In the early days of December, amidst the extraordinary fever to which the Bourse was still a prey, Universals had reached the price of two thousand seven hundred francs. Unfortunately, the alarming reports went on growing and spreading, and though the rise continued there was an intolerable feeling of uneasiness. The inevitable catastrophe was indeed openly predicted, and if the shares still went up--went up incessantly--it was by the force of one of those prodigious, obstinate infatuations which refuse to surrender to evidence. And Saccard now lived amid the glamour of his spurious triumph, with a halo around him as it were--a halo emanating from that shower of gold which he caused to rain upon Paris. Still, he was shrewd enough to feel that the soil beneath him was undermined, cracking, threatening to sink under his feet and swallow him up. And so, although he remained victorious after each settlement, he felt perfectly enraged with the 'bears,' whose losses must already be very heavy. What possessed those dirty Jews that they should fight on so tenaciously? Would he not soon annihilate them? And he was especially exasperated by the fact that, apart from Gundermann, who was playing his usual game, he could scent other sellers--soldiers of the Universal perhaps, traitors who, losing confidence, were going over to the enemy, all eagerness to realise their gains. One day when Saccard was thus venting his displeasure in presence of Madame Caroline, she thought it her duty to tell him everything. 'You know, my friend,' said she, 'that I also have sold. Yes, I have just parted with our last thousand shares at the rate of two thousand seven hundred francs.' He was overcome, as though confronted by the blackest of treasons. 'You have sold, you! you, my God!' he gasped. She had taken hold of his hands and was pressing them, really grieved for him, but reminding him that she and her brother had long since warned him of their intention. Moreover, Hamelin, who was still at Rome, kept on writing to her in the most anxious strain about this exaggerated rise, which he could not understand, and which must be stopped, said he, even under penalty of tumbling into an abyss. Only the day before she had received a letter from him, giving her formal orders to sell. And so she had sold. 'You, you!' repeated Saccard; 'so it was you who were fighting me, you whom I felt in the dark! It is your shares that I have been obliged to buy up!' He did not fly into a passion, as he usually did, and she suffered the more from his utter despondency; she would have liked to reason with him, to induce him to abandon that merciless struggle, which nothing but a massacre could terminate.