He never went to the Bourse, even affecting not to send any official representative; nor did he ever eat in a public place. Only once in a while he would happen, as on this day, to enter Champeaux’s restaurant and sit at one of the tables, to order just a glass of Vichy water, on a plate. For the last twenty years he had suffered from a gastric complaint, and the only food he took was milk.

The restaurant staff were immediately in a flurry to bring the glass of water, and all the diners kept their heads down. Moser, looking quite overwhelmed, gazed at this man who knew all the secrets and made the market go up or down as he pleased, the way God controls the thunder. Pillerault, having faith only in the irresistible force of a billion francs, greeted him. It was half-past twelve, and Mazaud, swiftly abandoning Amadieu, came back and bowed to the banker, who occasionally did him the honour of placing an order. Many of the brokers who were just leaving stopped and stood around the god, paying court with their spines respectfully inclined, in the midst of the clutter of messy tables; and watched with veneration as he took the glass of water and raised it with trembling hands to his colourless lips.

Some time back, during the land speculation on the Monceau plain, Saccard had had some disagreements, and even quite a quarrel, with Gundermann. They were incapable of getting on, the one a gambler full of passion, the other cold, sober, and logical. So the former, already angry and exasperated by this triumphant entrance, was leaving when the other called out to him:

‘Tell me, my dear friend, is it true? You’re leaving the world of business… Upon my soul, you’re doing the right thing. It’s just as well…’

Saccard received this like the lash of a whip across his face. He drew up his slight frame and replied in a voice as sharp as steel:

‘I am setting up a banking house with a capital of twenty-five million, and I expect to be calling on you soon.’

And he went out, leaving behind him the agitated hubbub of the room, where they were all jostling one another in their anxiety not to miss the opening of the Bourse. Oh! to be successful at last, and stamp on these people who were turning their backs on him, to engage in a struggle for power with this king of gold, and maybe one day bring him down! He hadn’t really made up his mind about launching his grand plan, and he was still surprised at the declaration which his need to respond had drawn from him. But would he be able to try his luck elsewhere, now that his brother was abandoning him, now that men and even things seemed to be wounding him and throwing him back into the fight, like the bull that is led back, bleeding, into the ring?

For a moment he stood tremulously on the edge of the pavement. It was the busy time when all the life of Paris seems to pour into this central square between the Rue Montmartre and the Rue Richelieu, the two congested arteries carrying the crowds. From each of the four junctions at the four corners of the square flowed a constant, uninterrupted stream of vehicles, weaving their way along the road through the bustling mass of pedestrians. The two lines of cabs at the cab-stand along the railings kept breaking up and then re-forming; whilst on the Rue Vivienne the dealers’ victorias* stretched out in a close-packed line, with the coachmen on top, reins in hand, ready to whip the horses forward at the first command. The steps and the peristyle of the Bourse were overrun with swarming black overcoats; and from the kerb market, already set up and at work beneath the clock, came the clamour of buying and selling, the tidal surge of speculation, rising above the noisy rumble of the city. Passers-by turned their heads, impelled by both desire and fear of what was going on there, in that mysterious world of financial dealings into which French brains but rarely penetrate, a world of ruin and bankruptcy and sudden inexplicable fortunes, in the midst of all that barbaric shouting and gesticulation. And Saccard, on the edge of the stream, deafened by the distant voices and elbowed by the jostling bustle of the crowd, was dreaming once more of the royalty of gold in this home of every feverish passion, with the Bourse at its centre, beating, from one o’clock until three, like an enormous heart.

But since his downfall he had not dared to go back into the Bourse, and even now a feeling of wounded vanity, the certainty of being greeted as a failure, still prevented him from climbing the steps. Like a lover driven from the boudoir of a mistress whom he desires all the more, even while telling himself he detests her, he kept coming back irresistibly, making a tour of the colonnade on various pretexts, crossing the garden as if taking a leisurely walk in the shade of the chestnut trees. In this sort of dusty square with neither grass nor flowers, on the benches among the urinals and the newspaper stands, swarmed a mixed crowd of shady speculators and bareheaded local women suckling their babies; here he affected a nonchalant saunter but kept looking up, watching, furiously imagining he was laying siege to the monument, surrounding it in an ever tighter circle, to re-enter it one day, in triumph.

He went over to the corner on the right, under the trees that face the Rue de la Banque, and immediately came upon the Little Bourse, trading in downgraded shares: the ‘Wet Feet’,* as these bric-à-brac dealers are ironically and contemptuously known, who trade in the shares of dead companies in the open air, out in the wind and, on rainy days, in the mud. Here was a tumultuous group of unclean Jewry, with fat shiny faces, and the desiccated profiles of predatory birds, an extraordinary gathering of typically Jewish noses, huddled together as if fighting fiercely over their prey with guttural cries, ready to devour each other. As he went by he noticed a big man standing a little to one side looking at a ruby in the sunlight, delicately lifting it up in the air with huge and dirty fingers.

‘Ah, Busch!… Seeing you reminds me, I was intending to call on you.’

Busch, who had an office in the Rue Feydeau, on the corner of the Rue Vivienne, had on several occasions been very useful to Saccard in difficult circumstances. He was standing there in ecstasy, examining the purity of the gem, his broad, rather featureless face thrown back, his big grey eyes seeming dulled by the brightness of the light; one could see the white cravat he always wore, rolled into a string; while his secondhand overcoat, once superb, now extraordinarily shabby and stained, reached right up into his colourless hair, which straggled from his bare skull in rare, rebellious strands. His hat, yellowed by the sun and washed by the rain, was now of indeterminate age.

At last, he decided to come back down to earth.

‘Ah, Monsieur Saccard, so you’re taking a little walk round here…’

‘Yes, it’s about a letter in Russian, a letter from a Russian banker based in Constantinople. So I thought of your brother, to translate it for me.’

Busch, still unconsciously rolling the ruby tenderly in his right hand, extended his left hand, saying the translation would be sent that very evening. But Saccard explained that it was only a matter of ten lines.

‘I’ll come up, and your brother will read it for me straight away…’

He was now interrupted by the arrival of an enormous woman, Madame Méchain, well known to the regulars at the Bourse, one of those rabid and wretched speculators whose greasy hands are always poking into all sorts of dubious activities. Her moon face, red and puffy, with narrow blue eyes, an almost invisible little nose, and a small mouth from which emerged a child-like fluting voice, seemed to spill out from under her old mauve hat, tied on lopsidedly with red ribbons; and her enormous bosom and dropsical belly seemed to stretch to the limit her mud-bespattered poplin dress, once green, now turning yellow. She carried on her arm a huge old black-leather bag, as deep as a suitcase; this she was never without. That day the bag, full to bursting, was pulling her over to the right, like a bent tree.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Busch, who must have been waiting for her.

‘Yes, and I’ve received the Vendôme papers, I have them with me.’

‘Good, let’s go to my office; there’s nothing to be done here today.’

Saccard’s eye flickered over the huge leather bag.