On the morning of the previous day, an old man, Johann Fischer, unable to pay back the thirty thousand francs he had raised for his nephew, found that he would have to file a petition for bankruptcy unless the Baron repaid him. The venerable, white-haired old man of 70 had such blind confidence in Hulot, who, for this Bonapartist, was a ray of Napoleon’s sun, that he was walking calmly up and down with the banker’s clerk in the front room of the little ground-floor premises, rented for eight hundred francs a year, from which he directed his grain and forage business.
‘Marguerite has gone to get the money very near here,’ he said.
The clerk, in grey and silver-braided uniform, knew the old Alsatian’s honesty so well that he was willing to leave him his bills for thirty thousand francs, but the old man made him stay, telling him that it had not yet struck eight o’clock.
A cab stopped at the door. The old man rushed out into the street and held out his hand, in sublime confidence, to the Baron, who gave him thirty bank notes.
‘Go three doors further on, I’ll explain later,’ said old Fischer. ‘Here you are, young fellow,’ said the old man, coming in and counting out the money to the bank’s representative, whom he then accompanied to the door.
When the man from the bank was out of sight, Fischer called back the cab where his eminent nephew, Napoleon’s right hand, was waiting, and said as he led him into the house:
‘Do you want them to know at the Bank of France that you paid me thirty thousand francs for bills which you endorsed? As it is, it’s too bad that they should bear the signature of a man like you!’
‘Let’s go to the bottom of your garden, Uncle Fischer,’ said the high official. ‘You’re in good health,’ he continued, sitting down in a vine arbour and scrutinizing the old man like a dealer in human bodies scrutinizing a substitute for army service.
‘Good enough to invest in an annuity,’ replied the little old man, who was spare, thin, wiry, and keen-eyed.
‘Does the heat upset you?’
‘On the contrary.’
‘What do you think of Africa?’
‘A fine country! The French went there with the Little Corporal.’
‘To save us all, you may have to go to Algeria,’ said the Baron.
‘But what about my business?’
‘A War Ministry clerk who is retiring and hasn’t enough to live on will buy your business.’
‘What am I to do in Algeria?’
‘Supply food for the army, grain and forage. I have your commission signed. You will buy your supplies in the country for 70 per cent less than the price you will enter on your accounts to us.’
‘Where shall I get them from?’
‘By raids and levies, and from the caliphates. Algeria is a country that is still very little known, although we have been there for eight years; it contains huge quantities of grain and forage. Now, when this produce is in Arab hands, we take it from them under a host of pretexts. Then, when we have it, the Arabs try to take it back. There is a lot of fighting over grain, but no one knows how much has been stolen on both sides. There isn’t time in the open field to measure out wheat in hectolitres as they do in the Paris market, and hay as in the Rue d’Enfer. The Arab chiefs, as well as our Spahis, prefer cash and so sell these crops at a very low price. But the Army administration has fixed requirements, so it sanctions purchases at exorbitant prices, calculated on the difficulty of obtaining supplies and on the risks of transport. That’s Algeria from the Army contractor’s point of view. It’s chaos, modified by the scribblings of every new administration. We administrators won’t be able to see clearly what’s going on there for about ten years, but private individuals have sharp eyes. So I’m sending you there to make your fortune. I’m placing you there as Napoleon used to place a poor marshal at the head of a kingdom where he could secretly protect smuggling. I’m ruined, my dear Fischer. A year from now, I’ll need a hundred thousand francs.’
‘I see no harm in taking them from the Arabs,’ the Alsatian replied calmly. ‘That sort of thing used to be done under the Empire.’
‘The purchaser of your business will come and see you this morning and will give you ten thousand francs,’ continued Baron Hulot. ‘That’s all you need, isn’t it, to go to Africa?’
The old man nodded his assent.
‘As for funds out there, don’t worry,’ the Baron went on. ‘I’ll keep the rest of the money paid for your business here; I need it.’
‘Everything I have is yours, even my life,’ said the old man.
