“‘If you had lived as long as I have, you would know that there is but one concrete reality invariable enough to be worth caring about and that is—GOLD. . . . When all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us. Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods. Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized. Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.’”

—Honor’ de Balzac (1799–1850), spoken by Gobseck in Gobseck, 1830.