In the Land of Billions An Account of a Visit to the Souterraine in 1932 By Stefan Zweig

The technologically most up-to-date, most remarkable and currently most important building in Paris is, strange as it may seem, entirely invisible from the outside. Every day, thousands, nay tens of thousands of people walk past it without a glance: they walk along the narrow Rue Montpensier or along the Rue des Petits Champs and do not notice anything other next to the old, imposing building of the Banque de France, the erstwhile Hôtel de La Vrillière, than a large empty, square, flat area, fenced in by boards, apparently just a building site awaiting workmen and their orders. In reality, the building has long been completed. Only this remarkable construction, this armoured casemate, this fortress is not raised up as elsewhere with steeply climbing walls on its ground beams but is invisibly buried six storeys deep below the ground. Beneath this innocently empty, sandy site in the middle of Paris lies pressed within steel and cement the mightiest goldmine of our modern world; down here, the famous underground vaults of the Banque de France stretch out undreamt-of and mysterious with today seventy and soon perhaps eighty billion, that is to say, with seventy or eighty thousand million francs-worth of minted or unminted gold, a physically unimaginable quantity, and in any case a hoard the like of which has been seen by neither Caesar nor Croesus, Cortés nor Napoleon, nor any of this world’s emperors and dynasties nor any mortal since the beginning of time. Here in this mysterious place is the geometrical point about which the whole of the economic universe turns in agitated circulation. Here the magical metal from which all of the world’s troubles springs sleeps its dangerously motionless and at once magnetic sleep.

I longed to see this secret and mysterious labyrinth round about the world’s gold, these cellars and chambers of the Banque de France, of which so many now speak and dream but which hardly anyone has set their eyes on. Not out of base curiosity, but rather out of the other passionate, scientific kind, for which Jean Richard Bloch has given the best description “Pour mieux comprendre mon temps”, to better understand the times whose air we breathe, to whose tremors we are connected. We all feel that atmospherically huge economic transformations and changes are in train, age-old laws are losing their meaning and the most enduring values their weight, a cosmogonical process is taking place in our economic and moral world without us being able to fully grasp its ramifications; we only sense that a transformation is taking place – most of us fearful, the smallest number

intellectually fascinated. But just as a shift in the earth’s interior only produces cracks here and there on its outer crust, this amorphous process is only manifesting in observable form, as a clear symbol, in a very few places. And only through living observation does a thought fully become an experience. The red flag on the top of the Kremlin is one of these visible symbols of our time, that fiery flame, dancing proud and challenging in the wind, a symbol of the attack on the old order. And the underground vaults of the Banque de France are another: cool steel and cement, a technically perfect defence, the most resolute stronghold, quiet, silently-armed protection; these two symbols represent the key positions of a struggle that began long ago. I am happy to have seen both of these poles. For in the space of tension between these two symbols, about their philosophical axis, our contemporary economic world oscillates.

Descent

The lift hurtles twenty-six metres, the height of a seven-storey building, vertically down into the earth. A cement shaft encloses it seamlessly and on all sides. For – and one would not suspect something so implausible without the engineer’s explanation – on this vertical journey down to the depths of the vaults we pass through the bed of a river, which, at the start of this troglodyte construction, appeared to be an obstacle. But technical expertise often succeeds in drawing its greatest support from impediments it encounters; so the galleries beneath the river were bored through and now the walled-off layer of water even provides especially secure protection against any attempt to forcibly enter the underground vaults from above – vaults which were constructed at such a depth that the residents of the buildings that still stood on the now bare piece of land had no idea that storeys deep below their own cellars these inaccessible and indestructible ones were being hollowed out. They sold tobacco and stockings in their shops, poured coffee, smoked and slept without noticing that gallery upon gallery beneath their homes, undisturbed by the slightest tremor from the digging, dark casemates of gold were burrowing silently and relentlessly away; and today the river still flows patiently between street level and this new subterranean stratum.

