Months went by, and it must be said that throughout all the difficult initial period of setting up the Universal Bank Madame Caroline found Saccard very energetic and very prudent. Her suspicions about shady deals, her fears that he might compromise her brother and herself, vanished entirely on seeing him constantly struggling with difficulties, exerting himself from morning to night to ensure the perfect operation of this great new engine, with its machinery grating as if about to explode; and she was grateful, she admired him. The Universal Bank was not in fact working as he would have wished, for it had to contend with the silent hostility of the major banks: ugly rumours were circulating, new obstacles constantly arose, immobilizing the capital and prohibiting big profitable ventures. So Saccard had made a virtue of the slow progress to which he had been reduced, moving forward one step at a time on solid ground, looking out for pitfalls, and too busy avoiding a fall to dare launching himself into the hazards of speculation. He was eaten up with impatience, pawing the ground like a racehorse made to trot along slowly; but never had the early days of a new bank been more honourable and correct, and the whole of the stock exchange was talking about it in astonishment.
So it was that they reached the time for the first General Meeting of shareholders. It had been fixed for 25 April.* On the 20th Hamelin arrived from the East to chair the meeting, having been hastily summoned by Saccard, who was suffocating in the restricted space of the bank. Hamelin, anyway, brought excellent news; contracts had been agreed for the formation of the United Steamboat Company, he had acquired concessions granting the exploitation of the Carmel Silver Mines to a French company; in addition there was the Turkish National Bank, for which he had just laid the foundations in Constantinople, and which would be a real branch of the Universal. As for the big question of the Asia Minor Railways, that had not yet matured so must be set aside for the present; he would have to go back to continue his research, the day after the General Meeting. Saccard was delighted and had a long conversation with Hamelin and Madame Caroline, and he had no trouble convincing them that an increase in the company’s capital was an absolute necessity if they were to provide adequately for these ventures. The most important shareholders, Daigremont, Huret, Sédille, and Kolb, had been consulted and had approved the increase, so the proposal could be studied and presented to the board on the very eve of the meeting of shareholders.
This Extraordinary Meeting was a solemn affair, with all the directors present in the austere room, tinged with green by the tall trees of the adjoining Beauvilliers garden. There were normally two meetings a month; the small, but most important meeting on the 15th, when only the top people, the business executives, would attend; and the big meeting, the ceremonial meeting, around the 30th, to which everyone came, the silent directors and the merely ornamental ones, to approve what had already been arranged and append their signatures. That day the Marquis de Bohain, with his little aristocratic head, was one of the first to arrive, bringing with him, in his grand air of weariness, the approval of all the nobility of France. And the Viscount de Robin-Chagot, the vice-president, a man at once affable and avaricious, was given the task of looking out for the directors who had not been pre-advised and taking them aside to give them the orders of the manager, the real master. It was all a matter of course, and they all indicated their compliance with a nod.
At last the session began. Hamelin made known to the board the report he was to read at the Annual General Meeting. This was the big task Saccard had been working on for some time, and he had just written it up in two days, adding the notes that Hamelin had brought; and he was now modestly listening to it with an air of lively interest, as if it were all entirely new to him. The report began by outlining the transactions of the Universal Bank since its foundation: they had all been good, just minor, everyday matters, carried out from one day to the next, the usual banking routine. However, handsome profits were expected on the Mexican loan, which had been launched the month before, after the Emperor Maximilian’s departure for Mexico: a very muddled loan, with crazy premiums, and Saccard bitterly regretted not having been able to get deeper into it for lack of funds. All this was no more than ordinary, but the bank had survived. For its first period, which was only three months, from its foundation on 5 October to 31 December, the total profits only amounted to slightly more than four hundred thousand francs, which had allowed the bank to pay off a quarter of the start-up expenses, pay the shareholders their five per cent, and put ten per cent into the reserve fund; in addition, the directors had taken the ten per cent granted by the company’s statutes, and there remained a sum of about sixty-eight thousand francs carried over to the next financial period. But there had been no dividend. Nothing could have been more ordinary and honourable than this. It was the same with the share-prices of the Universal on the Bourse: they had slowly and steadily risen from five hundred to six hundred francs in the normal way, like the share-prices of any self-respecting bank; and over the last two months they had remained stationary, there being nothing to raise them any further in the petty everyday dealings in which the new banking-house seemed to be quietly dormant.
