Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (3 page)

It is Saccard’s energy that produces what he later calls ‘the pickaxe of progress’, his Universal Bank, to sponsor these vast enterprises and at the same time satisfy what seems at times an almost physical, fetishistic need to see ‘heaps of gold’ and ‘hear their music’. His recklessness manifests itself as soon as the Universal is launched, and illegality follows illegality. He aims to wrest control of the Bourse away from Gundermann, and will use every available means to that end. With Jantrou, he makes use of the growing power of the Press; the newspaper he purchases supports the bank with advertising and also provides potential leverage on the government by supporting or attacking the minister Rougon’s policies in its pages. After its first triumph over the leaking of the peace treaty after Sadowa, the Universal goes from strength to strength, with Saccard increasing the bank’s capital and using ‘frontmen’ to buy the bank’s own shares. The share-prices rocket ever upward, and even Gundermann, relying on the force of logic to bring the bank down, is almost on the point of giving up against this seemingly unstoppable success. It is the treachery of Baroness Sandorff that tips the scales and leads to the destruction of the Universal, and it is Saccard’s sexual appetite that has made that possible. In defeat Saccard stands resolutely beside his habitual pillar in the Bourse, not deigning to sit down until the moment of weakness when he thinks of ‘the enormous mass of humble folk, wretched little investors who would be crushed to pieces under the wreckage of the Universal’ (p. 308). Then he allows himself at last to sit, revealing a Saccard capable of real compassion—as he had indeed shown earlier in his dealings with the charitable Work Foundation.

Zola amply signposts Saccard’s energy, creativity, and sexuality: the scene of Saccard caught
in flagrante
with Sandorff is surprisingly explicit, and his lustfulness is further demonstrated in his frequent
visits to ‘actresses’ like Germaine Coeur, and his extravagant but unsuccessful bidding for the favours of pretty little Madame Conin. At times Saccard becomes positively phallic, as in his triumph at countering Gundermann’s first attack on the Universal, when he is described as having really swollen and grown bigger. He succeeds in buying a night with Madame de Jeumont for a grotesquely huge sum, and parades her vaingloriously at the ball where, however, Bismarck watches them go by with an ironic smile. The smile is amply justified if Saccard here represents the dissolute society of the Empire, or even Napoleon III himself, who at Sedan would be crushed by the Prussians, accompanied by King Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. Saccard becomes a metaphor for energy, sexual vitality, creativity, at times seeming the embodiment of money itself, creative and destructive, capable of much good and much evil. In his audacity, Saccard is indeed a Napoleon of finance, and like Napoleon he has his ‘Austerlitz’. But he also meets his Waterloo when he is left on the trading-floor, waiting in vain for the promised troops from Daigremont, just as Napoleon at Waterloo awaited in vain the troops of Grouchy.

The fortunes of Saccard parallel the fortunes of the Empire, both reaching a peak with the Universal Exhibition of 1867, the ‘Exposition Universelle’, the extravagant world fair held in Paris under the auspices of Napoleon III, where forty-two nations were represented. The Empire is making a great display, and so is Saccard’s ‘Universal’, with its new, extravagantly palatial premises. If the Universal Bank is built on sand and lies, as Madame Caroline remarks, so, Zola suggests, is the Empire itself, as it promotes itself with false glamour. On the day when the Emperor in person awards the prizes to the exhibitors, the event is described as a huge fairy-tale lie. The Emperor presents himself as ‘master of Europe, speaking with calmness and strength and promising peace’ (p. 234) on the very day that news had come of the execution of Maximilian.
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Saccard’s glittering bank, with its coffers full of gold, is also a huge fairy-tale lie; this is fairy gold that will not stand the light of day. When the Exhibition is over, Paris is left still giddy and intoxicated with Second Empire extravagance, not realizing that Krupp’s splendid cannon, greatly admired in the Exhibition, would quite soon be pounding the city. At the end of the novel Saccard is bankrupt and so is the Empire, leaving France open to
invasion and defeat: the Bourse, now deserted, is seen against a fiery sky that prefigures the fires that would rage through Paris in the violent days of the Commune: ‘Twilight was falling, and the winter sky, laden with mist, had created behind the monument of the Bourse a cloud of dark and reddish smoke as if from a fire, as if made from the flames and dust of a city stormed’ (p. 336).

