He went to Paris, and there, in a wretched little room on the Rue Montmartre, in three years, he made his second capital.  He then managed it so well that in 1870, at the time of the war, he had made good his losses.  The armistice found him in England, where he had married the daughter of a Viennese agent, in London, for the purpose of starting a vast enterprise of revictualing the belligerent armies.  The enormous profits made by the father-in-law and the son-in-law during that year determined them to found a banking-house which should have its principal seat in Vienna and a branch in Berlin.  Justus Hafner, a passionate admirer of Herr von Bismarck, controlled, besides, a newspaper.  He tried to gain the favor of the great statesman, who refused to aid the former diamond merchant in gratifying political ambitions cherished from an early age.

It was a bitter disappointment to the persevering man, who, having tried his luck in Prussia, emigrated definitively to Vienna.  The establishment of the ‘Credit Austro-Dalmate,’ launched with extraordinary claims, permitted him at length to realize at least one of his chimeras.  His wealth, while not equaling that of the mighty financiers of the epoch, increased with a rapidity almost magical to a cipher high enough to permit him, from 1879, to indulge in the luxurious life which can not be led by any one with an income short of five hundred thousand francs.  Contrary to the custom of speculators of his genus, Hafner in time invested his earnings safely.  He provided against the coming demolition of the structure so laboriously built up.  The ‘Credit Austro-Dalmate’ had suffered in great measure owing to innumerable public and private disasters and scandals, such as the suicide and murder in the Schroeder family.

Suits were begun against a number of the founders, among them Justus Hafner.  He was acquitted, but with such damage to his financial integrity and in the face of such public indignation that he abandoned Austria for Italy and Vienna for Rome.  There, heedless of first rebuffs, he undertook to realize the third great object of his life, the gaining of social position.  To the period of avidity had succeeded, as it frequently does with those formidable handlers of money, the period of vanity.  Being now a widower, he aimed at his daughter’s marriage with a strength of will and a complication of combinations equal to his former efforts, and that struggle for connection with high life was disguised beneath the cloak of the most systematically adopted politeness of deportment.  How had he found the means, in the midst of struggles and hardships, to refine himself so that the primitive broker and speculator were almost unrecognizable in the baron of fifty-four, decorated with several orders, installed in a magnificent palace, the father of a charming daughter, and himself an agreeable conversationalist, a courteous gentleman, an ardent sportsman?  It is the secret of those natures created for social conquest, like a Napoleon for war and a Talleyrand for diplomacy.  Dorsenne asked himself the question frequently, and he could not solve it.  Although he boasted of watching the Baron with an intellectual curiosity, he could not restrain a shudder of antipathy each time he met the eyes of the man.