Whereupon, throwing on the table the pint of beer which he had not drunk, he walked out of the Café with Maxence.
“Here you are at last!” exclaimed the coachman, who had been waiting at the corner for over three hours, a prey to the utmost anxiety.
But M. de Tregars had no time for explanations; and, pushing Maxence into the cab, he jumped in after him, crying to the coachman,
“24 Rue Joquelet. Five francs extra for yourself.” A driver who expects an extra five francs, always has, for five minutes at least, a horse as fast as Gladiateur.
Whilst the cab was speeding on to its destination,
“What is most important for us now,” said M. de Tregars to Maxence, “is to ascertain how far the Mutual Credit crisis has progressed; and M. Latterman of the Rue Joquelet is the man in all Paris who can best inform us.”
Whoever has made or lost five hundred francs at the bourse knows M. Latterman, who, since the war, calls himself an Alsatian and curses with a fearful accent those “parparous Broossians.” This worthy speculator modestly calls himself a money-changer; but he would be a simpleton who should ask him for change: and it is certainly not that sort of business which gives him the three hundred thousand francs’ profits which he pockets every year.
When a company has failed, when it has been wound up, and the defrauded stockholders have received two or three per cent in all on their original investment, there is a prevailing idea that the certificates of its stocks are no longer good for any thing, except to light the fire. That’s a mistake. Long after the company has foundered, its shares float, like the shattered debris which the sea casts upon the beach months after the ship has been wrecked. These shares M. Latterman collects, and carefully stores away; and upon the shelves of his office you may see numberless shares and bonds of those numerous companies which have absorbed, in the past twenty years, according to some statistics, twelve hundred millions, and, according to others, two thousand millions, of the public fortune.
Say but a word, and his clerks will offer you some “Franco-American Company,” some “Steam Navigation Company of Marseilles,” some “Coal and Metal Company of the Asturias,” some “Transcontinental Memphis and El Paso” (of the United States), some “Caumart Slate Works,” and hundreds of others, which, for the general public, have no value, save that of old paper, that is from three to five cents a pound. And yet speculators are found who buy and sell these rags.
In an obscure corner of the bourse may be seen a miscellaneous population of old men with pointed beards, and overdressed young men, who deal in every thing salable, and other things besides. There are found foreign merchants, who will offer you stocks of merchandise, goods from auction, good claims to recover, and who at last will take out of their pockets an opera-glass, a Geneva watch (smuggled in), a revolver, or a bottle of patent hair-restorer.