It is a central paradox of the novel that Madame Caroline, seen by Zola as a sort of ‘chorus’ for his drama, the voice of morality and legality, should fall in love with Saccard, the financial pirate. Having fallen into his arms almost inadvertently after an emotional shock, Madame Caroline berates herself for her weakness, but Saccard’s dynamism and energy again win her over. She shares his dreams of what ‘the all-powerful magic wand of science and speculation’ (p. 64) might achieve, and caught up by his enthusiasm she even finds him handsome and charming, though Madame Caroline is not endowed by Zola with anything like Saccard’s sexuality or passion. He stresses above all her prudence and her frustrated maternal instincts, a frustration she shares with Princess d’Orviedo. It is largely on the basis of a quasi-maternal affection that she becomes Saccard’s mistress, but when she learns of his affair with Baroness Sandorff she discovers, with a shock, that she really loves him. Her feeling for Saccard is one of the rare examples of genuine love in the novel: the other is the touching love of the Jordan couple, blessed as it is by their expected child.

Throughout the novel Madame Caroline provides a moral commentary on the character and conduct of Saccard as she tries to restrain his reckless illegalities, countering his excesses with her moderation and good sense. But he will not be restrained, and in the end, after promising so much, Saccard brings ruin, misery, and even death to his victims. Madame Caroline, the moral compass of the novel, condemns and curses the man she loved and almost sinks into despair. Her brother, however, persuades her to go and see the imprisoned Saccard. In their last interview Madame Caroline finally tells Saccard what has become of Victor, the illegitimate son he now regrets never having seen, and for the first time she sees him in tears. Unlike Hamelin, Saccard is not peacefully resigned. He demands—with some justification, given the weaknesses of the case against him and
the vengeful involvement of Delcambre, the Public Prosecutor—to know why he and Hamelin are singled out for punishment. What about the directors who made huge amounts of money? And the auditors? Why are they all able to get away with it? If there were any justice, he argues, they and the heads of the major banks of Paris would be sharing his fate—questions and views that may strike a chord in contemporary Europe. Saccard’s belief in himself is still unshaken, and Madame Caroline marvels at his irresponsible assurance. Yet, as she feels once more his astonishing strength and vitality she finds her anger dissolving, and there is a moment of subdued tenderness between them before they finally part.

In the final chapter Zola takes Madame Caroline all over Paris, linking up with almost all the main characters, starting with Princess d’Orviedo from whom she learns of the rape of Alice de Beauvilliers by the fifteen-year-old Victor at the Work Foundation—that institution built to help and educate the poor. Seeing again its lavish splendour, she asks herself what was the point of it all if it couldn’t even turn one wretched boy into an honest citizen? Victor is now roaming at large, with no one to try to deliver him from his viciousness. The Beauvilliers have lost everything, with Alice raped, the son of the family dead, and what little money they had left lost in the collapse of Saccard’s bank. Madame Caroline witnesses the atrocious scene in which Busch manages to deprive the Countess of the last bits of her family jewellery, and yet when Sigismond dies she is able, with characteristic tolerance and kindness, to feel sympathy and pity even for Busch in his agony at his brother’s death.

Looking for help from Saccard’s other son, Maxime, Madame Caroline finds him just about to set off to Naples for the winter. Reflecting once more on the huge difference between Saccard’s two sons, Madame Caroline wonders if it is poverty that has made Victor a voracious wolf, and wealth that has made Maxime an elegant, idle dandy? When she finds the little girls in the Work Foundation saying prayers for Saccard, she is at first outraged, but then reminds herself that he had indeed been kind to them, and to many others at the Work Foundation, as well as to people like the Jordans, whom he befriended and helped. Perhaps she could forgive herself for having loved him. Looking back once more on her ‘fall’, and her guilty love for a man she could not esteem, she feels able to ease her shame, recognizing that a man may do much harm, yet also have much good in him. Madame Caroline now learns that Saccard has
gone to the Netherlands, where he is already working on drainage schemes, reclaiming land from the sea. Hamelin is revisiting the places that feature in the maps and pictures that Madame Caroline now takes down from the walls, before going to join him. Saccard had promised so much, failed so badly, done so much damage, and yet some of those promised miracles have indeed happened. Hamelin, writing from the Carmel Gorge, tells her:

a whole population had grown up there… The village, at first of five hundred inhabitants, clustering round the workings of the mine, was at present a city of several thousand souls, a whole civilization, with roads, factories, and schools, creating life in this dead and savage place… And wasn’t this the awakening of a world, with an expanded and happier humanity? (p. 371)

It is the realization of at least part of what Saccard had so enthusiastically prophesied, and money, filthy as it might be, had accomplished it. Money might be a dung-heap, but it was also the compost in which the future would grow. Saccard had argued that love itself can sometimes be sordid, and money, similarly, may be filthy but fruitful.

