Chapter 15
Who Wants to be a Billionaire
If young Russians dreamt of becoming oligarchs, their American counterparts set their sights on becoming billionaires.
According to Forbes there were more then two thousand two hundred billionaires in seventy two countries with the US leading the way followed by China. Their total worth exceeded nine trillion dollars with Jeff Bezos at the head of the list with a fortune estimated in twelve figures making him the planet’s first dollar trillionaire.
Many of the ambitious young men and women who are now entering the business world, armed with their recently acquired MBAs and IT diplomas, had set their sights on becoming billionaires.
They were constantly urged on by slogans like, ‘If you aren’t a billionaire yet, you haven’t tried hard enough.’
Objectively analysing an individual’s chances of becoming a billionaire did not offer those would-bes much hope.
Stories like Justin Rosenstein’s, a Silicon Valley techie, who pocketed three quarters of a billion dollars after an eighteen month stint at Facebook in its early days, are not likely to be very often repeated. In fact the odds of this happening are one in ten or twenty million, and only for those have a top IT degree.
The chances of becoming rich like Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma are weighed against hopeful punters by some astronomically negative probabilities.
Still, starting in Silicon Valley certainly offers a better chance of becoming rich than in Bombay. The competition came from two million others employed in the Greater Silicon Valley Area, the world’s most intensive techie hot house, which made the chance of becoming a billionaire in that over hyped Eldorado very remote, though certainly better than most other high tech centres.
It was not hard work that made Rosenstein rich, which doesn’t mean to say I’m disputing the fact he worked hard, everybody works, some hard, some for almost nothing, and many for both.
Silicon Valley reminded me Hollywood in the days when aspiring actors and actresses headed for Tinsel Town in the hope of finding fame and fortune. How many made it, how many fell on the way?
Hot houses for would-be billionaires were springing up all over Silicon Valley, they had become a growth business promising hopefuls a path to fame and fortune. It recalled a picture I had seen of a hall full of young men sitting a desks, assiduously learning Morse code, sometime at the end of the nineteenth century, or nearer to us the rush to learn Basic in the eighties, which certain academies claimed would assure their students of a place in the sun.
According to Liam Clancy, such places were like the Klondike, filled with rootless high-tech gold diggers and fortune seekers, hoping to strike it rich, exploited by greedy landlords selling bed space at exorbitant prices.
It was normal, during a gold rush smart operators sold shovels, there was no point in digging for gold when you had more chance of getting rich by selling shovels.
Most hopefuls were techies who commuted from their exorbitantly priced shared digs to jobs in start-ups, where they worked long hours, and if they were the luck got free pizzas delivered to their desks and other perks to increase their productivity.
Liam was on the way to becoming a billionaire, in fact he was already a multimillionaire. His route had been different, the result of chance, being in the right place at the right time, making the right friends, having a pleasant personality, being able to charm others and being reasonably intelligent with a language or two to boot, not forgetting some initial experience, including a couple of hard knocks...like finding him terminated at half an hour’s notice during the banking crisis.
But code writing techies were rarely transformed into billionaires, it was better to be a founder, though the competition was fierce for start-up cash, at least enough to get to the point of attracting a major investment. The trouble lay in an over supply of software engineers around the world, especially in places like India, which lowered the market value of their skills, that with the risk artificial intelligence would take over the run of the mill work of producing software made the future less promising for the hopefuls.
Becoming a skilled software engineer was already a costly investment, in time and in dollars, a poor investment, especially if it went the way of Morse code operators.
As the third decade of the third millennium approached it was better be a founder or an executive than an engineer, they were the ones favoured once a start-up began to look promising. With the internet, countless individuals took the plunge and one man bands flourished, as the gig economy forced no longer needed salaried workers onto the market, where survival became a constant battle with meagre rewards, as more and more white collar workers were forced into becoming freelancers or contract workers in the part time economy.
Get rich, or die trying, was the name of the game.
Chapter 16
Another Country
In 1895, Edmond de a Salle left his student lodgings and took the train to Paris where he planned to study languages and history.
