CP 03190/en

Lionel Hauser to Marcel Proust 1 September 1916

(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)

Paris, 1 September 1916

My dear Marcel,

I received your letter Tuesday evening and its contents interested me very much.

I am hurrying to write back in order to clear up the misunderstanding that your reading of my last letter might have given you.

I have no aspirations at all for your friends to place their money and even less their securities with me. As you can see that simplifies the matter greatly. The only thing to which I aspire is to have as clients those people who possess a large fortune and do not regard themselves as the issue from Jupiter’s thigh.

As you are not unaware, when a City or a State takes out a bond, the institution that has issued it allocates a commission to the banker who procures a subscription to it, which is why the more clients one has who are subscribers to the said bond the more the commission that one receives from it provides interest.

I do not believe therefore that the difficulty you point out is unsurmountable, because even when the fortune comes from the wife and is governed by the rules of the dowry, any interests arising from that capital are at the disposal of the husband. So as I do not believe that the friends you mention are expending the totality of their revenues they must be in a position to invest anew the sum of their savings

So first of all it would be a case of getting acquainted with the persons in question and then to have the certainty that when they receive a circular or a letter from our firm they don’t throw it in the wastepaper basket but follow up on my proposal to the extent that is available to them, provided of course that my proposal is agreeable to them. But if your friends are such elegant gentlemen that they think they are doing me a service by giving me an audience, and if they feel the need to consider me as a person of inferior quality because I don’t have a "de" in my name, I assure you that it would please me just as much not to make any effort to acquire their clientele.

Now that you know my considered opinion and that of your friends, I leave you free to act as you think fit.

You will have seen from our letter of yesterday that we have encashed a dividend of 5.80 francs per unit on your Banco del Rio de la Plata shares. So we have done the right thing not to sell them at 320 because after the ex-dividend they are valued at 321 which makes a total of 326.80 with the dividend.

Si, comme je l'espère, elles atteignent bientôt 323 il est possible que je me décide à les vendre puisque cela représente 330, en tenant compte du coupon.

Crois-moi mon cher Marcel,

Ton bien sincèrement dévoué.