The Seventh Name
The government no longer decided whether I could form a société anonyme. My brother did. Lyon, 1867: I had six willing shareholders and an empty seventh line. The silk merchant wanted my name on his bill. If I signed myself, the rooms above my vats stood behind the debt.
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I could dye silk without dulling its sheen, but my two vats were too small for the order a cloth house had offered me. Six of us had agreed to put money into larger works. The merchant would supply the raw silk on credit once he knew who was buying it. He left his bill blank on my table.
My brother had savings meant for his son's apprenticeship. I wanted him to take a share in the company, and I hated asking. He had watched our father die with a shop full of unpaid accounts. I could see him remembering the men who had come to settle them.
I showed him the new law. For a société anonyme, no one now had to carry our papers to Paris and wait for permission. But there had to be seven of us. Six names lay on the sheet between us. I had written the seventh line and left it empty.
“How much can I lose?” he asked.
I told him he would owe the whole sum he subscribed, though only a quarter had to be paid at the start. I watched him look toward his son's room. I wanted to say the order could not fail. I could not know that. I told him what I did know: I would let the new company buy the silk. I would not put his name, or mine, on the merchant's bill as a personal promise.
He took the pen. I had brought him a piece of silk dyed in my smallest vat. He held it to the light for a long time before he signed.
The signatures were only the beginning. We subscribed the capital, brought proof of the first payments to the notary, and sat through the meeting that appointed the people who would run and examine the new company. I kept the merchant's blank bill in my coat until we could give him the company's name.
He came back, looked at the papers, and made the bill out to the works. By winter we had filled the cloth house's order and paid him. My brother brought his son to see the finished silk hanging above the vats. The boy touched a blue length and left a mark on it. My brother laughed before I could object.