[Paris, France – 7:42 AM, 21st of February, 1928]
The jazz was loud enough that we did not have to pretend to listen to one another.
That was one of the things I liked about Le Grand Duc.
What made Le Grand Duc so different was that it wasn't simply another Paris nightclub. It occupied a very unusual space in 1920s Montmartre: small, intimate, heavily American in character, and centred around Black American musicians and entertainers.
It was at 52 rue Pigalle, in the heart of Montmartre, and was much smaller than the glamorous images of a modern. There were tiny tables packed closely together, a relatively small dance floor, and a short bar. That intimacy was part of its character: you weren't watching a distant stage performance so much as sitting practically on top of the musicians and other patrons.
But the biggest difference was the people who came through the door.
Le Grand Duc became a gathering place for Black American performers, particularly musicians who were working across Paris. When the more conventional clubs shut for the night, musicians could come to Le Grand Duc and keep playing until dawn. It therefore functioned partly as a nightclub, partly as a restaurant, partly as an after-hours musicians' hangout and partly as a social club.
The room was crowded, the lights deliberately low, and somewhere behind us a trumpet was a perfectly respectable tone. Waiters moved between the tables with the practised indifference of men who had already seen every possible form of human excess and found none of it particularly interesting.
The man sat beside me was Alexandre Le Bours, director of operations for the Yunnan-Indochina Railway and, by now, a rather interesting friend. He was French, which wasn't good, but he made up for it by being impeccably dressed while possessing the particular talent of making even profound disagreements sound like casual conversation. We had first met over the junction between his railway and mine, and although he had initially regarded my decision to build a broad-gauge line across China as the work of a lunatic, friendship had gradually replaced professional suspicion.
Alexandre leaned towards me in a half whisper, half shout so we could hear each other. "You really believe it is going to fall?"
He spoke with a light Parisian accent.
I took a sip of my drink before answering, "I believe it cannot continue."
"You have been saying that for months, and yet the market has been rising." Alexandre shook his head and laughed again. There was something wonderfully French about the way he disagreed with people. He could make the word 'idiot' sound almost affectionate.
"You are a chemist," he said. "Not a prophet…and you expect me to believe that the man who thought a railway as oafish as yours was commercially sensible is suddenly the cautious one?"
I raised my glass and said, "It was commercially sensible."
"Everyone thinks you're mad; you know that." The trumpet blared another few notes behind us. Alexandre waited until it had passed before continuing. "And yet here you are. A billionaire."
I then retorted. "That is not evidence that I am always right."
"No. But it is rather inconvenient evidence when I am trying to tell you that you are wrong." I smiled at his remark.
Alexandre had been involved with the Yunnan-Indochina line for long enough to understand precisely what I had done. We had spent months arguing over gauges, junctions, freight rates and whose engineers had made the greater number of mistakes.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, we had become friends.
He glanced towards the room. "Look around you. Everyone is getting rich."
He leaned back. "American industry is stronger than it has ever been. Automobiles are everywhere. Electricity is spreading. Production is increasing. Corporate profits are increasing. You have companies creating entirely new markets, quite a few of which, I might add, are your doing."
"I know." He frowned at my remark.
I put my glass down. "That is the part nobody seems interested in discussing."
"Because the companies are worth more?" He asked.
"But not this much," I continued before he could answer. "You are looking at America and seeing an extraordinary industrial transformation. So am I. That is not the disagreement." I pointed towards him. "You see a country becoming richer and conclude that its companies must therefore become enormously more valuable."
"And you don't?" He looked genuinely curious.
"I see a country becoming richer and ask how much of that prosperity has already been sold to investors."
Alexandre was quiet before saying, "You think expectations have outrun reality."
I leaned closer before speaking, "Take a company making ten million dollars. Suppose its profits rise to fifteen million. Excellent. Wonderful. I will happily congratulate its directors, but the market values it at twice what it did before?"
"So then I ask whether its profits have doubled. And they say no. So I ask if they have a market capitalisation index to plot growth, and they say no."
"Perhaps profits will double. Perhaps America will continue growing at the same rate. Perhaps every new automobile will produce another fortune. Perhaps every household will buy a radio. Perhaps every factory will become more productive. Perhaps the Federal Reserve will tolerate this forever. Perhaps nobody will ever need to sell."
"And you think they won't?"
"I think they cannot." The music swelled again, briefly drowning us out.
Alexandre waited before continuing, "You are particularly concerned about the borrowing."
