Reviews

Zola's money: further proof that the Rougon Macquart saga is a timeless marker of human societies' evolution!
We are back, after the Curée, in the world of money. Big money, that of the Stock Exchange, made to flow for the sole pleasure of feeling it flow, even if it means devastating all that gave birth and growing it, viable and valuable economic projects such as the illusions of the little people.
This unalterable thirst thrills Saccard, a magnificent trickster and crooked financier, which pushes him to rely on the development projects in the East of Hamelin and his sister, Madame Caroline, to demonstrate the place of Paris its power through the creation of the Universal Bank. Disregarding the few embezzlements necessary for its development, he never ceases to push it high, consistently higher, leading with him in a growing movement of collective hysteria about money. That's the entrepreneurs, nobles, corrupt politicians, and most everything, a host of small carriers, first wise and then driven mad by the lure of money, until the final collapse.

Through the story of the birth to death of this bank based on a vision of healthy prosperity but vitiated from the start by excessive appetites, it is not only from the angle of speculation, greed, corruption, and exhilaration game that Zola presents us with money. The author compares these dark aspects to a fine analyst and skillful storyteller. Thanks to a fantastic gallery of characters from all backgrounds, we know what positive money brings to people and societies: economic and social progress, fuel for creative energies, and receding poverty. Utopias are swept away in the end, in a paroxysmal scene of the stampede to the basket from which will come out rinsed and finished, except those who, like Madame Caroline, remain rich in their values.

I devoured this hectic and uplifting opus of Rougons, perfect from start to finish. However, I regret the unfinished development of the character of Victor, Saccard's hidden son, who could have better-shed light on his father's name and that of the time.