Then the report moved on to the future, and now there was a sudden expansion, with a vast horizon opening on to a whole series of grand ventures. The report laid particular emphasis on the United General Steamboat Company, the shares of which were to be issued by the Universal: a company with a capital of fifty million, which would have a monopoly of all the transport services of the Mediterranean and would be joined by the two main rival companies, the Phocean for the service through the Piraeus and the Dardanelles for Constantinople, Smyrna and Trebizond, and the Maritime Company for Alexandria, via Messina and Syria, as well as some minor banking institutions which would also join the association, Combarel and Co. for Algeria and Tunisia, Veuve Henri Liotard also for Algeria, via Spain and Morocco, and finally the Féraud-Giraud Brothers for Italy, via Civitavecchia for Naples and the cities of the Adriatic. In creating one single company out of all these rival firms and banks that had been killing each other off, they were taking over the whole of the Mediterranean. Thanks to the centralization of the capital they would be able to build their own boats of unprecedented speed and comfort, the services would be more frequent, and new ports of call would be created, making the Orient a suburb of Marseilles; and what importance might not the company later acquire when, with the completion of the Suez Canal, it would be able to create services for India, Tonkin,* China and Japan! Never had there been a safer or more wide-ranging enterprise. The next thing would be the supporting of the Turkish National Bank, on which the report provided lengthy technical details, all demonstrating its unshakeable solidity. And this outline of future operations ended with the announcement that the Universal was also taking under its wing the French Carmel Silver Mines Company, with a capital of twenty million francs. Laboratory tests indicated a substantial proportion of silver in the samples of ore examined. But even more than science, the ancient poetry of the Holy Land seemed to send that silver streaming down like a miraculous rain-shower, a divine and dazzling idea that Saccard had used at the end of a sentence and with which he was well pleased.
Finally, after all these promises of a glorious future, the report concluded with the matter of the increase of capital. It would be doubled, raised from twenty-five to fifty million. The system adopted for the issue was of the utmost simplicity, so that everyone could easily understand it: fifty thousand new shares would be created and would be reserved, share by share, for the bearers of the fifty thousand initial shares; so there would not even be a public subscription. But these new shares would be five hundred and twenty francs, inclusive of a premium of twenty francs, making a total sum of one million which would be carried over to the reserve fund. It was quite fair, and indeed prudent, to impose this small tax on the shareholders, since they were being favoured in the new issue. Besides, only a quarter of the price of the shares, plus the premium, would have to be paid on issue.
W
hen Hamelin came to the end of the report a great hubbub of approval arose. It was perfect, no further comment was required. During the whole time of the reading, Daigremont, absorbed in a careful examination of his nails, had occasionally smiled at various vague thoughts; and the deputy Huret, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, was half asleep, thinking himself at the Chamber of Deputies; while Kolb, the banker, had calmly, taking no pains to hide the fact, embarked on a lengthy calculation upon the sheets of paper that he, like every other director, had on the table before him. Sédille, however, anxious and distrustful as ever, decided to ask a question: what would happen to the shares abandoned by shareholders who chose not to exercise their right? Would the company hold them on its own account, and wouldn’t this be illegal, since the legal declaration of increased capital could not be made by the lawyer until the whole of the additional capital had been subscribed? And if the company decided to get rid of them, to whom and how was it going to do so? But from the silk-manufacturer’s first words the Marquis de Bohain, noting Saccard’s impatience, cut him short, declaring in his grand and aristocratic manner that the board left such matters of detail in the devoted and competent hands of the chairman and the manager. And then only congratulations were heard, and the meeting closed in the midst of general delight.
The shareholders’ meeting on the following day was the occasion for some really touching scenes. It was again held in the hall in the Rue Blanche, where a promoter of public dances had gone bankrupt; and before the arrival of the chairman, in the already crowded hall the most favourable rumours were circulating, one especially being whispered to the effect that the minister Rougon, the manager’s brother, having been violently attacked by the increasingly powerful Opposition, was disposed to favour the Universal if the company’s newspaper, L’Espérance, a former organ of the Catholic party, would defend the government. A left-wing deputy had just raised the terrible cry: ‘The second of December is a crime!’* and this had resounded from one end of France to the other, like a reawakening of the public conscience. Great deeds were needed to respond to this: the imminent Universal Exhibition would create a tenfold increase in business, and huge gains would be made in Mexico and elsewhere with the triumph of the Empire at its peak. In one little group of shareholders, who were being indoctrinated by Jantrou and Sabatani, there was a great deal of laughter about another deputy who, during the discussion of the army, had proposed the extraordinary idea that a recruitment system like that of Prussia should be established in France. The Chamber had found this very funny: how deranged by terror of Prussia some people’s minds must be after the Denmark affair* and the resentment that Italy nurtured against us ever since Solferino!* But the noise of individual conversations and the general hubbub of the room suddenly ceased when Hamelin and the other officials made their appearance. Saccard, even more modest here than in the board meeting, had almost disappeared, lost in the crowd; and he did no more than give the signal for applause, approving the report which presented to the assembly the accounts of the first quarter, checked and accepted by the auditors Lavignière and Rousseau, and which proposed the doubling of the company’s capital. This meeting was solely competent to authorize the increase, and it did so with enthusiasm, utterly intoxicated by the millions of the United General Steamboat Company and the Turkish National Bank, and recognizing the need to bring the capital into line with the importance the Universal was going to assume. As for the Carmel Silver Mines, they were greeted with a religious thrill. And when the shareholders had separated, after votes of thanks to the chairman, the board, and the manager, they all dreamed of Carmel and that miraculous shower of silver, raining down in glory from the Holy Land.
