Five Hundred Million Dollars

This story, which ends in New York, begins in the Department of the Gironde at the town of Monsegur, seventy-five kilometers from Bordeaux, in the little vineyard of Monsieur Emile Lapierre—­“landowner.”  In 1901 Lapierre was a happy and contented man, making a good living out of his modest farm.  To-day he is—­well, if you understand the language of the Gironde, he will tell you with a shrug of his broad shoulders that he might have been a Monte Cristo had not le bon Dieu willed it otherwise.  For did he not almost have five hundred million dollars—­two and a half milliards of francs—­in his very hands? Hein?  But he did!  Does M’sieu’ have doubts?  Nevertheless it is all true. C’est trop vrai!  Is M’sieu’ tired?  And would he care to hear the story?  There is a comfortable chair sous le grand arbre in front of the veranda, and Madame will give M’sieu’ a glass of wine from the presses, across the road.  Yes, it is good wine, but there is little profit in it, when one thinks in milliards.

The landowner lights his pipe and seats himself cross-legged against the trunk of the big chestnut.  Back of the house the vineyard slopes away toward the distant woods in straight, green, trellised alleys.  A dim haze hangs over the landscape sleeping so quietly in the midsummer afternoon.  Down the road comes heavily, creaking and swaying, a wain loaded with a huge tower of empty casks and drawn by two oxen, their heads swinging to the dust.  Yes, it is hard to comprendre twenty-five hundred million francs.

It was this way.  Madame Lapierre was a Tessier of Bordeaux—­an ancient bourgeois family, and very proud indeed of being bourgeois.  You can see her passing and repassing the window if you watch carefully the kitchen, where she is superintending dinner.  The Tessiers have always lived in Bordeaux and they are connected by marriage with everybody—­from the blacksmith up to the Mayor’s notary.  Once a Tessier was Mayor himself.  Years and years ago Madame’s great-uncle Jean had emigrated to America, and from time to time vague rumors of the wealth he had achieved in the new country reached the ears of his relatives—­but no direct word ever came.

Then one hot day—­like this—­appeared M. le General.  He came walking down the road in the dust from the gare, in his tall silk hat and frock coat and gold-headed cane, and stopped before the house to ask if one of the descendants of a certain Jean Tessier did not live hereabouts.  He was fat and red-faced, and he perspired, but—­Dieu!—­he was distingue, and he had an order in his buttonhole.  Madame Lapierre, who came out to answer his question, knew at once that he was an aristocrat.