The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co Read Online Free PDF Page B

the firm's profits around the globe.
    Sadly, great calamities were not atypical in New Orleans, either. Fires destroyed huge swaths of the city in both 1788 and 1794. When a fire struck the city again in 1849, the Lazards' storefront was destroyed, only a year after the partnership started. The family was able to salvage much of the inventory, though, and in an act of prescience, the brothers moved the whole operation to San Francisco and set up a new store in the Wild West, selling their imported goods. The journey to California was arduous and took many months; Lazare and Simon nearly died from malnutrition. They survived to find San Francisco a bustling if somewhat disappointing frontier city where the prices of land, housing, and food were rising precipitously, along with the population. They realized quickly, though, that there was money to be made catering to the new arrivals, among them a wave of gold miners and speculators that had descended upon the city soon after a sustained vein of gold was found, also in 1848, on the edge of the Sierra Nevada. The Lazards' California operation (they were now joined by a fourth brother, Elie, named after his father) became the leading wholesale dry goods concern on the Pacific coast, and an increasingly important exporter of the gold coming out of the mines.
    By 1855, "business was so brisk" that the Lazard brothers sent for their twenty-two-year-old cousin, Alexander Weill, to come from France to join the firm as the fifth employee. Weill served as the bookkeeper for his cousins' operation. "Gradually, the business became involved in financial transactions, first with its retail clients and then increasingly with others," according to a limited edition--only 750 copies were printed--of Lazard's 1998 self-published 150-year history. "Most often these dealings involved the sale of gold and the arbitrage of the different dollar currencies then in use, one backed by gold and the other by silver. Weill was the driving force taking the enterprise further and further into finance."
    As the French were the chief trading partners for the Lazards, on or around July 20, 1858, the prospering firm opened an office in Paris under the name of Lazard Freres et Cie. With the Paris office up and running at 10 Rue Sainte-Cecile, the Lazard brothers returned to France. Alexander Weill remained in San Francisco in charge of the American outpost. Twelve years later, in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the family opened a third office, in London--christened Lazard Brothers & Co.--as a way to continue the importing and exporting of gold bullion after the French government curtailed all payments of foreign debts by domestic firms. The London office was considered a branch of the Paris office, but by enabling Lazard to continue to pay its bills as they came due, the London office added immeasurably to the firm's overall reputation at a time when other financial firms were defaulting on their debts.
    By 1874, the firm was doing sufficiently well to be included in an article about the new breed of San Francisco millionaires.
    In 1876, the partners made the "momentous" decision to sell their dry goods inventory at auction and refocus their business entirely on banking. On July 27, 1876, a new fourteen-year partnership agreement was drawn up between the four Lazard brothers, Alexander Weill, and the Lazards' half brother David Cahn, creating the Banking House of Lazard Freres, to be known as Lazard Freres et Compagnie in Paris and as Lazard Freres in San Francisco. (London remained a branch of the Paris office.)

    IN 1880, ALEXANDER Weill left San Francisco for New York with the intention of opening an office that would be a leader in the exporting of gold to Europe and spent four years in New York building the business there. In 1881, Lazard was named the treasurer of the Sutro Tunnel Company, a California gold mining concern that controlled the Comstock Lode, the Brunswick Lode, and a tunnel