weak spot. Meddlesome taxation has lost us more victories here in France
than the vexatious chances of war. I once spent seven years in the hulks
of a government department, chained with bourgeois to my bench. There
was a clerk in the office, a man with a head on his shoulders; he
had set his mind upon making a sweeping reform of the whole fiscal
system--ah, well, we took the conceit out of him nicely. France might
have been too prosperous, you know she might have amused herself by
conquering Europe again; we acted in the interests of the peace of
nations. I slew Rabourdin with a caricature.”[*]
[*] See Les Employes [The Government Clerks aka Bureaucracy].
“By _religion_ I do not mean cant; I use the word in its wide political
sense,” rejoined Blondet.
“Explain your meaning,” said Finot.
“Here it is,” returned Blondet. “There has been a good deal said about
affairs at Lyons; about the Republic cannonaded in the streets; well,
there was not a word of truth in it all. The Republic took up the
riots, just as an insurgent snatches up a rifle. The truth is queer and
profound, I can tell you. The Lyons trade is a soulless trade. They
will not weave a yard of silk unless they have the order and are sure of
payment. If orders fall off; the workmen may starve; they can scarcely
earn a living, convicts are better off. After the Revolution of July,
the distress reached such a pitch that the Lyons weavers--the _canuts_,
as they call them--hoisted the flag, ‘Bread or Death!’ a proclamation
of a kind which compels the attention of a government. It was really
brought about by the cost of living at Lyons; Lyons must build theatres
and become a metropolis, forsooth, and the octroi duties accordingly
were insanely high. The Republicans got wind of this bread riot, they
organized the _canuts_ in two camps, and fought among themselves. Lyons
had her Three Days, but order was restored, and the silk weavers went
back to their dens. Hitherto the _canut_ had been honest; the silk for
his work was weighed out to him in hanks, and he brought back the same
weight of woven tissue; now he made up his mind that the silk merchants
were oppressing him; he put honesty out at the door and rubbed oil on
his fingers. He still brought back weight for weight, but he sold the
silk represented by the oil; and the French silk trade has suffered from
a plague of ‘greased silks,’ which might have ruined Lyons and a whole
branch of French commerce. The masters and the government, instead
of removing the causes of the evil, simply drove it in with a violent
external application. They ought to have sent a clever man to Lyons,
one of those men that are said to have no principle, an Abbe Terray; but
they looked at the affair from a military point of view. The result of
the troubles is a _gros de Naples_ at forty _sous_ per yard; the silk
is sold at this day, I dare say, and the masters no doubt have hit
upon some new check upon the men. This method of manufacturing without
looking ahead ought never to have existed in the country where one of
the greatest citizens that France has ever known ruined himself to keep
six thousand weavers in work without orders. Richard Lenoir fed them,
and the government was thickheaded enough to allow him to suffer
from the fall of the prices of textile fabrics brought about by the
Revolution of 1814. Richard Lenoir is the one case of a merchant that
deserves a statue. And yet the subscription set on foot for him has no
subscribers, while the fund for General Foy’s children reached a million
francs. Lyons has drawn her own conclusions; she knows France, she knows
that there is no religion left. The story of Richard Lenoir is one of
those blunders which Fouche condemned as worse than a crime.”
“Suppose that there is a tinge of charlatanism in the way in which
concerns are put before the public,” began Couture, returning to the
charge, “that word charlatanism has come to be a damaging expression, a
middle term, as it were, between right and wrong; for where, I ask you,
does charlatanism begin? where does it end? what is charlatanism? do
me the kindness of telling me what it is _not_. Now for a little plain
speaking, the rarest social ingredient. A business which should consist
in going out at night to look for goods to sell in the day would
obviously be impossible. You find the instinct of forestalling the
market in the very match-seller. How to forestall the market--that is
the one idea of the so-called honest tradesman of the Rue Saint-Denis,
as of the most brazen-fronted speculator. If stocks are heavy, sell you
must. If sales are slow, you must tickle your customer; hence the
signs of the Middle Ages, hence the modern prospectus. I do not see a
hair’s-breadth of difference between attracting custom and forcing your
goods upon the consumer. It may happen, it is sure to happen, it often
happens, that a shopkeeper gets hold of damaged goods, for the seller
always cheats the buyer. Go and ask the most upright folk in Paris--the
best known men in business, that is--and they will all triumphantly tell
you of dodges by which they passed off stock which they knew to be bad
upon the public. The well-known firm of Minard began by sales of this
kind. In the Rue Saint-Denis they sell nothing but ‘greased silk’; it
is all that they can do. The most honest merchants tell you in the most
candid way that ‘you must get out of a bad bargain as best you can’--a
motto for the most unscrupulous rascality. Blondet has given you an
account of the Lyons affair, its causes and effects, and I proceed in my
turn to illustrate my theory with an anecdote:--There was once a woolen
weaver, an ambitious man, burdened with a large family of children by a
wife too much beloved. He put too much faith in the Republic, laid in a
stock of scarlet wool, and manufactured those red-knitted caps that you
may have noticed on the heads of all the street urchins in Paris. How
this came about I am just going to tell you. The Republic was beaten.
