Great wealth

I’ve been thinking recently about a quote from I You We Them, the 1000pp collection of essays by Dan Gretton on desk killers. (It’s not a history, and Fairfax County Public Library designates it Criminology in the Dewey Decimal system.) Gretton attributes it to Honoré de Balzac:

“The secret to great wealth is a forgotten crime.”

That seems pretty legit to me—on both personal and corporate fields. I’m thinking Standard Oil (predatory monopoly), every steel and railroad company of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (campaigns of terror against workers) and Lloyd’s of London (established to insure ships of the Middle Passage carrying slaves to America). And the fortunes of Kennedys (bootlegging during Prohibition) and Trumps (prostitution, violations of fair housing laws) do not stand up to scrutiny of their early days.

But it turns out that Gretton has misquoted Balzac. The original thought, from Père Goriot, is slightly different:

“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.”

Which is to say:

“The secret to great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.”

This is a little less straightforward, and permissive in a bourgeois kind of way. The “without apparent cause” thing is (to my mind) an unearned free pass: only if the source of the wealth isn’t obvious do we look for the hidden crime? Nah—there are way too many examples of riches coming from the blood, pain and loss of others for me to swallow that.

Now the “crime properly done” thing—that does track. Unexplained wealth coupled with a foundational crime never discovered makes all kinds of sense.

So, if what Balzac is actually saying (and I don’t know the context of Père Goriot) is that huge fortunes are all the result of an original crime, and if you can’t discern the source of some wealth, it’s because the crime was so well executed that people have forgotten it, mais oui.

 

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