Suddenly in his guttural, slightly hoarse voice, he threw himself into the struggle: 'I have Universals! I have Universals!' he called.
And in a few minutes he had offered several millions' worth. Voices answered him, and the quotations collapsed.
'I have at two thousand four hundred!' 'I have at two thousand three hundred!'
'How many?'
'Five hundred, six hundred!'
'Deliver!'
What was he saying? What was taking place? Instead of the expected succour, was this a fresh hostile army emerging from the neighbouring woods? As at Waterloo, Grouchy failed to come up, and it was treason that completed the rout. Under the onslaught of those deep, fresh masses of offers hastening to the attack at the double quick, a frightful panic set in.
Mazaud at that moment felt death pass over his face. He had carried Saccard over for far too large a sum, and he was fully conscious that the Universal was breaking his back in its fall. But his handsome dark face, with small moustaches, remained impenetrable and brave. Exhausting the orders which he had received, he still went on buying in his piercing cockerel-like voice, as shrill as in the hours of success. And opposite him, his counterparts, the roaring Jacoby and the apoplectic Delarocque, despite their efforts at indifference, showed more anxiety than he, for they realised that he was now in great danger, and would he pay them should he fail? Their hands grasped the velvet balustrade, their voices continued shouting as though mechanically, from mere habit, while their fixed glances expressed all the frightful anguish of this tragedy of money.
Then, during the last half-hour, came the smash-up, the rout growing worse and worse, carrying the mob away in a disorderly gallop. After extreme confidence, blind infatuation, came the reaction of fear, and one and all rushed forward to sell, if there was still time. A perfect hail of orders to sell fell upon the corbeille: there was nothing to be seen but a rain of fiches; and the enormous parcels of shares, thus imprudently thrown upon the market, accelerated the decline, turned it into a veritable collapse. The quotations, from fall to fall, dropped to one thousand five hundred, one thousand two hundred, nine hundred francs. There were no more buyers; none were left standing; the ground was strewn with corpses. Above the dark swarming of frock-coats, the three quoters looked like clerks registering deaths. By a singular effect of the blast of disaster which swept through the hall, the agitation congealed there as it were, the uproar died away as in the stupor of a great catastrophe. A frightful silence prevailed when, after the stroke of the closing bell, the final quotation of eight hundred and thirty francs became known. And meantime the obstinate rain still streamed upon the windows, through which only a doubtful twilight filtered. What with the dripping of the umbrellas and the tramping of the crowd, the hall had become a cloaca, muddy like an ill-kept stable, and littered with all sorts of torn papers; while in the corbeille shone the variegated fiches, green, red, and blue, scattered there by the handful, and so abundant that afternoon that the vast basin overflowed.
Mazaud had re-entered the brokers' room at the same time as Jacoby and Delarocque. Consumed by an ardent thirst, he approached the buffet, and drank a glass of beer. Then he looked at the immense room, with its long central table, around which were ranged the arm-chairs of the sixty brokers, its red velvet hangings, all its commonplace faded luxury, which lent it the appearance of a first-class waiting-room in a large railway station; he looked at it with the astonished air of a man who had never had a good view of it before. Then, as he was going off, he silently shook hands with Jacoby and Delarocque, exchanging the accustomed grasp with them; and although they all three preserved their every-day correct deportment, they could not help turning pale. Mazaud had told Flory to wait for him at the door; and there he found him, in company with Gustave, who had definitively left the office the week before, and had come there simply as a spectator, always smiling and leading a gay life, without ever asking himself whether his father would, on the morrow, still be able to pay his debts; while Flory, with pale cheeks and an idiotic sneer on his lips, endeavoured to talk, though crushed by the frightful loss of a hundred thousand francs which had just fallen upon him, and the first sou of which he did not know where to get. However, Mazaud and his clerk disappeared in the rain.