Free Money (Oxford World’s Classics) by Émile Zola

he had been chatting when Saccard came along.
    ‘This is Captain Chave, an uncle of my wife’s… Madame Maugendre, my mother-in-law, is a Chave from Marseilles.’
    The captain rose and Saccard shook his hand. He knew by sight this apoplectic face, with a neck stiff from wearing the military collar, one of those petty-cash speculators who could always be seen aroundhere from one o’clock until three. They played for tiny but almost certain winnings of fifteen to twenty francs, which had to be realized within one session of the Bourse.
    Jordan had added, with a pleasant laugh, to explain his presence there:
    ‘A ferocious speculator, my uncle, I just come along from time to time to shake his hand as I go by.’
    ‘My word,’ said the captain, ‘I have to gamble; on the government pension I’d starve.’
    Then Saccard, who took an interest in this young man on account of his robust attitude to life, asked him how things were going on the literary front. And Jordan, brightening up, told him that his needy family was now installed on the fifth floor in the Avenue de Clichy, for the Maugendres, distrustful of a poet and feeling they had done more than enough just by consenting to the marriage, had given them nothing, on the pretext that after their death, their daughter would have their whole fortune, untouched and fattened by savings. No, literature did not feed a man, but he had in mind an idea for a novel, which he didn’t have time to write, so he had had to go into journalism where he dashed off anything he could get, from writing a column to doing the law reports or even little news items.
    ‘Oh well,’ said Saccard, ‘if I get my grand plan going I shall perhaps have a job for you. So come and see me.’
    After saying goodbye, he turned to go round the back of the Bourse. Here at last the distant clamour, the barking of the stock-market, was no more than a vague hum, lost in the roaring traffic of the square. On this side the steps were just as crowded with people, but the stockbrokers’ offices, whose red curtains could be seen through the tall windows, insulated the colonnade from the din of the trading hall, and here various speculators, the rich and fastidious, were sitting comfortably in the shade, some alone and some in little groups, transforming the huge portico, open to the sky, into a sort of private club. The rear of the building was rather like the wrong side of a theatre, or the stage-door, with this seedy, relatively quiet street, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, entirely occupied by wine-merchants, cafés, brasseries, and taverns swarming with a particular, strangely mixed set of customers. The shop-signs too clearly indicated the sort of noxious vegetation that had grown up on the edge of the huge cesspit nearby: disreputable insurance companies, crookedfinancial journals, company offices, banks, agencies, moneylenders, a whole range of small-time gambling-joints established in shops or on mezzanines the size of a pocket-handkerchief. Everywhere, on the pavements and in the middle of the road, men were prowling about, loitering as if in some dark alley.
    Saccard had stopped just inside the railings and was looking up at the door leading to the stockbrokers’ offices, with the piercing gaze of an army chief inspecting from every angle the place he intends to attack, when a tall fellow, coming out of a tavern, crossed the street and made him a very low bow.
    ‘Ah, Monsieur Saccard, don’t you have anything for me? I have now at last left the Crédit Mobilier * and I’m looking for a job.’
    Jantrou was a former professor, come to Paris from Bordeaux after some shady affair. He had had to leave the university, had lost his place in the world, but was still a good-looking chap, with his ample black beard and his precocious baldness, well-read too, intelligent and amiable; he had started off at the Bourse when he was about twenty-eight, and had trailed around getting his hands dirty for ten