He had spent the last two years at the University of Perpignan where he had been impregnated with Catalan nationalism. Edmond naturally spoke French, but growing up he had spoken different regional patois, including Occitane, which some called Langue d’Oc, spoken by many of the lads in Sommières, and the nearby villages, from where his father, the Comte de Sommières, drew the labour needed on his land surrounding the château especially during harvest times.
Edmond like many sons of landed noble families had been taught by private tutors, studying Latin and Ancient Greek, as was the custom in those times, and as a consequence had developed a keen interest in history.
In Paris, and at the Sorbonne, he entered a new world and made many new friends. He discovered Orientalism and art. He visited museums and salons, especially the Louvre where he was dazzled by the treasures of ancient Middle Eastern civilizations. Given the family interests in Indo-China, he was equally drawn to the Musée Guimet, recently established in its magnificent new home on place d’Iéna, there he discovered the history and exoticism of France’s most recent colonies.
The family home in Sommières had been filled with the souvenirs and trophies, brought home by his father and grandfather from their travels to the Far East. His grandfather had sailed under Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, who captured Saigon in 1858, which under the orders of Napoleon III, became Cochinchina and was declared a French territory.
Meanwhile, in China, the French Concession in Shanghai, granted in 1848, was extended and slowly spread beyond the treaty boundaries, which along with the British Concession, established since the Treaty of Nanking at the end of the First Opium War in 1842, where intrepid foreign traders set up their comptoirs, became a magnet for adventurers of all kinds.
At the time the French Empire was vast, eleven million square kilometres with a population of one hundred million stretching from Africa to Indo-China and the Pacific.
With the family interests in Indo-China, rubber, wood and coffee, Edmond sailed from Marseille in 1899, on a fast steamer for Saigon, where he was to learn the ropes of the business.
However, he interrupted his journey in Suez, from where he went to Cairo, then the Holy Land, which at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire, to see the wonders of the Ancient World.
His arrival in Saigon was one of equal amazement and wonder. He discovered another civilisation, now ruled by France. He visited Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Laos and Cambodia, where his family owned plantations and whose agents bought commodities from other planters and shipped them to France.
Life in Indo-China was extraordinarily fascinating for a young man. Starting in 1858, France had progressively colonised most the region, exploiting its riches, transforming their capital, Saigon, into a rich and elegant city, little wonder they called it the Pearl of the Orient.
He travelled travelled up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, then along Lake Ton-le Sap to visit the wonders of Angkor Wat.
Then in 1902, Edmond started his journey home, via Shanghai, where he visited the family’s comptoir, then Peking, during the last days of Imperial China, when the Empress Dowager, Cixi, ruled behind her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, the last of the Qing dynasty.
At that time, China was still China, barely changed for generations, if not centuries, where men wore a queue, where women’s feet were bound, where scholars and men of standing wore the changshan.
From Tianjin he sailed to Vladivostok, and there he took the newly opened Trans-Siberian to St Petersburg in 1903.
During his four years of travel in Asia, he started to collect souvenirs, antiquities and works of art, which he shipped to Paris, to furnish his future apartment and home to Sommières.
Back in Paris in the autumn of 1903, he was now a man of the world, the son of a noble family, planters in the colonies, experienced in business, proud to show his collection of exotic objets d’arts to his old and new friends, businessmen, linguists, archaeologists and artists.
One of them was Cecile d’Albaret, a friend from his Sorbonne days, who in the meantime had become a writer and painter, one of the first to enter the École des beaux-arts, which had not opened its doors to women until 1897. Cecile introduced him to an American friend she had met in Florence, Leo Stein, a young artist, who had recently moved to Paris and now lived near the Jardins de Luxembourg, on rue Fleurus, with his sister Gertrude, a budding writer.
Together, Edmond and Cecile, went to the salon at the Steins, on Saturday evenings, where they met artists, intellectuals and foreign visitors, congregated to talk about art and literature. The Steins were curiosities, American Jews, whose family were in business in San Francisco, which gave the siblings the means to live a comfortable, carefree, bohemian life in Paris, where they revelled in the company of young artists, poets and writers.
Cecile introduced him to her artist friends and he responded by buying their paintings to decorate the large apartment he now owned near the Opera.