Two days later, accompanied now by the vice-chairman Viscount de Robin-Chagot, Hamelin and Saccard returned to the Rue Sainte-Anne to declare, in the office of Maître Lelorrain, the increase of capital which, they asserted, had been entirely subscribed. The truth was that about three thousand shares, refused by the first shareholders to whom they belonged by right, remained in the possession of the company, which once more, with some juggling of the books, passed them over to the account of Sabatani. It was the same old irregularity, but aggravated, the system of concealing a certain number of its own shares in the coffers of the Universal as a sort of fighting-fund, allowing it to speculate, to throw itself into battle on the Bourse if needed, to maintain its share-prices in the event of a coalition of ‘bears’ intent on driving them down.
Anyway, Hamelin, although he disapproved of this illegal manoeuvre, had in the end left all the financial operations to Saccard; and there had been a conversation on the subject between the two men and Madame Caroline, but only in relation to the five hundred shares that Saccard had forced them to take in the first issue, which now, of course, were doubled in the second issue, making a thousand in all, which meant, for the payment of one-quarter of the value plus the premium, a sum of one hundred and thirty-five thousand francs, which the brother and sister insisted on paying, since they had just received an unexpected inheritance of about three hundred thousand francs from an aunt, who had died of the same fever that ten days previously had caused the death of her only son. Saccard let them do as they wished, without offering any explanation of how he was intending to pay for his own shares.
‘Ah, this inheritance!’ said Madame Caroline with a laugh. ‘It’s the first stroke of good fortune we’ve had… I really think you are bringing us luck. My brother has his salary of thirty thousand francs and substantial travelling expenses, and now all this money pours down on us, no doubt just because we don’t really need it any more… We’re rich!’
She gazed at Saccard with her good-hearted gratitude, quite conquered now, trusting in him and losing a little more of her clear-sightedness with each passing day in the growing affection she felt for him. Then, carried away by her gaiety and frankness, she continued:
‘No matter, if I had actually earned this money I assure you I would not be risking it in your ventures… But an aunt we scarcely knew, and money we had never thought of, it’s like money found in the street, it’s something that doesn’t even seem quite honest, and I feel a bit ashamed about it… You understand, it’s not close to my heart, I am prepared to lose it.’
‘Quite so!’ said Saccard, similarly joking. ‘It’s going to grow and will give you millions. There’s nothing like ill-gotten gains for making money! Before a week is out you’ll see, you’ll see how the price will rise.’
And in fact Hamelin, who had had to delay his departure, was able to observe the rapid rise of the Universal share-price. By the settlement at the end of May it had passed the seven-hundred-franc rate. This was just the usual result of an increase of capital: it’s the classic move, the way to whip up success and set the share-prices galloping with each new issue. But it was also due to the real importance of the ventures the bank was launching; and big yellow posters pasted up all over Paris, announcing the forthcoming opening of the Carmel Silver Mines, had further disturbed people’s minds, lighting a spark of intoxication, a passion which would grow and carry away all common sense. The ground had been prepared, the Imperial compost, made of fermenting rubbish, and heated by exacerbated appetites, an extremely fertile ground for one of those mad surges of speculation which, every ten or fifteen years, choke and poison the Bourse, leaving behind them only blood and ruins. Crooked firms were already springing up like mushrooms, big companies were promoting risky financial ventures, an intense gambling fever was manifesting itself in the rowdy prosperity of the reign, all that razzle-dazzle of pleasure and luxury for which the impending Exhibition would be a last blaze of glory, the mendacious grand finale of the show. And in the giddiness of the crowd and the flurry of all the other fine ventures everywhere on offer, the Universal was at last beginning to get started, like a powerful engine destined to madden and destroy everything in its path, while violent hands went on wildly heating it to the point of explosion.