Successors to the Fuggers and Salviatis, to the supercilious members of the Hanseatic League whom a richly apparelled convoy of heralds and musicians preceded each day to the Exchange, they traffic in empires and peoples as simply as in rice and coffee; but, should they lend money to kings, less pompous and less artistic than the legendary Focker, they would not throw upon a hearth fed with cinnamon-bark, the bond of Caesar, their great debtor, but their honored guest! In the old days they were patricians; today they are but parvenus.
Bulls and bears consult as an infallible barometer the wrinkles of their foreheads, the expression of their lips, the color of their look. They are vicars of the divinity symbolized by the five-franc note.
Thus, once when a frank talker so far forgot himself as to speak to the Rhenish Jew Fuchskopf about a noble character, a genius insufficiently provided with money, and to implore his aid for an unfortunate whose plight would move any more or less human mortal, the vile usurer, the dealer in souls, the provider of unsold shoes to the butchered soldiers of recent wars, the insatiable shareholder whom coal miners, caught by fire-damp, starved out by strikes, fired upon by the troops, cursed in their agony; the Jew drew from his pocketbook a shining five-franc piece and, instead of consecrating it to an exceptional charity, passed it two or three times beneath the nose of his petitioner, pressed it lovingly between his twisted fingers, moist as cupping glasses, drew it near his lips, as though he were kissing a paten, and, slightly bending his knee, addressed this untranslatable orison to the fetich:
