“Money” (1891) is Émile Zola’s eighteenth novel from the “Rougon-Macquart” cycle, devoted to representatives of one family living during the Second Empire—the era of Napoleon III’s dictatorship. Aristide Saccard, a swindler and speculator known to readers from Zola’s novel “The Quarry,” accidentally meets the engineer Hamelin and his sister Caroline. Hamelin is obsessed with creating, in the Middle East, a network of railroads and a number of other enterprises that will allow that part of the planet to prosper. But Aristide quickly understands that there’s money to be made off it…