BETWEEN US

The New Cocagne

Among German money changers and bankers, we no longer count the paper mark on the sticker, as with us bank notes, we weigh it. The paper mark has been so debased that nothing costs as cheap as it throughout the Reich. Thus, a stearin candle is worth three thousand marks in Berlin. However, the candle lasts four hours. If, instead of candles, the German lit himself with small torches made from rolled paper, it was calculated that, at the end of four hours, he would have consumed only two thousand three hundred and forty-two marks. That's a saving of eight hundred and sixty-six marks for a single candle.
On Berlin buses, it’s something else!… The simplest trip costs two marks. However, the smallest ticket that the employee gives to the traveler in exchange for the price of the seat costs three marks there. So, the Berlin bus company no longer charges passengers. But also she no longer has to give them tickets. Which means that she earns one mark per occupied place. Unfortunately, we French are poorly received by the Germans. But the same is not true of the Italians, the borders of the Reich are wide open to them.
Rich Italians prefer to spend the summer elsewhere, but Italian beggars aren't so squeamish. During the months of May and June, the Italian beggar saves money on the “handouts” he receives. When he is only a hundred lire rich, he gets a free ride to the border, using a pauper's permit, he crosses Switzerland still begging, and hurries to reach Württemberg or the Grand Duchy. of Baden. There he exchanges his lire. for paper money and, suddenly, he is a millionaire. For the value of one lira he gets transported. by luxury train car to Berlin; for half a lira, he has a four-room apartment on the first floor of a palace in Unter-den-linden; for a quarter of a lire, he lunches and dines with champagne (Chemnitz or Eisenach champagne) in the best restaurants in the capital; for an eighth of a lire, he has a motor car for the day; for a sixteenth of reading, he goes to the theater in a bathtub; for a thirty-second reading, he sups with a dancer.
Unfortunately, after three months of this transfer, by dint of throwing the paper marks out the windows, even having been robbed, the rich lazzarone uses up his hundred lire and he has to return to start again, under the porch of San Marco or in the shadow of the Palazzo Farnese, his job as an Italian beggar.

Jean Bastia.