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With this and his salary, the President's income amounted to about twenty thousand francs; but though to all appearance a wealthy man, especially as one-half of his father's property would one day revert to him as the only child of the first marriage, he was obliged to live in Paris as befitted his official position, and M. and Mme. de Marville spent almost the whole of their incomes.
Could there be that much money in the whole concern? I looked about me at the sumptuous furniture of Schafer's Hotel. No doubt there were many such incomes. My head was spinning with unwonted Benedictine and Burgundy. "Let me go back and look at the game again," I said. "Let me see upstairs and round about." I did. "What do you think of it all?" my uncle asked at last.
She knew vaguely that many girls these days were given special training of some sort even where their parents were well off; but more particularly where the father was what is known as a high-salaried man; or even a moderately successful professional or business man all of whose expenses arid incomes balanced too nicely for investments. Not in her set!
Suffice it to say that the ship was worth nearly five million dollars of actual cash, and ten, twenty, thirty, or many more millions if present sums of money are to be considered relatively to the national incomes of those poorer days. But better than spices, jewels, and gold were the secret documents which revealed the dazzling profits of the new East-India trade by sea.
One wonders how many hundreds of respectable families were thus bled of their small incomes by the vile informers who were being rewarded by Government for their extortion. Imagine the terror that respectable Chinese women suffered, knowing that any man might denounce them, out of malice, and thereby reduce them to the very worst conceivable form of slavery!
Others, again, had heard something of how this husband and wife lived, one in each wing of the house, with different staffs of servants, and with separate incomes; that she had furnished her side in her own way, at her own expense, and had apparently conceived the idea of a new kind of married life.
In the business world we see it all around us; among those who "work for a living," among clerks and employees and among the so-called laboring classes it appears to be the normal attitude. People who work for salaries or wages seem characteristically to use up all their earnings in their current expenditure, to live up to their incomes without any serious attempt to save.
It was calculated that these would bring into the treasury a thousand millions of francs. But a difficulty was found. So many of the rich had lied or had concealed their wealth that only a fifth of the sum required could be raised, and therefore a law was soon passed which levied forced loans upon incomes as low as one thousand, francs, or, say, two hundred dollars of American money.
"Well, it struck me that she was getting moped, and beginning to settle down, which wouldn't suit her a bit. The first symptom that I noticed was when she began to complain that we were living beyond our income. All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples. A few gifted individuals manage to do both."
In a day when many of their people had not yet learned to get beyond showiness in dress, they were temperate and self-restrained, they lived within their incomes, and they retired at a seasonable hour. In spite moreover of all the laws and disadvantages that they had to meet the Negroes also made general advance in education.
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