The novel is a mighty allegory, but not in terms of simple one-to-one correspondences: each figure is multiple, a nexus of meanings and contradictions. Madame Caroline herself, with all her good sense, does not entirely preserve her integrity; she is, after all, imperfect, but, as she herself suggests early on in the novel, her case is, ‘in microcosm, the case of all humanity’ (p. 62).

In the telegraphic style of his preparatory notes, Zola wrote: ‘I should like, in this novel, not to conclude on disgust with life (pessimism). Life, just as it is, but accepted, in spite of everything, for love of itself, in its strength.’ This was what he wanted to emerge from the whole Rougon-Macquart series. He had put much of himself into Madame Caroline, with her indestructible love of life and stubborn joy in being alive, and it is left to her at the end to bring all the paradoxes together, underlining the coexistence of good and evil in an imperfect but always interesting world.

Money
reflects a sophisticated view of the economy, and it also shows economic concerns as deeply embedded in the social milieu, affecting
both public and private life at every level. The people involved in speculation with the Universal Bank cover a huge social range—from pensioners with small savings to country priests, relatively well-off bourgeois, and aristocrats, both penurious and wealthy. Politics too plays an integral part. It is not by accident that the first chapter of the novel introduces references to political events that will affect the lives of the characters, and indeed the life of France and its people. Three of the political issues raised in the conversation in Champeaux’s restaurant recur throughout the book: Mexico, Rome, and the foreign policy of Prussia. All three exemplify the weaknesses—some might say follies—of the foreign policy pursued under Napoleon III. In Mexico, the attempt to gain a foothold in the country through French military intervention, while the United States was preoccupied with the Civil War, failed dismally after only three years, ending with the execution of Maximilian, the emperor Napoleon III had chosen for Mexico. In the matter of Rome and the Italian Wars of Independence, Napoleon III’s intervention to defend the Pope was driven as much by domestic politics and the need to keep the Catholics on side as by foreign-policy considerations. Italy was being created, with French support, out of a patchwork of small states, some controlled by Austria and some by the Pope. The decision to prevent the Papal States, including Rome, from being absorbed into Italy, with the use of 2,000 troops in 1867, as well as being expensive and ultimately ineffective, alienated those who supported the liberal cause of Italian nationalism while leaving the Catholics thoroughly dissatisfied.

Moser’s references to the matter of the Duchies, wrested from Denmark by Prussia and Austria, not only serve to tie the novel into actual events of the period but also draw attention again to the inadequacies of the regime’s foreign policy. When Moser remarks that ‘when big fish start eating the little fish you can’t tell where it will all end…’ (p. 6), the reader is reminded of the end that lies in store. Bismarck was already steadily creating the German Confederation while France did nothing: ‘In a few short years Bismarck had overturned the European balance of power and France, under the incompetent and vainglorious guidance of Napoleon III, found herself facing a politically unified and increasingly aggressive Germany.’
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Politics and the financial world are closely interlinked. Saccard
views with envy the enormous power of the banker Gundermann, ‘for whom ministers were no more than clerks, and who held whole states in his sovereign fiefdom’ (p. 181). Eugène Rougon himself, powerful as he may be, cannot afford to offend Gundermann. Saccard’s first great financial coup, after the defeat of Austria at the battle of Sadowa, is the result of political action. A change of fortunes in the Austro-Prussian War creates a sharp fall in share-prices, and Deputy Huret leaks information about a peace treaty, allowing Saccard to make a killing on the market. Rougon’s juggling between liberals and Catholics seems to parody Napoleon III’s efforts to pacify first one group then another, with dismal results. By dint of a mild anachronism, Zola brings in a reference to the formation of the Marxist-inspired First International (brought forward from its actual foundation in September 1864 to May in the novel), thus introducing the conflict of capitalism and socialism as represented by Saccard and Sigismond. In the view of William Gallois, Zola here undertakes ‘a morality tale which describes how imperialism developed in France’, and shows ‘how elements of the modern world fitted together, how capitalism was an imperial culture, and how that culture operated’.
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Gallois points to the way that Zola shows imperial ambition often expressed in terms of philanthropy and further cloaked by a mantle of religion, as is the case with the ambitions of Saccard’s Universal Bank.