"The borrowing frightens me more than the prices." I almost scowled.
He then teased, "...Margin?"
I nodded slowly. "It is not like I am not guilty of capitalising on it, but at some point someone has to point out that even a ten per cent drop in the market will result in over half of borrowers losing their entire starting capital."
"That I understand," he replied before I continued.
"If a man buys a thousand dollars' worth of shares with a thousand dollars, he can lose his thousand. If he buys ten thousand dollars' worth with one thousand of his own money, then a relatively small fall can destroy him. And when he is destroyed, he must sell."
Alexandre's expression changed slightly as if he saw my point: "And then someone else has to buy it, unless nobody wants to."
"Exactly," I responded. For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then Alexandre smiled as he said, "You know, I rather hate it when you make things sound simple."
"They usually are."
He laughed. "No. They are usually complicated, and you simply enjoy making complicated things sound inevitable."
I laughed. "That may be true."
He raised his glass. "To being wrong."
"To being solvent." I countered as I raised mine.
We drank.
It was at that precise moment that someone touched me on the shoulder.
I turned.
Billard stood behind me, grinning broadly. "Ah!"
He extended his hand. "Mon ami."
I stood and shook it. "Félicitations, mon ami. Mon avocat m'a dit que vous êtes maintenant le propriétaire fier de cet endroit." (Congratulations, my friend. My lawyer told me that you are now the proud owner of this place.)
He then gave me a slightly bemused look before placing a hand on my shoulder and switching from his almost perfect Parisian French he had been greeting guests with to a slightly heavy Southern American drawl, "Edward, no matter how hard you try, your French will always remain atrocious."
"Hence why I keep trying; it really seems to upset people here." I shrugged, causing both Alexandre and Eugune to laugh.
"Alexandre, this is Eugune Bollard, the fine owner of this place." I introduced.
I then decided to be slightly sarcastic. "Eugene, this is Alexandre le Bours; he's the director of operations of this tiny little railway company in Indochina."
Eugene Bullard was not the sort of man whose life could be summed up by a single occupation. He was one of those people who made me question why history books didn't include them.
Eugene Bullard was a striking man, dark-skinned and broad-shouldered while also athletic, and he had the easy confidence of someone who had spent a lifetime refusing to be intimidated.
He was born in Columbus, Georgia; he had fled the American South as a young man after his father had almost been lynched. He eventually "found" (stowed away but was discovered and adopted by the crew) his way across the Atlantic and into the strange, exhilarating world of pre-war Europe.
He had been a boxer, an entertainer, target practice for some Scots, a soldier in the French Foreign Legion and a decorated veteran of the Great War before becoming one of France's pioneering military aviators.
By the 1920s he had made Paris his home, where he reinvented himself once again as a nightclub proprietor and impresario, becoming a familiar figure among the city's Black American musicians, artists and expatriates. There was an unusual confidence to him, born not from privilege but from having repeatedly survived circumstances that should have defeated him.
He spoke French with the ease of a Parisian, English with the unmistakable accent of the American South, and could move between the two worlds almost effortlessly. Behind the polished club-owner's appearance was a man who had lived several lifetimes already and who seemed to regard whatever came next as simply another challenge to be met.
He had initially been the manager here and had been trying to buy the club for years, but being an African man didn't exactly make it easy to find a creditor willing to lend him the money. So I had stepped in.
"And yet after all these years you still speak French like an Englishman falling down a staircase." Alexandre laughed before saying to Eugene, "Il faut quand même qu'il fasse un effort. Il ne peut pas simplement prendre une phrase anglaise et mettre des mots français dedans… Enfin, il est anglais, après tout." (He really does have to make an effort. He can't just take an English sentence and put French words into it… Then again, he is English after all.)
This caused both of them to laugh as Eugene saw someone waving him over somewhere else. He said, "It was a pleasure seeing you again, my friend, and meeting you, sir."
While watching Bullard go, Alexandre said, "If that's what your French still sounds like. I dread to hear you Mandarin."
"I tried while in Hong Kong, and the teller asked if I was Japanese," I said. "And also, I'll have you know I'm Welsh, not English.
Alexandre stared at me for a moment before shaking his head. "I do not see a difference."
I gave him a distainful look before pretending to stare off into the distance and said, "I suddenly feel a great disturbance, as if a million souls suddenly cried out in terror but were quickly silenced."
My movie reference fifty years ahead of its time simply drew a half-confused, half-bemused look.