The Entente Cordiale was a propitious period and the family business prospered with Edmond and his father moving office, to a larger new establishment, nearby the Palais Brongniart, a short walk from rue Laffitte.
Paris had been the Western world’s cultural capital for much of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, giving birth to an extraordinary diversity of artistic expression. From the 1860s, as it was transformed into the City of Light under the impetus of Napoleon III, with Baron Haussmann rebuilding it with wide gas light boulevards radiating our from its centre towards Montmartre and its cabarets, windmills and vineyards.
Following the Franco-Prussian War, the city was reborn, prosperity returned bringing a cultural explosion with new ideas, as café life prospered, glass roofed arcades offered Parisians a new way to shop, cabarets flourished and art experimented with new and radical images and forms, transforming music, literature, theatre, dance, architecture and debate, all of which contributed to the birth of Modernism.
Paris became, throughout most of the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, with its beauty, its sense of romance, its cultural history, its liberal politics, its affordability, a pole of attraction for artists, a watershed between the past and the modern with the first steps toward Impressionism. Then, over the following decades, came the Post Impressionist movement with a torrent of revolutionary creativity, as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Mogdigliani and Henri Rousseau appeared on the exuberant scene.
Today it is difficult to imagine why those luminous landscapes, brightly coloured still lifes and the languid scenes from the South Seas, now the icons of Western art, caused such a scandal. In those days when public decency was easily outraged bohemian Fauvists provoked the establishment and its conventions with their vision and by the profligacy they were seen to encourage.
The legacy of the Renaissance, the Sun King Louis XIV, the Revolution, Napoleon, the Third Republic, played the central role in Continental Europe’s destiny, culminating in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, which gave birth to the Third Republic, which coincided with the Great Depression of 1873-1890.
In spite of the depression, the Third Republic was characterised by the Belle Époque, with its optimism, peace and prosperity, the summit of France’s vast colonial empire as well as its technological and scientific advance and cultural innovation.
The French Republic, Europe’s unique republic, was surrounded by autocratic monarchies, and Paris flourished as the cultural capital of the world, where art, literature, music, theatre, blossomed as it underwent an extraordinary transformation as creative talent from all over the world flocked to the City of Light. Its Expositions, monuments such as the Palais Garnier, the Eiffel Tower and the Haussmannian transformation made it an irresistible attraction, a hub linked by railway networks to the rest of Europe, creating a Golden Age that announced the Entente Cordiale, tragically ending with the Great War.
Beyond the parks, the grand tree lined avenues with their large luxury hotels, fine restaurants and department stores, were the Bohemian quarters, Montmartre, Montparnasse, the Latin Quarter, which offered everything the pleasure seeking bourgeois could desire, provided by cabarets, bistros and music halls.
The poor and the wretched, as in other great capitals, lived in decrepit, overcrowded housing without basic sanitation, or on the streets, huddled in doorways and under bridges. Beyond the brilliantly light centre were the bidonvilles, made of old planks and tarpaulins, where the poor lived from hand to mouth as chiffonniers, living off the garbage produced by the rich and better off.
The workers were employed in factories owned by rich industrialists, often under harsh conditions and for low wages, though more than eighty percent of France’s populations still lived off the rich agricultural land surrounding the country’s towns and villages, as they had for centuries.
Edmond, in the company of Cecile, became a frequent visitor to the different art galleries on rue Laffitte and befriended not only the dealers but also many of the artists.
The couple liked the free and easy bohemian lives of their friends, visiting their studios, on buying works off the easel whenever they took their fancy. Edmond’s apartment became the meeting place of Picasso, Mogdigliani and others from the Montparnasse set. At their evenings they were offered drawings as gifts, and in return, to help his friends, Edmond commissioned portraits and other paintings, without passing by the intermediary of the dealers.
When war broke out Edmond volunteered, he died at Verdun in 1916, his son Guy was born six months later in 1917, the Cecile died soon after, victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic. Guy’s father, Louis, broken hearted, emptied their apartment and moved their collection of paintings and oriental objets d’art to Sommières. The paintings, which for the most part seemed like nonsense to him, were consigned to a store room in the basement of the château, which was later sealed off during rebuilding work and forgotten.
