d M. de Tregars to Maxence,
"is to ascertain how far the Mutual Credit crisis has progressed;
and M. Latterman of the Rue Joquelet is the man in all Paris who
can best inform us."

Whoever has made or lost five hundred francs at the bourse knows M.
Latterman, who, since the war, calls himself an Alsatian and curses
with a fearful accent those "parparous Broossians." This worthy
speculator modestly calls himself a money-changer; but he would
be a simpleton who should ask him for change: and it is certainly
not that sort of business which gives him the three hundred thousand
francs' profits which he pockets every year.

When a company has failed, when it has been wound up, and the
defrauded stockholders have received two or three per cent in all
on their original investment, there is a prevailing idea that the
certificates of its stocks are no longer good for any thing, except
to light the fire. That's a mistake. Long after the company has
foundered, its shares float, like the shattered debris which the
sea casts upon the beach months after the ship has been wrecked.
These shares M. Latterman collects, and carefully stores away; and
upon the shelves of his office you may see numberless shares and
bonds of those numerous companies which have absorbed, in the past
twenty years, according to some statistics, twelve hundred millions,
and, according to others, two thousand millions, of the public
fortune.

Say but a word, and his clerks will offer you some "Franco-American
Company," some "Steam Navigation Company of Marseilles," some "Coal
and Metal Company of the Asturias," some "Transcontinental
Memphis and El Paso" (of the United States), some "Caumart Slate
Works," and hundreds of others, which, for the general public, have
no value, save that of old paper, that is from three to five cents
a pound. And yet speculators are found who buy and sell these
rags.

In an obscure corner of the bourse may be seen a miscellaneous
population of old men with pointed beards, and overdressed young
men, who deal in every thing salable, and other things besides.
There are found foreign merchants, who will offer you stocks of
merchandise, goods from auction, good claims to recover, and who
at last will take out of their pockets an opera-glass, a Geneva
watch (smuggled in), a revolver, or a bottle of patent hair-restorer.

Such is the market to which drift those shares which were once
issued to represent millions, and which now r