Finally we arrive at the bottom of the shaft, at the entrance of this artificial mine. First impression: how wonderfully quiet it is down here! Now we can hear nothing from above, not a single one of the countless and indefinable noises – the cries and shrillness, the

words and the wind, the grating, calling, honking and creaking of wheels that boil up the stone cauldron of the street into a sea-like roar: one rests, frightened at first, then happy with this shining silence. For this silence does indeed shine: in these modern-day catacombs there is perpetual daylight. Countless lamps carry even light along white cement corridors and the air tastes as pure as mountain air; with huge metal lungs electric compressors pump oxygen down here. Here one does not breathe like up above the stale leftover air dirtied by exhaust fumes, vapours and swirling dust: no, filtered and pure, still and warmed and dried by invisible heating, this artificial subterranean atmosphere is perhaps the most appetising in the whole of the metropolis with its gardens and fountains: pure ozone. Technology always equals and even surpasses the most perfect achievements of nature.

The entrance is signalled by a door, hanging broad and thick and yet feather-light on its well-oiled hinges so that a child’s finger could move it. An armoured cashier’s office door, as thick as a man, made out of a single piece of flashing steel. This was to be expected as, since the dawn of time the two metals are like brother and sister. Where there is gold, it anxiously draws its stronger brother, iron, close to it; as the more sensual, softer woman cleaves to the powerful man, so the pale, pliant metal cleaves to the hard and combative one to be protected by it. Where gold turns itself into coins and property so iron forms itself into armour and swords. Where gold sleeps, iron must keep watch, always bound one to the other, and no one knows which is dependent on the other, gold which buys iron for combat and war, or iron which snatches gold as booty and possession.

The armoured door stands threatening. As if through a hostile yoke, we step through the open door, a slight chill running down our spines: if it fell down, we would be buried alive. No earthly force could lift this hundredweight-heavy cover back up. But a few paces further and we almost smile. How mistaken we were! With this single door we thought that we had penetrated into the fortress, that we were already in the labyrinth. Not at all, we had only entered the lobby, hardly the first threshold. This armoured door was nothing but a little, flimsy garden gate, only the green, soft skin that encloses the real hard nutshell. In this anteroom employees and workmen go to and fro. Here there is still public access. We continue our descent. Dante’s Paradise and Inferno have seven circles and the Banque de France’s vaults have perhaps more still.

The armoured rotating turrets

All at once, in the electric light as bright as day, one is reminded of the Arabian Nights. The magnetic mountain of our childhood is looming there before us, bare, motionless and huge. Suddenly we cannot go any further, the way is barred. In the middle of the corridor is a steely, immobile wall that blocks the view. We look carefully for a door in it, an opening, a lock, a crack. Nothing. Sheer, blank and bare. Only a magic spell, only “open sesame” – all of the fairy tales suddenly become true – can open it, a sign from heaven must be given. And it is given. It does not come from heaven but from an invisible realm, from someone who is following and watching over our subterranean progress by magical-technological means. A sign must have been issued from a higher realm. For suddenly the immobile wall starts to move, it slides to one side, just as the genius of fantasy Edgar Allan Poe describes in his story about the Inquisition, without for one moment ceasing to be an impregnable wall. Something slides like a piece of scenery, huge invisible forces raise or lower or turn the armoured wall from within and on its sheer surface something appears – not a door, a lock or an opening, but who knows what. Only something on it has changed: one thinks one can detect a particular grain, contacts or other markings where previously it had been perfectly smooth. But the huge wall still stands steely and immobile, vertical and forbidding.

An electric engine travels – we step to one side – along tracks that we had not noticed straight at the immobile wall and is sucked towards it. And once again a sign is given – it now reverses and pulls like a cork out of a bottle a whole massive section of the wall with it, a rectangular, smooth block of steel that is taller than a man and as wide as six or seven men standing in a row – a hundredweight that a whole regiment could not move – and all this with that silent, almost mocking, ease with which technology, vain like many acrobats, likes to show that what for us is extraordinary for it is entirely natural and effortlessly easy. We walk up to the steel, to this gigantic hewn piece of fortress wall: magnificent, bare, smooth, cool, unriveted steel the colour of water, like agate to the touch only a hundred times harder. From it, we can gauge the thickness of the wall next to which the armoured plates of our Dreadnought seem like rose petals; only now do we really comprehend the might of these circular walls which scorn any attack. No bomb could do any more than tear tiny scratches in this smooth iron skin, no force could penetrate the inner sensitive substance to get close to the golden heart. Lasciate ogni speranza those that dream of entering here! At the sight of this collectively designed wall that has been tested by the

