Money (1891)

[Money] continues the story of Aristide Saccard, last encountered as a speculator nonpareil in The Kill . A year after the spectacular ball at the end of The Kill] Saccard is bankrupt and a widower. Sitting alone at a window table in Champeaux, the restaurant for financial traders where he had once held court, Saccard found himself an outsider, excluded, a person whose bad fortune just might be contagious.

Contemplating the wild swings of fortune since his arrival in Paris sixteen years earlier, he realized he had never been able to make fortune his slave... at his disposal, alive, real, and kept under lock and key. His coffers had always been full of lies and fictions, with mysterious holes that seemed to drain away their gold. And now here he was back on the street again, just as he started out long ago, ... never satisfied, and still tortured by the same need... He had tasted everything without ever satisfying his appetite... Now he felt quite wretched, a good deal worse off than a mere beginner, who would have hope and illusion to sustain him. He was seized by a frenzied desire to start all over again, to conquer once more, to rise even higher than before and at last plant his foot firmly on the conquered city. No longer with the facade of mendacious wealth but the solid edifice of fortune, the true royalty of gold, reigning over well-filled bags of wealth.

Just as he was leaving the restaurant, he had a brief encounter with Gundermann, "the banker-king, master of the Bourse and the world". Gundermann is based on the powerful Baron de Rothschild. Saccard hated Gundermann, hated his secure position. Later in the novel Saccard's strong anti-semitism and hatred of Gundermann consume him. This hatred was a sentiment Zola did not share, but he uses it here both as a reflection of what was actually happening in France, and as a character flaw reflecting Saccard's low born origins, a continuation of Zola's exploration of the effects of heredity and environment. This chance encounter did spur Saccard to follow up on his musings and create his own institution, the Universal Bank, in an effort to destroy Gundermann.

Once again, Zola sets Saccard firmly in his place and time. The Universal Exhibition brought the world to Paris in 1867. Saccard's fortunes rose along with those of Emperor Napoleon III and the city of Paris. Intoxicated with it all, to him, ...this exaltation of the Universal shares, this ascension, carrying them up as if on a divine wind, seemed to harmonize with the louder and louder music from the Tuileries and the Champs de Mars, and the continual festivities with which the Exhibition was driving Paris mad. ... there was no evening when the blazing city did not sparkle under the stars like some colossal palace, in the depths of which, debauchery went on until dawn. Joy had spread from house to house, the streets were an intoxication, a cloud of animal vapours, cooking smells from the feastings, the sweat of couplings, all rolling away to the horizon, carrying over the rooftops the nights of Sodom, Babylon, and Nineveh.

Saccard emerges as a more complex character in this novel than in [The Kill], written eighteen years earlier. His restless drive and energy are linked to more complex and focussed plans than the mere acquisition of money. The building of the Suez Canal presented opportunities for expansion in banking, transport and construction that fired him. His relationships with women are more developed here too, especially with Caroline Hamelin, herself more complex than previous female characters of Zola's.

This 2014 translation by Valerie Minogue is the first unabridged translation into English and the first new translation into English since the nineteenth century. It gives the reader insights into Saccard previously unavailable due to the work of the nineteenth century American and English censors. In her Translator's Note, Minogue says the nineteenth century translators regretted the parts they had to leave out. One even invented new passages to account for the gaps created by such omissions.

In the Introduction, Minogue quotes Zola; "It's very difficult to write a novel about money. It's cold, icy, lacking in interest..." She says he wanted to avoid the conventional views of it as an evil and show instead "its generous and fecund power, its expansive force". This novel does that brilliantly, showing the reader not only the expected greed and scandals, but digging deeper, creating an excitement over supposedly mundane topics like the workings of the Bourse, credit, and money bills, so that the reader becomes as enthralled as Saccard with the minutiae behind it all. Above all, it offers an insight into the soul of a gambler and recognizes the obsession that becomes life itself.

A bit simplified and didactic but can still be used to understand speculation. Good read anyway. ( )

This novel continues the story of Saccard, born Rougon, the whirlwind of real estate speculation, money obsession, and sexual drive who, along with his wife Renée, now dead, made reading The Kill such an anticipation of a train wreck. As this book starts, Saccard has fallen on hard times, no longer living in his magnificently gaudy house, but instead renting in the home of princess who has devoted herself to good works after the death of her philandering and corrupt husband. Saccard becomes the manager of one of those good works, the Work Foundation, a combination of a beautifully designed home for children otherwise living troubled lives on the streets of Paris with a conviction that a life of work will enable them to become productive citizens. In the home of the princess, he meets a brother and sister who also live there and who had traveled in the Middle East. Looking at the drawings and paintings the sister, Madame Caroline, made of the sights they saw while the brother, Hamelin, was working as an engineer, he starts dreaming of a bank that could make development possible there: steamer lines, silver mines, train systems. With his vivid imagination, his natural salesman abilities, his temperamental optimism, and his never-ending persistence, he raises the capital for a bank, the Universal, finding rich people of various sorts to participate. As time passes, Hamelin starts building the proposed projects using these investments; Saccard raises additional capital again and again (with a lot of wheeler-dealering and a little illegality); and the share prices keep rising on the Bourse. Both Madame Caroline and Hamelin have some reservations about Saccard's methods but, with his visions of creating good through money they largely keep them to themselves; indeed, for a time, Caroline becomes his mistress.

The subplots in this book introduce not only other characters, but also other ways people are obsessed with money. A thoroughly unpleasant pair consists of Busch and La Méchain: he combs through documents to find ways to blackmail people and she is his spy, tracking people down, gathering documents, and being thoroughly nasty. When she first sees Saccard, she sees a resemblance between him and her cousin's son, a boy she conceived after being brutally raped; on the cousin's behalf, Busch has been holding notes promising payments of 600 francs to the mother. The tale of Victor, now a teenager, who later Madame Caroline finds living in conditions of unbelievable squalor in a vividly described slum, and who is a completely vicious boy, is a thread that runs through the book.

Another important character is Gundermann, an elderly man who is "king" of the Bourse and, importantly for Saccard, who is violently antisemitic, Jewish. Part of the reason he wants to overthrow Gundermann is because he wants his bank, a "Catholic" bank to rule the world of finance. He and other characters frequently make antisemitic remarks or have antisemitic thoughts. With this angle, Zola was reflecting the antisemitism of the time, largely based on the idea that Jews had a natural talent for finance and ruled the financial world, without of course believing this himself.

Many other permutations of the raging desire for money -- and a few variations on rejecting money -- occur in this book. There are people from all walks of life who gamble all their money on the Universal stock, and by and large they are people who can ill afford it, although they are seduced by Saccard's vision and by the fact that the share price keeps rising. Some people are smart enough to sell, but they are far and few between. In addition, Zola examines the issue of capitalism itself: Busch has a brother Sigismund of whom he is extremely fond, who is dying of tuberculosis and who is a committed socialist, working away on a book that will convince its readers that the abolition of money will bring in a new world of harmony and justice.

Of course, being a book by Zola, this isn't just a novel of ideas, but a novel of characters and action and of course a few sexual adventures, most of them sleazy and not a little mean. It is a complex book, and I probably haven't done it justice here.

As a side note, I was delighted to find this Oxford World Classics edition in a bookstore; as the cover notes, this is the first translation in more than a hundred years, and the only unabridged translation. (It is easy to see why the original translator would have cut some of the material in this book.) It also had a helpful introduction and useful endnotes.