As I write, I am staring at the Money Bunny. It is a brown and hairless old thing, rubbed smooth over the years, and it stares back at me with one plastic eye slightly popped. The bunny is fairly bursting. When I return from foreign trips, I empty my pockets into it, through the slot on its back. Before leaving again, however, I never remember to extract the appropriate currency. The bunny thus has a cash-flow problem.
I decide to pull the little plastic plug from its bottom. A thick bolus of British sterling stanches the flow at first, solid and heavy, each coin bearing the crowned profile of Elizabeth--as a young woman on the oldest ones, later as a handsome matron, but always and ever the Queen. German marks come next, and German eagles, strangely atavistic in a nation that today is so pacifist: on the 5-mark piece, the raptor's feathers and claws are splayed and its tongue is sticking out, as if it were about to kill or had just been electrocuted. Either way it looks severe. A 25-peseta coin from Spain follows the marks; it has a hole in its center. The 5-peseta coin shows a costumed man who is either stomping grapes in the Rioja or dancing on stilts, it is hard to tell which.
And then there is the Semeuse--the sower--who adorns the French franc. Her long hair is blowing from beneath her Phrygian bonnet (a Revolutionary symbol of emancipation); her dress clings in gauzy folds to her long, graceful legs. She is walking across a field at sunrise, and with a careless wave of her right hand she is scattering seed from a bag held in her left--she is scattering it into the wind, which seems significant somehow. Perhaps it's just that I'm a Francophile, but to me the franc is the perfect coin. It doesn't commemorate a fossilized monarchy or a warlike past; it celebrates life, and what life here in France is supposed to be: sensual, dignified, humanistic. I once inadvertently tried to slip 10 pesetas to Annique, the young woman in the bakery who hands me my baguette every morning. She spotted it almost before the tinny little thing clinked into the dish on her counter.
People have a feeling for their money. You know what a nickel, dime, or quarter feels like in your pocket, and what many of them feel like in your bank account; Annique knows a peseta from a franc, by sight, sound, and touch. Not long ago I asked her what she thinks of the euro, the new European currency that will soon supplant the franc and other national currencies--electronic transactions in euros begin January 1, and the new coins and bills will follow three years later. She did not feel like talking about it. "It will be hell," she said.
The first coin called a franc was minted in 1360. It showed King Jean le Bon, triumphant on horseback. Actually, Jean had just been released from an English prison, about a quarter of the way through the Hundred Years' War, after swearing to pay a ransom of 12 and a half tons of gold, which he did not have. The solution was to tax his people. In return, Jean promised them a strong and stable currency--hence the figure on horseback, on a coin of gold. The franc is made of nickel now, but it has endured as a national currency--with long interruptions and changes of form-for 638 years. (So have the taxes.) Sometime next year, from his tall-windowed office overlooking the Seine, Emmanuel Constans, director of the Paris mint, will preside over the minting of the last franc. He says he will regret it not a bit.
