“For this reason. If you should live, and if you have the money credited to you in your policy of insurance against the chances of death—you follow me—”
“I follow.”
“Well, then, it is because you have succeeded in your undertakings! And you will have succeeded solely in consequence of that policy of insurance; for, by ridding yourself of all the anxieties which are involved in having a wife at your heels, and children whom your death may reduce to beggary, you simply double your chances of success. If you are at the top of the tree, you have grasped the intellectual capital compared with which the insurance money is a trifle, a mere trifle.”
“An admirable idea!”
“Is it not, monsieur?—I call this beneficent institution the Mutual Insurance against beggary!—or, if you prefer it, the Office for discounting Talent. For talent, sir, talent is a bill of exchange, bestowed by Nature on a man of genius, and which is often at long date—ha, hah!”
“Very handsome usury,” cried Margaritis.
“The deuce! He is sharp enough, this old boy! I have made a mistake; I must attack this man on higher ground with palaver A 1,” thought Gaudissart.—“Not at all, monsieur,” said he aloud. “To you who—”
“Will you take a glass of wine?” asked Margaritis.
“With pleasure,” said Gaudissart.
“Wife! give us a bottle of the wine of which two casks are left.—You are here in the headquarters of Vouvray,” said the master, pointing to his vines. “The clos Margaritis.”
The maid brought in glasses and a bottle of the wine of 1819. The worthy lunatic filled a glass with scrupulous care, and solemnly presented it to Gaudissart, who drank it.
“But you are playing me some trick, monsieur,” said the commercial traveler. “This is Madeira, genuine Madeira!”
“I should think it is!” replied the lunatic. “The only fault of the Vouvray wine, monsieur, is that it cannot be used as an ordinaire, as a table wine. It is too generous, too strong; and it is sold in Paris as Madeira after being doctored with brandy. Our wine is so rich that many of the Paris merchants, when the French crop is insufficient for Holland and Belgium, buy our wine to mix with the wine grown about Paris, and so manufacture a Bordeaux wine.—But what you are drinking at this moment, my dear and very amiable sir, is fit for a king; it is the head of Vouvray. I have two casks, only two casks of it. Persons who appreciate the finest wines, high-class wines, and like to put a wine on their table which has a character not to be met with in the regular trade, apply direct to us. Now, do you happen to know anyone—”
“Let us go back to our business,” said Gaudissart.
“We are there, monsieur,” replied the madman. “My wine is heady, and you are talking of capital; the etymology of capital is caput—head.—Heh?—The Head of Vouvray—the connection is obvious.”
“As I was saying,” persisted Gaudissart, “either you have realized your intellectual capital—”
“I have realized, monsieur.—Will you take my two puncheons? I will give you favorable terms.”
“No” said Gaudissart the Great, “I allude to the insurance of intellectual capital and policies on life. I will resume the thread of my argument.”
The madman grew calmer, sat down, and looked at Gaudissart.
“I was saying, monsieur, that if you should die, the capital is paid over to your family without difficulty.”
“Without difficulty.”
“Yes, excepting in the case of suicide—”
“A question for the law.”
“No, sir. As you know, suicide is an act that is always easily proved.”
“In France,” said Margaritis. “But—”
“But abroad,” said Gaudissart. “Well, monsieur, to conclude that part of the question, I may say at once that death abroad, or on the field of battle, are not included—”
“What do you insure, then? Nothing whatever,” cried the other. “Now, my bank was based on—”
“Nothing whatever, sir?” cried Gaudissart, interrupting him. “Nothing whatever? How about illness, grief, poverty, and the passions? But we need not discuss exceptional cases.”
“No, we will not discuss them,” said the madman.
“What, then, is the upshot of this transaction?” exclaimed Gaudissart. “To you, as a banker, I will simply state the figures.—You have a man, a man with a future, well dressed, living on his art—he wants money, he asks for it—a blank. Civilization at large will refuse to advance money to this man, who, in thought, dominates over civilization, who will some day dominate over it by his brush, his chisel, by words, or ideas, or a system. Civilization is merciless. She has no bread for the great men who provide her with luxuries; she feeds them on abuse and mockery, the gilded slut! The expression is a strong one; but I will not retract it.—Well, your misprized great man comes to us; we recognize his greatness, we bow to him respectfully, we listen to him, and he says to us:
“ ‘Gentlemen of the Insurance Company, my life is worth so much; I will pay you so much percent on my works’—Well, what do we do? At once, without grudging, we admit him to the splendid banquet of civilization as an important guest—”
“Then you must have wine,” said the madman.
“As an important guest. He signs his policy, he takes our contemptible paper rags—mere miserable rags, which, rags as they are, have more power than his genius had. For, in fact, if he wants money, everybody on seeing that sheet of paper is ready to lend to him. On the Bourse, at the bankers’, anywhere, even at the moneylenders’, he can get money—because he can offer security.—Well, sir, was not this a gulf that needed filling in the social system?
“But, sir, this is but a part of the business undertaken by the Life Insurance Company. We also insure debtors on a different scale of premiums. We offer annuities on terms graduated by age, on an infinitely more favorable calculation than has as yet been allowed in tontines based on tables of mortality now known to be inaccurate. Our Society operating on the mass, our
