Other branch
Georges Hamelin
Engineer, financial visionary
Caroline Hamelin's brother and the moral foil to Saccard's speculative genius in L'Argent. Hamelin is a genuine engineer with real plans for productive enterprise in the Orient — railways across the Ottoman Empire, agricultural projects in the Levant, a shipping company for the eastern Mediterranean. His projects are technically sound and humanly valuable. He is also entirely unsuited to the world of finance: when Saccard takes his plans as the basis for the Universal Bank, Hamelin departs for the Orient to actually begin building, blissfully unaware that back in Paris the stock price is being manipulated into the stratosphere. He returns to find his genuine work buried under the rubble of Saccard's fraud, his name attached to a catastrophe he did not cause. Zola uses him to represent productive capital — the thing that speculation claims to serve but systematically devours.
Frère de Caroline Hamelin et pendant moral de Saccard dans L'Argent. Ingénieur aux vrais projets en Orient — chemins de fer ottomans, agriculture levanine — il part construire pendant que Saccard manipule le cours de la Banque universelle. Il revient pour trouver son travail honnête enterré sous la fraude. Zola l'utilise pour incarner le capital productif que la spéculation prétend servir mais dévore en réalité.
Quiet, precise, with the focused air of an engineer who thinks in structures and forces — a man more at ease with blueprints than with boardrooms.
Quiet, precise, with the focused air of an engineer who thinks in structures and forces — a man more at ease with blueprints than with boardrooms.