technology of both war and peace, of the gigantic muscle play of these invisibly movable towers, all thought of break-in or attack withers, for, as well as the huge mass of matter, scientific-technical secrets bar the way. Here the builder has sought help from the inventor: here science helps to defend the gold.

The security area

On we go through the rectangular tunnel of the magically cut steel wall, along the labyrinthine passages – all brightly lit, white and clean, like the corridor of a sanatorium. Where are we walking now? Perhaps under the river bed of the street, perhaps thirty metres below the cellar floor of a house, perhaps under the Place des Victoires or already under the Bibliothèque Nationale? Only the guide knows the Ariadne thread that leads through this maze.

And suddenly – a huge hall. A hall as big as a church or a theatre, the ceiling supported by hundreds of short, sturdy cement columns, a forest of stone columns reminiscent of the mosque in Cordoba or the temple in Madras carved into the rock; only, whereas those shimmer dark and mysterious, this hall is filled with light and is therefore seven times as mysterious in its perfect emptiness. Where are we? In an abandoned refectory, a deserted monastery, a modern-day catacomb twenty-six metres below ground? Who is this vast room intended for? Mass is not celebrated here, nor are plays performed nor assemblies held. No apparatus, no inscription, no sign indicates its purpose. The limestone columns stand bare in the empty, even light; only in the corner, scattered and as if forgotten, lurks a row of wooden tables and chairs. But no one sits on them – it all looks unused, and this eerily deserted hall appears pointless and useless.

In reality, this hall has a very specific purpose, a horribly precautionary purpose. It is reserved for mankind’s most dreadful hour, an apocalyptic time, for war or revolution, for a time when the city and this financial fortress are in danger. Just like a submarine which, as soon as it sees it is under attack, dives under the surface of the sea to safety, the whole of the Banque de France with its offices, its employees, its books and papers and its typewriters would, at one fell swoop, descend twenty-six metres from the zone of unrest to the security area to carry on working, undisturbed and inaccessible, untouchable; the armoured doors would close hermetically, the doors would be sealed, and no disturbance

from the events above would penetrate down to the silence; unimpeded the gigantic enterprise of the Banque de France would carry on in this peculiar refuge.

But how will people live? What will they live on, cut off as they are from the world above without water, light, heat or food? The technical guide smiles: it is all taken care of. In adjacent rooms, supplies for eighty days lie ready, there is an electric kitchen, dormitories, beds, provisions – everything a person might need has been planned for down to the smallest detail. Water comes from a separate system that cannot be cut off and the electricity is not connected to the city power supply; in one room, as silent as huge antediluvian animals stand the steel-grey machines which, as soon as they are fed with oil, immediately produce incredible power, power which allows light to shine forth in this underworld, power which sucks in and warms the air, which vaporises any moisture, that power of all powers – electricity, which the human mind has magically invested in huge flywheels and which can be unleashed by lifting a single lever.

A terrifying realisation: chillingly brilliant caution has thought of everything soberly and calculatingly here. Our whole universe may descend into chaos, revolt may sweep through the city, aeroplanes may circle around it, the drunken god of war may again rage from one end of the world to the other – but in this one small armoured fold in the Earth’s surface the microbic lives of a hundred or two hundred people will carry calmly on. They will hear nothing, will know nothing of what is happening in the outside world: even the blood of thousands of victims, when it again stains the Earth, will not drip down into this hermetically sealed steel coffin. The typewriters will clatter away, account items will be entered, cheques will be written and the gold will sleep on, undisturbed, untouched and out of reach; and when the world clock is smashed to pieces and its mechanism shatters, this one tiny wheel will keep on turning. When the whole of Europe, the whole of the world, shudders in fear and terror, in this single place there will be safety and life will go on for eighty days.

