After taking turns to give guidance from three great knights, the chef at home finally made a qualified and delicious Disi pie. Finally, he had one more choice for the staple food. From now on, the main meal at home will be Disi pie and buttery white bread.

Take turns.

The servants' meal every other day is Dixie pie.

On April 15th, I returned home and settled down for a certain period of time.

On this day, the maid Ariel sent an invitation from Mr. Patrice Roland, whom she had met once before, inviting Mr. Panyao to have afternoon tea at the Brilliant Tea Restaurant on Dixi Street.

I guess the afternoon was uneventful. When Zhang Cheng arrived, he took Miranda, who was dressed in men's single ponytail, as his personal valet, and went to the Brilliant Tea Restaurant together.

Personal servants are extremely important in social etiquette. When d'Artagnan first arrived in Paris, he had no money, no place to live, and no job, so he immediately hired a valet.

Really, dignity is more important than life and death.

After getting off the car at the entrance of the Brilliant Tea Restaurant, a waiter naturally greeted Zhang Cheng. After Zhang Cheng showed Mr. Patrice's invitation, the waiter introduced Zhang Cheng into a large private room on the second floor. There were about ten round tables here.

Four or five people were sitting at a round table, chatting or playing cards.

Seeing Zhang Cheng coming, Patrice said to the waiter who was leading the way: "Bring Mr. Panyao a cup of afternoon tea."

"Okay, Mr. Panyao, this is actually a club organized voluntarily by businessmen. We come here every day to exchange some information and occasionally do some business."

In fact, like Pan Yao, big businessmen of Patrice's level usually leave their business to their professional managers. These big businessmen themselves are only responsible for general direction and large-scale investment or business. This also includes maintenance and their own business.

Friendly aristocratic relations - this is something managers cannot do.

"Of course, it can also be purely used as leisure and entertainment time. There are cigars, refreshments, and poker friends here."

"Okay, let me play two cards first."

Not long after Zhang Cheng sat down at the card table, after watching two games, black tea was already served. The cards everyone played were similar to stud, but instead of dealing cards one by one, one person was dealt five cards in a row. Still

You can change the cards once, and the cards can be changed from one to five cards. Generally, you place your bet first, and you can raise your bet once after changing the cards. Until the bets of both parties are equal, the card ratio will be higher or lower. The Royal Flush is also the largest,

Four a’s followed by…

It is each servant who shuffles the cards. The master is responsible for placing bets and looking at the cards. If the servant is a thousand kings, the master's cards will be very good. Unfortunately, Miranda has not received training in this area. Fortunately, Miranda has not received any training in this area.

The bets are not big, usually starting from one gold coin. In the end, it only takes four or five gold coins before the cards are drawn. Everyone is still very restrained.

Due to luck, after Zhang Cheng lost more than twenty gold coins, several people suggested taking a break and starting to drink tea, smoke cigars and chat.

Because almost everyone here bought a large amount of war bonds, the topic naturally began to revolve around war bonds.

Most people want to sell their war bonds, fearing that the enemy country will also have gunpowder and artillery in the future and reduce the chicken country's army to rubbish.

Out of inertia, these big businessmen of the Chicken Country do not believe in the combat effectiveness of the Chicken Country Army.

There are sellers and buyers, and there are also those who want to take a gamble and take advantage of the current low price of bonds to absorb bonds.

Zhang Chengcheng is the latter, but he only has more than 500,000 gold coins in his hands for the time being. If this amount of funds does not use bank leverage in the entire bond market, he will not be able to get it out of the money.

Unfortunately, there is no mature banking system. It is difficult to lend real money from banks.

At least the functions of the National Bank of China are relatively simple. In addition to minting coins, it also issues public bonds.

Coinage has stable and long-term interests. In this regard, as long as the chicken country's regime has not collapsed, currency and public debt can be guaranteed to a certain extent.

We talked for a while, but finally the seller wanted to sell at a high price and the buyer wanted to sell at a low price. In the end, the negotiation failed. After all, the business here is tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, and it is not that easy to make a decision.

of.

When business failed, a group of men naturally turned to talking about women.

A fat man named Lennon said mysteriously: "Do you know? The Moulin Rouge in the South District."

"Is it a brothel? Who doesn't know? Tell me anything!"

Lennon: "I've heard before that Moulin Rouge has a military background, but now I believe it. There are several aristocratic ladies from the cattle country there. That figure, that temperament..."

"Didn't you say that if you capture a noble or a noble's family member on the battlefield, you will ask for a ransom? How come the military was so willing to send Moulin Rouge this time?"

Lennon: "I heard that it was a family member who was captured after a noble family member died on the battlefield. No one would pay the ransom, so they would naturally put it in the Moulin Rouge to make money."

"Have you tried it?"

"Of course." Lennon said, holding up three fingers: "This is the price for staying overnight."

"Thirty gold coins? Isn't that expensive?"

Lennon: "Thirty gold coins, three hundred gold coins. The average top ticket at the Moulin Rouge also costs thirty gold coins for the night. Is the aristocratic lady the average top ticket? Three hundred. Don't say it, it's really worth the price. It's all light.

There are only eight maids. If you have the ability, you can fight nine of them."

After smoking the cigars and drinking the tea, everyone started a new game of cards.

In this afternoon, apart from getting some news, Zhang Cheng lost more than fifty gold coins. Drinking tea here is very cheap. It is included in the private room usage fee, which is two silver coins per person per hour.

The purchasing power of gold and silver coins is still very strong.

On the way back, Miranda gritted her teeth in embarrassment.

Zhang Cheng asked: "What's wrong?"