Guy then grew up with his grandparents in Sommières.
Chapter 17
Art, images and communication
In preliterate society, before the 18th century, visual images were used to provide information relating religion, history, kings, queens and lords. The ruling order knew this, the nobility and the church used symbolism through art and artists to manipulate and mould the human mind, so as to better rule and dominate the common people. They like the Medicis used artists to create symbols of their power and wealth, and objects that would make their own lives comfortable and agreeable.
In 19th century France, in the wake of the revolution the new bourgeois could patronise the arts and hold exhibitions and salons where a growing middle class public could discover and follow the latest trends.
During the 17th century, the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris had began to hold its exhibition of the paintings and sculptures in the Salon Carré of the Louvre. By 1748, the Salon, as it was soon called, was held every year and works were judged by the academicians and prizes awarded.
The Salon reached the summit of its influence between 1784 and 1890, when it was the most important international event in the world of art. Throughout the 19th century, French society was centred around the Salon, which was the undisputed arbiter of taste and style and a must for the presentation of the works of any ambitious artist.
Major 19th century art movements, like Romanticism or Neoclassicism, were launched at the Salon, where all Parisian society gathered to view the presentation of these new creations.
During this period of scintillating creativity, the Salon overflowed with paintings and sculptures literally filling the exhibition halls from ceiling to floor, as the event became the most important in the artistic calendar.
Of course art had always been the pursuit of beauty and artistic skills, but what purpose did art in the form of images serve?
With the invention of photography in 1826, art began to embrace aesthetic values as photographic realism and the development and reproduction of images slowly transformed and spread visual information and knowledge, with for example photographic images of the Crimean War in the 1850s, and then the American Civil War, which revolutionised news and brought distant reality to everyman.
The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch
It was exemplified by David Wilkie’s The Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch, painted in 1806, portraying a group of men and women seated in the garden of English inn, surrounded by a crowd excitedly discussing the Waterloo Despatch in a newspaper, ears alert, necks straining and eyes wide as the news of Wellington’s victory was read out to the crowd. Wilkie’s painting was so popular it required a cordon to protect it from the enthusiastic crowd of viewers at an exhibition in 1822, soon after the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1874, Elizabeth Butler’s Roll Call needed a policeman in the academy to hold back the crowds. A sombre image depicting a roll call of soldiers from the Grenadier Guards during the Crimean War, illustrating the fatigue, trauma and desolation of war. It was brought to the palace for Queen Victoria see, to bedridden Florence Nightingale, and a quarter of a million photographic reproductions of the painting were sold.
These first images were reproduced in the press, first with engravings, then real photographs that started to appear in the press in 1886. In 1900, the first motion pictures and cinemas arrived. It was the end of painting as a means of illustrating and recording real events and paintings became art for art’s sake when Picasso and created new imaginary forms.
In 1913, the Paul Cézanne’s painting View of the Domaine Saint Joseph was bought by the Metropolitan Museum for six thousand seven hundred dollars and became the most expensive painting ever bought to that date.
One hundred years later, that sum is the equivalent to about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which puts the inflation of art values into perspective when compared to the price paid by the Qatar Modern Art Museum in 2012, for one of Cézanne paintings in The Card Players series, for a quarter of a million dollars, one thousand five hundred times more in constant dollars.
It is a reflection of the huge divide between the rich and the poor, which is nothing new when considering the rich and ruling classes had throughout history used their wealth to create and accumulate works of art, such as the Medici family in Renaissance Florence,
Shchukin used his wealth to support a specific group of artists, changing the aesthetic criteria of his times and for future generations, today crowds of Museum visitors are conditioned by his tastes, which passed over so many other artists of his epoch.
Chapter 18
The Village
With Easter, the tourist season commenced in Provence and the appearance of new faces in the village of Aujargues, three kilometres to the east of Sommières, was nothing unusual as far as the neighbours were concerned.
