'Am I to run through them and classify them to-day, monsieur,' asked Flory.
'Undoubtedly, if they are coming thus en masse. What are all those?'
'Oh, Universals—orders to buy, almost all.'
The broker, with a practised hand, turned the telegrams over, and was evidently well pleased. Very much involved with Saccard, whom he had long been carrying over for considerable sums, and from whom that very morning he had received orders to buy on a very large scale indeed, he had finally become the Universal's authorized broker. And, although so far not a prey to any great anxiety, he nevertheless felt relieved at noticing how persistent was the infatuation of the public, how obstinately people went on buying Universals in spite of the extravagance of the rise. One name particularly struck him, among those appended to the telegrams, that of Fayeux, the dividend-collector at Vendôme, who must have secured a vast number of petty buyers among the farmers, devotees, and priests of his province, for not a week passed but he thus sent orders after orders.
'Give those to the Cash-clerk,' said Mazaud to Flory. 'And don't wait for the telegrams to be brought down to you. Go up and wait, and bring them down yourself.'
Going at once to the Cash department, Flory leant over the balustrade, shouting, 'Mazaud! Mazaud!' at the top of his voice.
It was Gustave Sédille who approached, for employees lose their own names at the Bourse and take those of the brokers whom they represent. In this wise Flory himself was called Mazaud by the others. For two years Gustave Sédille had been out of the office, but he had lately returned to it in the hope of thereby inducing his father to pay his debts; and that afternoon, owing to the absence of the principal clerk, he found himself entrusted with the Cash-work, which amused him. Flory leant over to whisper in his ear, and they agreed between them that they would only effect the purchases for Fayeux at the last quotation, after using his orders for a private gamble of their own, first buying and then selling in the name of their usual man of straw, so as to pocket the difference, for a rise seemed to them to be certain.
Meantime Mazaud went back towards the corbeille. But at every step an attendant handed him a fiche on which an order had been scribbled in pencil by some customer who had been unable to approach. For these fiches each broker had his own special colour—red, yellow, blue or green—so that he might easily recognise them. Mazaud's were green, the colour of hope; and the little slips kept on accumulating between his fingers as the attendants continually went to and fro, taking them, at the end of the railed passages, from the employees and speculators who, in order to save time, were each provided with a supply of the little cards.
As Mazaud halted once more in front of the velvet-topped balustrade he again came upon Jacoby, who also carried a handful of fiches, red ones, the hue of freshly shed blood. These undoubtedly were orders from Gundermann and his followers, for everybody was aware that in the massacre now being prepared Jacoby would be the broker of the 'bears,' the executioner-in-chief of the Israelite banking world. He was at present listening to another broker, his brother-in-law, Delarocque, a Christian who had married a Jewess, a very bald, stout, thick-set, florid man, partial to clubland and known to receive the orders of Daigremont, who had lately fallen out with Jacoby as he had formerly fallen out with Mazaud. The story which Delarocque was telling—a story of equivocal character—lighted up his little blinking eyes, while he waved, in passionate pantomime, his memorandum-book, from which protruded his package of fiches, which were blue, the soft blue of an April sky.
'Monsieur Massias is asking for you,' an attendant came to say to Mazaud.