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542 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1891
What you have to understand is that speculation, playing the market, is the central motor, the very heart of a vast affair such as ours. Yes! It brings new blood into the system, it takes small streams of it from all over the place then collects it together and sends it out in rivers, in all directions, creating an enormous circulation of money which is the very lifeblood of great enterprise. Without it major movements of capital, and the great civilising works that result, are fundamentally impossible. [...]
Risk, that's the essential, that and the grandeur of the aim too. There has to be a vast project, a project big enough to capture the imagination; there has to be hope of substantial gain, of winning a jackpot that will give ten times the initial outlay, unless of course it gets swept away instead; that's what provokes passions, so life floods in, everyone brings his money, and the world can be reshaped. What evil do you see in that?
It was like one of those fits of madness that can seize a crowd, and was intelligible only to the initiated. Up above, women were leaning their heads over the telegraph gallery, stupified and horrified at this extraordinary spectacle. In the government-stocks market, it was almost like a brawl, with a furious central group resorting to fisticuffs, while the public, crossing this side of the room in both directions, pushed into the groups that were constantly breaking up and forming again in continual turmoil. Between the cash market and the main trading-floor, above the tempest-tossed sea of heads, there were now only the three quoters sitting on their high chairs, floating above the waves like wreckage, with the big white patch of registers, while they were tugged hither and thither by the rapid fluctuation of the prices being thrown at them. In the cash section especially, the jostling was at its worst, it was a solid mass heads of hair, without faces, like a dark swarm, lightened only by the little white pages of notebooks waving about in the air.
Ah! Money, she would have liked to bring it to him by the bucketful, and he would be very stupid to be over particular about it, since she loved him and owed him everything. It was her fairy story, her “Cinderella,” the treasures of her royal family, which with her little hands she deposited at the feet of her ruined prince, to keep him on in his march to glory and the conquest of the world.I love Zola's characterizations, but it's pretty hard to love most of the characters themselves, and especially in this one. A fair warning: this is 19th Century Catholic France, and some of the characters openly display strong anti-semitism. Zola simply writes of the people and society of the Second Empire.
. . . he doesn’t love money like a miser, for the sake of having a huge pile of it and hiding it in his cellar. No; if he wished to make it gush forth on every side, if he draws it from no matter what sources, it is to see it flow around him in torrents; it is for the sake of all the enjoyments he derives from it – luxury, pleasure, power.
Ah! Money, that all-corrupting poisonous money, which withered souls and drove from them all kindness, tenderness, and love for others! Money alone was the great culprit, the agent of all human cruelties and abominations.