It was the time of year when the intellectual, middle-class, British tourist could be found lurking around places of interest, clutching a thick guide book, in search of authenticity in the form of history, culture, handicrafts and gastronomic experiences. Perhaps they were the kind who had enjoyed Lawrence Durrell’s works, or more recently ‘A Year in Provence’ – Peter Mayle’s idyllic story, seen through rose coloured glasses, which had been a huge success, followed by an equally successful television series. Mayle recounted his own story, that of a middle aged couple and their two dogs, moving to a picture postcard village and their trite run-ins with unbelievably laid back local workers and other colourful characters, as they they rebuilt the ruined farmhouse they had bought.
The château told another story.
It lay on higher ground, a little over a kilometre to the south of the village, in the direction of Junas. Originally built in the 12th century as a fortified castle, it had been transformed again and again, during the Religious Wars and the consolidation of France under Louis IV. The detailed history of de la Salle’s family had been relatively obscure until the 19th century when they found new prosperity as France extended its colonisation of Indo-China under Napoleon III.
After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Edmond de la Salle’s great grandfather, Emile, became engaged in the introduction of coffee and later rubber plantations in what was called Cochinchina, that is the region of the Mekong Delta.
This continued during and immediately after World War I, until the Great Depression, when in 1929-1932, the production of rubber slumped thirty percent and commodity prices in Singapore falling by eighty percent.
The start of the war in 1939, was disaster for the family, and the Japanese invasion of Indo-China, in 1942, was the coup de grace. For the ‘planters’, as the colonists were known, it was the death knell, the prelude to France’s retreat from Indo-China, and the start of the Vietnamese War.
The old Comte, Louis de la Salle, had passed away in 1944, and Edmond turned his attention to what he knew best, commodity trading at the Bourse de Commerce, or the Palais Brongniart, in the centre of Paris, where as a broker he bought and sold shares, or traded coffee, rubber and tropical hardwoods. When he died in 1944, his son Guy took over the business until his sudden death in 1982. Until that point the family had never known financial straits, but when Olivier succeeded his father, its fortunes took a turn for the worst and entered a long period of slow decline.
The Comte and Comtesse de la Salle had a daughter and granddaughter who lived in Paris, in the family apartment in the exclusive district of Neuilly, a couple of Metro stops from the Champs Elysée. Catherine de la Salle was an architect and worked at the Monuments historiques, a French government heritage organisation, where she coordinated restoration work mostly on government owned properties. She was divorced and her, daughter, Camille was studying Chinese at the school of oriental languages, Inalco, in Paris after completing a masters in business studies at HEC near Versailles.
I asked de la Salle why he hadn’t asked his daughter Catherine for assistance with the paintings. His reply was quick, the last thing he needed was the Monuments historiques, that is the Ministry of Culture involved. The Monuments historiques had existed for more than a one hundred and fifty years and protected over forty thousand buildings, and many other things of historical and cultural interest, a valuable organisation, but by its vast structure and state involvement was cumbersome and seen by some as interfering, including the Comte who complained they had never been helpful when he had tried to involve them with the restoration project he had long cherished for the family château.
He had a visceral hatred for red tape and the authorities, a family trait, which went back to the war and well before. His daughter Catherine was deeply passionate about her profession as an architect for the Monuments historiques, but detested their slowness and their political attachments with the constant interference the organisation was subjected to as a state owned body.
It was for this reason Catherine had encouraged her daughter to seek an alternative route for her career.
Beyond that de la Salle had no family to speak of, his father had been an only son and his own brother had died some years earlier without any descendants.
Olivier de la Salle doted on his granddaughter, Camille, who came down to visit her grandparents whenever possible. Together they shared a passion for Chinese porcelain, a long-time family tradition who owned large collection, some of which dated back to the time of Louis IV.
Following the debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when the French Far East Expeditionary Corps was defeated by Ho Chi Min’s Viet Minh Communist revolutionaries, the family’s interests in Indochina declined and were finally abandoned when the war became an American affair.
Half a century passed before Camille came onto the scene and developed an interest in the family’s history in French Indochina, its comptoirs in China, and started to study Chinese.
To complete the picture I carried out some discreet research on the family’s financial situation, but uncovered little beyond some rents and their vineyards, which given the region, was not especially famous for its wines, and not very productive in terms of income. A few additional enquiries showed the Comte had some financial investments, though not the kind that would allow him to live in the style of a Comte or maintain his château, which was the case.