March 2025 Money Chapters 7-9

Thoughts/discussions

In Chapter 8 (or 9) Caroline and Hamelin sell their shares of stock. Saccard seems genuinely upset. He intimates that they are amongst his closes friends and he only wanted the best for them. Not sure if he's upset they have abandoned ship for their sake or his.

Have to check with 19thC Vizetelly translation available on Project Gutenberg to see how he handled scene where another lover surprises the naked Baroness de Sandorff on her knees in front of the pantless Saccard. Nothing like that in George Eliot, I’m afraid.
PS Just checked. Whole episode excised in Vizetelly’s translation.

>3 booksaplenty1949: THE George Eliot?

>4 Tess_W: Yes. Am I wrong?

>5 booksaplenty1949: No idea! We may be talking apples & oranges! THE George Eliot translated Zola, or Eliot just wouldn't have any such scene in her translation?

>6 Tess_W: No, George Eliot didn’t translate Zola. I meant that Eliot, or any other Victorian novelist, wouldn’t/couldn’t have such a scene in one of his/her own novels. Sex is strictly off-camera in novels by Zola’s English contemporaries because of censorship, which of course also applied to translations.

>7 booksaplenty1949: That's what I thought........my brain is a bit addled....getting ready to go to the Caribbean......

Karl Marx showed up rather unexpectedly in Ch 9, as the dying Sigismond is reading Das Kapital and explains to Saccard that money will have no future in the collectivist state. “Destroy money, but money is life itself! Then there would be nothing more, nothing more,” Saccard objects. All that is solid melts into air. A great chapter.

>2 Tess_W: I think it’s clear that he is offended by what he perceives (accurately) as a lack of commitment to the project.