Money (Oxford World’s Classics) by Émile Zola Read Free Book Online

asked:
    ‘Tell me, hasn’t Monsieur Huret come in?’
    ‘No sir, not yet.’
    So Saccard made up his mind and sat down at a window-table that a customer was just leaving. He thought he was probably late, and while the tablecloth was being changed, he started to look outside, peering at the passers-by on the pavement. Even when the table had been relaid for him, he didn’t order straight away, but waited a while, gazing out at the square, so pretty on this bright sunny day in early May. * At this time of day, when everybody was having lunch, it was almost deserted. Under the fresh green of the chestnut trees the benches were all empty, and along the railings where the carriages pull up, a line of cabs stretched from one end to the other, and the Bastille omnibus stopped at the kiosk on the corner of the garden without a single passenger getting on or off. The sun was beating down and the great monument of the Bourse was bathed in sunshine, with its colonnade, its two statues and its imposing flight of steps, at the top of which there was, as yet, just an army of chairs, drawn up in neat ranks.
    But turning round, Saccard recognized Mazaud, the stockbroker, * at the table next to his. He held out his hand:
    ‘Ah! it’s you, Mazaud! Good-day!’
    ‘Good-day,’ Mazaud replied, with a perfunctory handshake.
    Small, dark, and very lively, he was a good-looking man, who, at only thirty-two, had just inherited the business of one of his uncles. He seemed totally engrossed in the guest facing him across the table, a large gentleman with a florid, clean-shaven face, the celebrated Amadieu, revered by the Bourse ever since his famous coup on the Selsis Mines. When the Selsis shares had fallen to fifteen francs, * and only a madman would have been buying, he had put his entire fortune intothem, two hundred thousand francs, quite haphazardly, with neither calculation nor flair, but only the pig-headedness of a lucky brute. Now that the discovery of real and substantial seams had raised the share-price to over a thousand francs, he had made about fifteen million francs, and his idiotic venture, for which he could have been locked up as a lunatic, now caused him to be regarded as one of the great financial masterminds. He was admired and, above all, consulted. Besides, he no longer did any buying, content now to sit enthroned upon his sole and legendary stroke of genius. Mazaud must be longing to acquire him as a client.
    Saccard, having failed to get so much as a smile from Amadieu, greeted the table opposite where three speculators of his acquaintance were gathered, Pillerault, Moser, and Salmon.
    ‘Good-day! Everything going well?’
    ‘Yes, not bad… Good-day!’
    He sensed a certain coldness, almost hostility, in these men too. Pillerault, however, very tall, thin, jerky in his movements, and with a razor-sharp nose in a bony face like that of a medieval knight, usually had the familiar air of a gambler who made a principle of recklessness, swearing that when he tried any serious thinking he just tumbled into disaster. He had the exuberant nature of a bull trader, * always expecting victory, whereas Moser, by contrast, short with a yellowish complexion, ravaged by a liver complaint, was always moaning, forever prey to fears of disaster. Salmon, a very handsome man, looking decidedly younger than his fifty years, and displaying a fine inky-black beard, was regarded as an extraordinarily clever fellow. He never spoke, he replied only with smiles. You couldn’t tell what he was speculating in, or even if he was speculating at all, and his manner of listening made such an impression on Moser that after telling him something, disconcerted by his silence, he would often go dashing off to change an order.
    Meeting with so much indifference, Saccard continued his tour of the room with fiery, challenging eyes. And the only person with whom he exchanged a nod was a tall young man sitting three tables away, the handsome Sabatani, a