Miranda: "Master, you don't know what happened when I was a child. At that time, I almost went to the Moulin Rouge. At that time, the Moulin Rouge bought seven or eight-year-old girls from outside, and trained them from childhood to raise them as the future red brand of the Moulin Rouge.

"Originally they were interested in me, but the people they came were only willing to pay thirty silver coins to buy me because the price was too low and my family didn't agree."

Zhang Cheng nodded, but said in his heart, thirty silver coins is really not a small amount, and Jesus sold it for this price.

Miranda: "Now that I think about it, even if I sell it for thirty gold coins, I will still lose a lot of money. Fortunately, my family did not agree at the time."

Although it was impossible for Miranda to lose dozens of gold coins in one afternoon and pretend that nothing happened, she did have thirty gold coins on her body, which were left over from the bounty left for her family. Think about a few years ago,

I was almost sold into prostitution for just a few dozen silver coins, which definitely left me feeling unbalanced.

On the contrary, Zhang Cheng can understand Moulin Rouge. The demand for prostitutes in the market now exceeds demand. As the boss of the entire industry, he can naturally pick and choose. There is never a shortage of supply. And the biggest cost is not the cost of buying a girl, but the cost of buying a girl.

It is the cost of subsequent education and training. Although most of the children in the Chicken Country do not eat well, they are not hungry. After all, this black bread is quite cheap. But only a very small number of children in the Chicken Country can

I received an education when I was a child, because in this era, even public schools did not exist. If you want to be literate, you have to have parents who can read and teach their children themselves, or they have to ask a tutor.

At this time, the cost of hiring a private tutor was at least fifty gold coins a year, and food and accommodation were included. This shows how expensive knowledge is. Moreover, Hezhou, Xiniu, is doing better now. Papermaking and lithography have been introduced from the East in the past few decades.

The cost of books dropped significantly. Newspapers were also created.

A hundred years ago, all the books in Xiniu Hezhou were 100% handwritten, and the material used was parchment. After tanning one piece of parchment, you couldn't make several pieces of parchment, so the price of each book at that time was

Flying in the sky.

From then on, Zhang Cheng took two or three days a week to sit in the large private room of the magnificent tea restaurant. Even if he got some information, it would be very useful. There were many things that newspapers did not dare to mention at all, such as the gunpowder of the Chicken Country.

The formula was obtained by Lion Nation spies. Since the emergence of newspaper news, the Press Censorship Agency was born.

But in this kind of club-like gathering, there is nothing that cannot be said.

When he went to a tea restaurant for tea for the second time, Zhang Chenggong finalized a deal on war bonds worth 100,000 gold coins at the card table. Zhang Cheng bought the war bonds worth 100,000 gold coins at a 15% discount.

Whether this business will help or make money in the end depends on the direction of the war.

The news that Zhang Cheng went further than these traditional merchants is that Zhang Cheng was one of the masterminds behind this war, directly supplying all the six-pound field artillery in the early days of the war, and the current eighteen-pound large-caliber siege cannon.

As the Ministry of War purchased more and more of the new eighteen-pound large-caliber siege guns, Zhang Cheng knew that bonds would rise sharply in the future.

Based on the precedent of the Chicken Country's Army Arsenal, even if the Ox Country and Eagle Country obtained gunpowder or even the gunpowder formula, it would not be smooth sailing to develop qualified artillery.

By the end of May, the bond market fell again. By this time, Zhang Cheng had already bought bonds with a face value of 300,000 gold coins, which were actually bought at a 15% discount. But this time, the market bonds fell to a 20% discount.

.There is even a downward trend.

Many bond dealers' buyers began to wait and see, while sellers were eager to sell.

This was because he got the latest news that the Eagle Kingdom to the east was using new firearms on the battlefield. Even Zhang Cheng got the news and flew to the battlefield on the eastern front overnight to take a look quietly.

The result was a huge disappointment. The so-called new firearm in the Eagle Country was just a copper pipe with wood tied to the back, gunpowder and projectiles in the front, which was ignited and fired.

It requires two people to use it.

Zhang Chengxin said, isn't this a musket? It belongs to the Song Dynasty. What he made is almost as good as Napoleon's cannon. The two sides are no longer in the same era.

Moreover, the entire musket can only shoot projectiles a hundred meters away. If you want to kill unarmored personnel, you have to shoot from 50 meters away. And the biggest problem with the musket is that it cannot kill people equipped with a full set of armor at close range.

Great Knight.

At this level, it's better than toys.

Most of the time I just listen to it.

And with the emergence of new firearms from the Eagle Country on the battlefield, at least bond prices have been suppressed.

After Zhang Cheng visited the battlefield overnight, he felt that this new firearm was not enough to change the direction of the war. The next afternoon, he continued to buy bonds in a tea restaurant, because this time there were more people selling and fewer people buying. Zhang Cheng

In one day, he bought war bonds worth half a million gold coins, and the price was only 20% off the face value of the bonds.

If it hadn't been for the recent shortage of liquidity, I would have bought war bonds worth millions this afternoon.

At this time, Zhang Cheng had already bought 1.3 million gold coins in war bonds. The most expensive purchase was made at Marquis Franco's house. No wonder many big businessmen were unwilling to buy more at that time. It turned out that

Private sales prices may be lower.

The financial resources of those large businesses that have been in business for more than ten generations cannot be ignored.

A few days later, in early June, new news came back. In the field, hundreds of field artillery pieces of the Chicken Country Army fired at the same time, using concentrated field artillery to defeat the Eagle Country's Tu musket troops. Among the captured Tu musket copper pipes were
To be continued...