‘Oh, there’s nothing to fear,’ continued the Baron, crediting his uncle with greater perspicacity than he in fact had. ‘As far as collecting levies are concerned, your reputation for honesty won’t suffer. Everything depends on those in authority, and as I appointed them I’m sure of them. This, Uncle Fischer, is a mortal secret. I know you and I have spoken frankly without beating about the bush.’
‘I’ll go,’ said the old man. ‘And for how long?’
‘Two years. You’ll make a hundred thousand francs for yourself to go and live happily in the Vosges.’
‘It will be done as you wish. My honour is yours,’ said the little old man calmly.
‘That’s how I like a man to behave. Still, you won’t go till you’ve seen your great-niece happily married. She’s going to be a countess.’
Levies, raiding the raiders, and the price paid by the War Ministry clerk for Fischer’s business could not immediately raise the sixty thousand francs for Hortense’s dowry plus the trousseau costing about another five thousand francs, as well as the forty thousand francs already spent or about to be spent on Madame Marneffe. And how had the Baron obtained the thirty thousand francs that he had just brought? In this way.
A few days earlier, Hulot had taken out life insurance policies with two companies, for three years, for one hundred and fifty thousand francs.
Armed with the insurance policies for which the premiums had been paid, he had spoken as follows to Monsieur le Baron de Nucingen, peer of France; Hulot was riding back with the Baron in his carriage on the way to dine at Nucingen’s house, after a sitting of the House of Peers.
‘Baron, I need seventy thousand francs and I’m asking you to lend them to me. You’ll appoint a nominee to whom I’ll make over the assignable portion of my salary. It amounts to twenty-five thousand francs a year, that’s seventy five thousand francs. You’ll say, “You may die.”’
The Baron nodded his assent.
‘Here is an insurance policy for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which will be handed over to you until eighty thousand francs have been paid,’ replied the Baron, taking a paper from his pocket.
‘Put subbose you’re tismissed,’ said the millionaire Baron, with a laugh.
The other Baron, the contrary of a millionaire, became thoughtful.
‘Ton’t worry. I only raise the opjection to boint out to you dat id’s rather goot of me do gif you ze money. You bust pe very hart ub, for the Pank has your signadure.’
‘I’m arranging my daughter’s marriage,’ said Baron Hulot, ‘and I’ve no money, like everyone else who continues in Government service in an ungrateful age when five hundred bourgeois, sitting on benches, will never know how to reward devoted servants generously the way the Emperor did.’
‘Gome now, you hat Chosépha!’ replied the Peer of France. ‘Dat exsblains eferyding! Bedween ourselfs, de Tuc t’Hérufille tit you a real zerfice py bulling dat leech off your burse. “I haf known dat misfordune ant gan symbadize”,’ he added, thinking he was quoting a line of French verse.* ‘Dake a vrient’s atvice: shud up shob, or you’ll gome a gropper.’
This dubious transaction was arranged through the intermediary of a little money-lender called Vauvinet, one of those shady dealers who hang around large banking houses like the little fish that seem to attend upon sharks. The apprentice profiteer promised Monsieur le Baron Hulot—so eager was he to obtain the patronage of such an eminent personality—to raise thirty thousand francs for him in bills of exchange in ninety days, pledging himself to renew them four times and not to put them into circulation.
Fischer’s successor was to give forty thousand francs for the business, but with the promise of the contract to supply forage in a department near Paris.
Such was the terrible maze into which his passions were leading a man who, until then, had been of the utmost integrity, one of the most able administrators of the Napoleonic regime: misappropriation of public funds in order to pay for usury, usury required to pay for his passions and for his daughter’s marriage.
This ingeniously contrived prodigality, all these efforts, were expended to appear great in the eyes of Madame Marneffe, to be the Jupiter of that middle-class Danaë.* A man would not have to deploy more energy, intelligence, or enterpise in making an honest fortune than the Baron did in plunging head first into a hornets’ nest. He attended to the affairs of his department, he harried the decorators, he supervised the workmen, he checked minutely the tiniest details of the Rue Vaneau establishment. Although he was completely absorbed by thoughts of Madame Marneffe, he still went to meetings of the House. He was everywhere at once and neither his family nor anyone else noticed his preoccupations.