The cloister of valuables

Again corridor after corridor, then another room. Like a honeycomb in which the golden substance from countless worker bees is collected, in the wall there is safe upon safe. Not only small, rectangular armour-plated cupboards, but whole rooms, bare, white monks’ cells with a very profane purpose, equipped with table and chair. We go into an empty room

and are amazed – what steely quiet! No anchorite in his desert or cave could have known such silence, for even in the remotest wilderness there are still the cries of the birds, the roaring of the wind, the quiet rustling of the trickling sand, the chirruping of a cricket. But here there is nothing, here there is just stony silence. No sound penetrates into these hermitages where the securities sleep. Just like on the ocean floor where no wave stirs and the water is as smooth and dead as rock, the air is still here. When one breathes, one notices it straightaway so perfectly motionless is the silence, an unequalled sanatorium for overwrought nerves (and a room like this costs thirty thousand francs a year in all, actually no more than a room in a big Paris hotel). But this silence, we know, is not the reason that people rent such rooms. Behind these mute walls lie millions in the form of paper symbols: the debts of foreign States, whole railways and ocean liners and tea plantations and industrial conglomerates amassed as shares. With a smile one reflects that a whole factory with forty chimneys and a thousand machines perhaps sits here in the form of property deeds on a shelf and next to it, on another shelf, a whole Javanese or Manchurian railway with locomotives, tenders and carriages, stations, depots and administrative buildings since, thanks to the symbolic condensing power of the ownership of shares and bonds, a whole archipelago fits into a steel drawer, which a tiny key opens and closes. A small room like this can enclose all of the world’s wealth, just as the small skull of a human being can contain an incalculable number of thoughts. But fortunately these cells also have a higher, almost sacred, purpose: here – just as people can take refuge in the security area – works of art can be housed in times of danger. In a few hours, the whole of the Louvre with all of its treasures, the manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the precious ivory objects from the Musée Cluny can be hidden here should the old madness seize the world again and the great frenzy of destruction rampage through towns and fields. No more like nine- tenths of his other works would Leonardo’s remaining works fall prey to the stupid and savage fury of war; down here the Mona Lisa will smile as men once again senselessly attack one another (how often she has seen this in four hundred years!). The most sacred things that we have – the productions of art, that which is inwardly immortal – would at last be fully protected in their earthly form. And we thank technical expertise more heartily than before for creating such an armour-plated home for its more illustrious brother, creative genius, and for helping to save the eternal along with the transitory from humanity’s confusion.

The invisible gold

Once more corridor after corridor. Along the way, we look into an area separated off by railings. What is happening there? Workers are pushing wheelbarrows laden with heavy wooden boxes. It could be sugar, wool or dates in this ordinary packaging, but we know that down here only more precious fruit flourishes, the golden honey of the millions of worker bees. What is loaded and stowed here has arrived freshly by aeroplane or by boat and rail, golden freight from the other end of the globe. Gold bars and coins, pure gold that anxiously covers itself in scanty wrapping, gold that has perhaps journeyed for centuries, from Transylvania or been dug out of Scythian or Californian sand, minted as coins then melted down again into bars, gold that has journeyed or been sold or robbed from Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Byzantium, from Byzantium to Germany or Russia and from there via unfathomable routes and adventures through hundreds and thousands of hands across the ocean; now it is returning from the new world to the old, the restless gold that at last wishes to rest and sleep as it once did in the womb of the Earth. Here we are at the heart of the building. The vaults in which the gold bars lie stacked must be very close – gold, gold and more gold, seventy billion francs worth, perhaps more. A dowser’s willow would now be trembling strongly in his hand and would soon be irresistibly hitting the floor and wall; it must be very close, the immense hoard.

