Money (Oxford World’s Classics) by Émile Zola

dream, with no need for any enjoyment, and of such frugality that his brother had to scold him to make him drink wine and eat meat. What he wanted was that each man’s work, measured according to his strength, should be sufficient to satisfy his appetites: while he, for his own part, was killing himself with work and living on nothing. A real sage, impassioned about his studies, detached from material existence, very gentle and very pure. Ever since the previous autumn he had been coughing more and more, as the consumption spread through him, without his even deigning to notice and take care of himself.
    But at a movement from Saccard, Sigismond at last looked up with his big, vague eyes, and expressed surprise, although he knew the visitor.
    ‘I’ve come about a letter to translate.’
    The young man was even more surprised, for he had been discouraging clients, the bankers, speculators, and currency dealers, all those Bourse people who receive, especially from England and Germany, a great deal of correspondence, circulars, and company statutes.
    ‘Yes, a letter in Russian. Oh! only ten lines.’
    At this Sigismond held out his hand, for Russian had remained his speciality; he alone, among the other translators of the neighbourhood who made their living on English and German, translated it fluently. The rarity of Russian documents in the Paris market explained his long periods of unemployment.
    He read the letter aloud, in French. It was a favourable response, in three sentences, from a banker in Constantinople, a simple ‘Yes’ to a deal.
    ‘Ah, thank you,’ exclaimed Saccard, who seemed delighted.
    And he asked Sigismond to write the few lines of the translation on the back of the letter. But Sigismond was seized by a terrible fit of coughing that he tried to smother in his handkerchief so as notto disturb his brother, who would come running as soon as he heard him coughing like that. When the spasm was over he got up and went to the window, throwing it wide open, suffocating, needing air. Saccard, who had followed him, glanced outside and gave a slight gasp.
    ‘Oh, you can see the Bourse! My! How funny it looks from here.’
    Indeed he had never before seen it from such a strange angle, a bird’s-eye-view, with the four huge zinc slopes of the roof exposed in amazing detail, bristling with a forest of pipes. The points of the lightning-conductors stood up like giant lances, threatening the sky. And the great building itself was now no more than a cube of stone, striped by rows of columns, a dirty, grey cube, bare and ugly, with a ragged flag on top. But what astonished him most was the steps and the peristyle, dotted with black ants, a whole anthill in turmoil, restlessly moving, creating a huge disturbance that from up here seemed incomprehensible, and even pitiable.
    ‘How small it all looks!’ he continued. ‘As if one could grab them all up in one handful!’
    Then, being familiar with the ideas of his companion, he added with a laugh:
    ‘When are you going to get rid of all that, with one swift kick?’
    Sigismond shrugged.
    ‘What’s the point? You’re already doing the demolishing yourselves.’
    And bit by bit he grew animated, overflowing with the subject he was so full of. A proselytizing urge launched him, at the slightest excuse, into an exposition of his system.
    ‘Yes indeed, you’re working for us without realizing it… There you are, a few usurpers, dispossessing the masses, and once you are gorged we, in turn, will only have to dispossess you… Every kind of monopolizing, every centralization, leads to collectivism. You are giving us a practical lesson: in the same way that big estates swallow up small plots of land, big manufacturers devour cottage industry and large banks and big stores kill off all competition, growing fat on the ruin of small banks and little shops—they are all, in fact, slowly but surely moving towards the new social order… We are waiting for it all to break