Other People's Money by Emile Gaboriau (ebook smartphone txt) 📕

But each day that elapsed had seemed to bring calm to his soul.  Little by little, he had become to his wife so indulgent and so affectionate, that the poor helot felt her heart touched.  He had for his daughter attentions which caused her to wonder.

Often, when the weather was fine, he took them out walking, leading them along the quays towards a part of the walls occupied by the battalion of their ward.  Twice he took them to St. Onen, where the sharp-shooters were encamped to which Maxence belonged.

Another day he wished to take them to visit M. de Thaller’s house, of which he had charge.  They refused, and instead of getting angry, as he certainly would have done formerly, he commenced describing to them the splendors of the apartments, the magnificent furniture, the carpets and the hangings, the paintings by the great masters, the objects of arts, the bronzes, in a word, all that dazzling luxury of which financiers make use, somewhat as hunters do of the mirror with which larks are caught.

Of business, nothing was ever said.

He went every morning as far as the office of the Mutual Credit; but, as he said, it was solely as a matter of form.  Once in a long while, M. Saint Pavin and the younger Jottras paid a visit to the Rue St. Gilles.  They had suspended,—the one the payments of his banking house; the other, the publication of “The Financial Pilot.”

But they were not idle for all that; and, in the midst of the public distress, they still managed to speculate upon something, no one knew what, and to realize profits.

They rallied pleasantly the fools who had faith in the defence, and imitated in the most laughable manner the appearance, under their soldier’s coat, of three or four of their friends who had joined the marching battalions.  They boasted that they had no privations to endure, and always knew where to find the fresh butter wherewith to dress the large slices of beef which they possessed the art of finding.  Mme. Favoral heard them laugh; and M. Saint Pavin, the manager of “The Financial Pilot,” exclaimed,

“Come, come! we would be fools to complain.  It is a general liquidation, without risks and without costs.”  Their mirth had something revolting in it; for it was now the last and most acute period of the siege.

At the beginning, the greatest optimists hardly thought that Paris could hold out longer than six weeks.  And now the investment had lasted over four months.  The population was reduced to nameless articles of food.  The supply of bread had failed; the wounded, for lack of a little soup, died in the ambulances; old people and children perished by the hundred; on the left bank the shells came down thick and fast, the weather was intensely cold, and there was no more fuel.

And yet no one complained.  From the midst of that population of two millions of inhabitants, not one voice rose to beg for their comfort, their health, their life even, at the cost of a capitulation.

Clear-sighted men had never hoped that Paris alone could compel the raising of the siege; but they thought, that by holding out, and keeping the Prussians under its walls, Paris would give to France time to rise, to organize armies, and to rush upon the enemy.  There was the duty of Paris; and Paris was toiling to fulfil it to the utmost limits of possibility, reckoning as a victory each day that it gained.

Unfortunately, all this suffering was to be in vain.  The fatal hour struck, when, supplies being exhausted, it became necessary to surrender.  During three days the Prussians camped in the Champs Elysees, gazing with longing eyes upon that city, object of their most eager desires,—that Paris within which, victorious though they were, they had not dared to venture.  Then, soon after, communications were reopened; and one morning, as he received a letter from Switzerland,

“It is from the Baron de Thaller!” exclaimed M. Favoral.

Exactly so.  The manager of the Mutual Credit was a prudent man.  Pleasantly situated in Switzerland, he was in nowise anxious to return to Paris before being quite certain that he had no risks to run.

Upon receiving M. Favoral’s assurances to that effect, he started; and, almost at the same time the elder Jottras and M. Costeclar made their appearance.

It was a curious spectacle, the return of those braves for whom Parisian slang had invented the new and significant expression of franc-fileur.

They were not so proud then as they have been since.  Feeling rather embarrassed in the midst of a population still quivering with the emotions of the siege, they had at least the good taste to try and find pretexts for their absence.

“I was cut off,” affirmed the Baron de Thaller.  “I had gone to Switzerland to place my wife and daughter in safety.  When I came back, good-by! the Prussians had closed the doors.  For more than a week, I wandered around Paris, trying to find an opening.  I became suspected of being a spy.  I was arrested.  A little more, and I was shot dead!”

“As to myself,” declared M. Costeclar, “I foresaw exactly what has happened.  I knew that it was outside, to organize armies of relief, that men would be wanted.  I went to offer my services to the government of defence; and everybody in Bordeaux saw me booted and spurred, and ready to leave.”

He was consequently soliciting the Cross of the Legion of Honor, and was not without hopes of obtaining it through the all-powerful influence of his financial connections.

“Didn’t So-and-so get it?” he replied to objections.  And he named this or that individual whose feats of arms consisted principally in having exhibited themselves in uniforms covered with gold lace to the very shoulders.

“But I am the man who deserves it most, that cross,” insisted the younger M. Jottras; “for I, at least, have rendered valuable services.”

And he went on telling how, after searching for arms all over England, he had sailed for New York, where he had purchased any number of guns and cartridges, and even some batteries of artillery.

This last journey had been very wearisome to him, he added and yet he did not regret it; for it had furnished him an opportunity to study on the spot the financial morals of America; and he had returned with ideas enough to make the fortune of three or four stock companies with twenty millions of capital.

“Ah, those Americans!” he exclaimed.  “They are the men who understand business!  We are but children by the side of them.”

It was through M. Chapelain, the Desclavettes, and old Desormeaux, that these news reached the Rue St. Gilles.

It was also through Maxence, whose battalion had been dissolved, and who, whilst waiting for something better, had accepted a clerkship in the office of the Orleans Railway, where he earned two hundred francs a month.  For M. Favoral saw and heard nothing that was going on around him.  He was wholly absorbed in his business:  he left earlier, came home later, and hardly allowed