Money

FIRST EDITION. One of the numbered copies on Holland paper.

Eighteenth volume of the Rougon-Macquart series

“ L’Argent is the book that gave me the biggest headache, amidst the mass of documents provided by stock market men, so bewildering for me, that I still doubt I understood anything ”. After going bankrupt, Aristide Saccard gets back in the saddle with a new lucrative project: “to form a cartel bringing together the shipping companies that crisscross the Mediterranean, to build a large railway line that would connect the cities of Lebanon and Syria and extend to Turkey, to help the emergence of a national Turkish bank, to finance the exploitation of silver mines in the Mount Carmel region of Lebanon, and more broadly to awaken an entire sleeping continent”. Thus the Banque Universelle was born, its trajectory modeled on that of L’Union Générale, a bank founded by Eugène Bontoux, which was at the origin of a financial scandal that left many small Catholic savers, lured by the gambling instinct, stranded.

To sell his pipe dream, Aristide does what he does best: he acquires L’Espérance, a small newspaper in which the former journalist of L’Indépendant dispenses financial advice to small shareholders, touting good opportunities and products offered by the Banque Universelle. However, Aristide forgets to mention that he is massively buying his own shares to artificially inflate the share price, and when Gundermann sells his shares, the market collapses – it's a crash.