But no unbidden foot may enter the gold’s innermost sleeping place. Too much of this the mightiest of metals has poured in during the last momentous months. With lightning telegraphic speed human will has summoned the bars from far-off lands and across the sea and suddenly there was not room for them all. New passages are now being dug, new caverns, new catacombs, new resting places for the restless gold; perhaps new technical secrets are also being devised in order to guard it even more carefully, even more securely. In any case, I did not see a single one of those yellow streaks of lightning that make the human eye burn so curiously; and perhaps this is a good thing. For seeing bars merely packed in paper or wood would probably have been sobering; the mystique of gold in our modern age stems strangely from the fact that it remains invisible. As long as it was tangible, it was barely esteemed. Since it has fled, it is sought after. In the past, it did not occur to anyone to think about France’s gold or to talk about it and yet among this, the most industrious and thriftiest people on Earth, it passed openly and freely from hand to hand. It clinked everyday, workaday music on the tables of cafés, on the tin counters of the bars-tabac. No worker was so poor that he did not possess a small Louis; any newspaper

seller would take it without surprise. More fluid than paper money today, glittering and free, gleaming and musical, it slipped in minted form through the fingers of thousands upon thousands and acquired from this journeying through pockets and hands a natural, almost human, warmth. It is only now when gold lies silent, cold and eerily amassed in one place that it troubles the world.

And now we are standing next to its inaccessible sleeping chamber: we know that behind this cement and steel wall this already legendary treasure, France’s gold and with it a considerable part of the whole world’s gold, is resting. We are finally standing at the focal point of our economic world. From here the tremors from the markets, stock exchanges and banks radiate out in invisible waves; if one touches this cold metal wall, one is touching the axis of the contemporary world. And yet one feels no vibration, either in one’s outstretched hand or in one’s soul. If grey sand lay here, desolate, worthless conglomerate, dull stone in this elaborate concrete casing, the silence would be no different in the oscillating light. Only one knows that here lies the Earth’s gold – only this and this alone makes this cold, bare wall mysterious. And what matters is not that the gold is there but that we believe that it is. For it is only insofar as we invest this yellow, sleepy metal with value above all others that it has value. It is not the bare substance but rather the belief that it is imbued with that gives its real creative power.

Ascent

Back we go, once more past the shiny steel, tireless machines which with their own, constant momentum fill this underworld with light and warmth. Once more through the magic armoured walls which, once they have granted us passage, noiselessly and seamlessly close behind us. Once more into the lift up to the world above; a bank lobby first of all like any other bank lobby, with clattering typewriters, counters and foreign currency desks, then out into the everyday day. Only now the real world seems irregular, more chaotic and scientifically uncontrolled than in that sensible underground construction, the air in the street stickier and more discoloured than the artificial air in that abyss. The houses suddenly appear mediocre and small, the lights pale and the human hustle and bustle futile next to this purposeful feat of French state-of-the-art engineering in which every difficulty has been overcome, every eventuality planned for and every danger countered in advance. And one is filled with great horror at the creative power of our

modern technical expertise, which subjugates all the elements, which beneath the ground, cellars and rivers constructed this city of steel full of warmth, provisions and light, and for which the difficulties of matter only serve to fire its inventive power all the more.

And yet, seen from another star, from Sirius, Mars or Aldebaran, would their inhabitants not smile at this strange two-legged race on Earth which, in spite of the supreme power of the intellect in one place on Earth, constructs elaborate mines in Cape Town and there digs one of the countless metals – and the most inert of all of them – laboriously out of the Earth only to then bury the same useless metal once again in the Earth in an even more elaborate mine thousands of miles away and to gird it with armoured walls of steel? Even the cleverest among us probably does not really understand the reason for expending all of this energy. But this is perhaps part of the mysteriously inexplicable nature of the earthly mind that it must always create a delusion in the name of which it produces something real, that time and again it fabricates artificial measures in order to prove its immensity with reference to them: this one – gold – its millennia-old, most ancient delusion, has almost become a religion. But the gods evolve and change with the generations. And a future race will perhaps walk carelessly past this building with all its technical wonders and achievements and its mine of gold, but still marvel in awe at the true and immortal treasure chambers of our world: the Bibliothèque Nationale with its millions of books and the Louvre with its sacred paintings by Rembrandt and Leonardo.