After the Saint-Merri affair the caps were quite unsalable. Now, when a
weaver finds that besides a wife and children he has some ten thousand
red woolen caps in the house, and that no hatter will take a single one
of them, notions begin to pass through his head as fast as if he were
a banker racking his brains to get rid of ten million francs’ worth of
shares in some dubious investment. As for this Law of the Faubourg, this
Nucingen of caps, do you know what he did? He went to find a pothouse
dandy, one of those comic men that drive police sergeants to despair
at open-air dancing saloons at the barriers; him he engaged to play the
part of an American captain staying at Meurice’s and buying for export
trade. He was to go to some large hatter, who still had a cap in his
shop window, and ‘inquire for’ ten thousand red woolen caps. The hatter,
scenting business in the wind, hurried round to the woolen weaver and
rushed upon the stock. After that, no more of the American captain, you
understand, and great plenty of caps. If you interfere with the freedom
of trade, because free trade has its drawbacks, you might as well tie
the hands of justice because a crime sometimes goes unpunished, or
blame the bad organization of society because civilization produces some
evils. From the caps and the Rue Saint-Denis to joint-stock companies
and the Bank----draw your own conclusions.”
“A crown for Couture!” said Blondet, twisting a serviette into a wreath
for his head. “I go further than that, gentlemen. If there is a defect
in the working hypothesis, what is the cause? The law! the whole system
of legislation. The blame rests with the legislature. The great men
of their districts are sent up to us by the provinces, crammed with
parochial notions of right and wrong; and ideas that are indispensable
if you want to keep clear of collisions with justice, are stupid when
they prevent a man from rising to the height at which a maker of the
laws ought to abide. Legislation may prohibit such and such developments
of human passions--gambling, lotteries, the Ninons of the pavement,
anything you please--but you cannot extirpate the passions themselves by
any amount of legislation. Abolish them, you would abolish the society
which develops them, even if it does not produce them. The gambling
passion lurks, for instance, at the bottom of every heart, be it a
girl’s heart, a provincial’s, a diplomatist’s; everybody longs to
have money without working for it; you may hedge the desire about with
restrictions, but the gambling mania immediately breaks out in another
form. You stupidly suppress lotteries, but the cook-maid pilfers none
the less, and puts her ill-gotten gains in the savings bank. She
gambles with two hundred and fifty franc stakes instead of forty sous;
joint-stock companies and speculation take the place of the lottery;
the gambling goes on without the green cloth, the croupier’s rake is
invisible, the cheating planned beforehand. The gambling houses are
closed, the lottery has come to an end; ‘and now,’ cry idiots, ‘morals
have greatly improved in France,’ as if, forsooth, they had suppressed
the punters. The gambling still goes on, only the State makes nothing
from it now; and for a tax paid with pleasure, it has substituted a
burdensome duty. Nor is the number of suicides reduced, for the gambler
never dies, though his victim does.”
“I am not speaking now of foreign capital lost to France,” continued
Couture, “nor of the Frankfort lotteries. The Convention passed a
decree of death against those who hawked foreign lottery-tickets, and
procureur-syndics used to traffic in them. So much for the sense of our
legislator and his driveling philanthropy. The encouragement given to
savings banks is a piece of crass political folly. Suppose that things
take a doubtful turn and people lose confidence, the Government will
find that they have instituted a queue for money, like the queues
outside the bakers’ shops. So many savings banks, so many riots.
Three street boys hoist a flag in some corner or other, and you have a
revolution ready made.